a call-and-response poem cycle
for Elizabeth

1. Sin/vergüenza

There are trials that end only in silence. Even gavels need not speak to such decrees. We are not softened by judgment.

Losses are incalculable in this moment, measured only by our own fragilities. And time is indispensable. I know, because I've tried.

Shame and dirt. The compulsion to do right, to be respected. To uphold standards. These are the things that many of us who come from nothing and no one know well.

A congregation of mothers pressing our lips to scapulars, children, lovers. We drape ourselves in the mantillas of self-effacement. Heads bent, learning humility. Fathers, the black-robed knees of absolution and absorption.

Confession: progress is nearly imperceptible, despite my wars. I am an inconvenient daughter, progeny of cruel kings. In my arrogance, I have taken the names of good lords in vain. I do not know whether I have ever honored my father or my mother. I suspect myself of many things.

2. Speaking in Tongues

Trust has become an excruciatingly slow venture, a return from damage.

I am not a good person. Not yet. I don't know how to be with other people, beyond the diffused choreography and earnest entrenchments of physical embrace. That richness, that largesse, of coming to know another person's being - whole and fragmented, tender and alarming - is, to no uncertain degree, the unknown half of what compels me. I want to know that there is kinship in travel, intrigue along the pathways. Intensity beyond yearning, bloodstones amongst the gravel.

Was I ever good enough for you? The choices I had, the many options I exercised, what did that mean to you? That I needed only excess? That I needed to be "free"? I have spent eight seasons clutched in a petulant immobility I did not think my body could withstand. Waiting. For direction, for insight, something. Anything. At times, I think it will overtake me, the way darkness rises to overshadow a new moon. Years ago, at least, I believed I could go to god. Now I understand that there are no shortcuts. Which would agitate me more, I suppose, if I felt I had any direction at all. But I am still. Just waiting.

I ask myself over and over whether I still look to you only because you are "familiar." Each time, I am reminded that you were never familiar enough. Or because you knew me then, when things made sense. But you were never kind enough with what you knew, especially when logic seemed to fail, or became too urgent.

Now, for years, you have questioned my "stability." Am I less real for the processes of addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division? Does "stability" refuse to acknowledge the empirical veracity, the mathematical certainty, of change?

The characters of strangers seem more familiar, more accessible to me, than these new roles you and I have been given to play. Which should, by all rights, propel me toward some new disaster, crippled and keening with despair.

I resist.

3. Gracia

Or I tell stories. Mostly to myself. Little cuentos that end with things like: It's okay to believe; you're safe; you can take what comes. The odd thing is that other people seem to believe these stories about me much more fully than I do, and I wonder if that isn't some sort of deception. Could be I'm not worth the effort, yet I expect so much. How do we learn to see ourselves clearly?

I can say this:

I am round and pretty in all the photographs from then. I am particularly fond of the photo where the little girl is wearing a yellow dress, with a matching sweater and bonnet. White shoes and socks. She stands before a white, white picket fence.

But that is not what I remember. Instead, I see hands. Mouths. Teeth. Eyes. Appendages. Rage punching hot and thick as a tongue. I remember no safety. Ever. I do not feel that I was ever a little girl in a yellow dress. I was something soft and torn.

That tearing happened all the time. I feel it now. Sometimes I feel it in places and ways that are not the same as when I was a child. A voice. A tone. Attitudes. I do not cry.

I have suffered pounding. I have suffered heat. I have suffered brutal indifference. I have suffered the arrogance that masquerades as pride. And more.

That's as much as I have ever been able to say to a congregation of strangers who may also be enemies. There is no comfort in this knowledge.

How do we understand where safety and tolerance meet to conquer the fierce humblings of fear and repulsion? What do I have to offer? People say it's best to just lay it all out on the table, to allow for failing gracefully. But much of what I have is stained. And I've never felt trust enough to burden anyone's table with my soiled underthings.

It is so hard to keep trying. Is there grace in failure? I don't know. Maybe there is nothing to lose. I might exhibit all. Then I might learn, at last, precisely how graceful are the failures of these bloodied cloths, jagged implements, and other pointed displays of inequity.

There is a dizzying sensation in my body, when I think I have said too much.

Then I remember that I have never told enough. But I will. I will.

4. Ceniza

I never had a body of my own, as a child. I felt touch but never comfort, contact but never love. What happens to a body that knows well only rage and shame? I know the answer to this, now: what gets buried quickens and rots and, if you're lucky, that half-death feeds you, until you live again.

The things I bury are what I become, and when I stop to know this, I can say who I am. For most of my life, I closed my eyes to burden and brutality, desperation and denial, shadow and shame. Still, every path I've taken cleaves and clashes under my skin. Nothing gets dissolved, nothing gets wished away.

5. Cántico Sagrado

To each child I bore, I gave my breasts. Nipples swollen like breath, puckered, supple, releasing. Small fists and tongues, battering and lovely, pushing into me, drawing from me, nearly satisfied.

What if Jesus were never crucified? What if it were Mary? Virgin, madonna, apostle, whore. Would the rituals be as seductive, as salient, and would we still care? Lifeblood spent through pendent breasts far more tender than marble, more unctuous than paint. Would we still understand the obedience of sacrifice? Probably. Mothers and whores are second-nature to environment and greed.

"The head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God." These are the mandates of canonical faith. We tongue the eucharist of thought. We are now, and have always been, the motherless children of belief.

There are long seasons when the caverns of dissent have swallowed me whole.

Who is what among us - we, the splints of the cross? In our inability to forget our catechism, we lose our voices in the repetition of psalms. Selah.

Tend and serve. Refuse recognition. Mothers and whores are second-nature to environment and greed.

The things I bury are what I become, and when I stop to know this, I can say who I am. Nothing gets dissolved, nothing gets wished away.

6. Estaciones

Release and letting go. Mercy and pain. Independence. I used to puzzle over a line from a favorite poem by Nicanor Parra: Concedo la misma atención a un crimen que a un acto de piedad — "I give the same attention to a crime as to an act of mercy." Was that apathy or objectivity? Is it really possible to release the legacy of crimes committed against our flesh?

The triumphs of conquest. We fall into harsh linens, against stiff walls. Fingering the fissures, caressing the craquelure, mapping misfortune. Struggling between arrest and unrest.

No. There is nothing less possible than grief. That twin of desperation. That split-second after surrender, before acceptance. The very texture of regret. No.

I live the inchoate. I confess a craving for fall-guys, for whipping-boys. The noble knave and exalted buffoon. And, strident rationale or dim excuse, I have for so long been their alibis.

Sometimes, it is easier to say we know nothing than to pretend at the thrones of power or prescription.

I am opposed to innocence, defiled by greed, obsessed with both the pressure and diminishment of consequences.

What is it, then, to desire wholeness, when nothing can ever be seamless again?

Loneliness is a savage liability.

7. Purgatorio

In our worst moments of arrogance, we imagine what we cannot apprehend to be no larger than passing idolatries, smaller than a shoebox. A child's rectangle of inconsequences: brambles, painted leaves, cat's eye marbles.

No. It's an atmosphere; a lifetime; a thick rope of stones beading one by one, always lengthening. And I can't tell by whose hands this all begins and ends. Nor what part my own fingers play.

We struggle with inadequacies, become brittle. Pray for a return to the concord of fellowship.

Because maybe refusing to forgive, to heal, is worse than just stubborness. Perhaps it's not only how we begin to die, but how we suffer others unto death.

Tonight, if I could, I'd let go two dozen white doves, necks pearled with blood, to send my own personal miseries skyward.

I'd capture a column of dark moon and hold it to my breast for just a moment, giving away all my secrets.

I'd take three steps forward, so that, if I moved one or two steps back, I'd still be making some progress.

As it is, I'm tired; I'm lonely; I'm hurt. I've rescued everyone there is to help this week. I'm done turning all the attention away from myself. My girls are asleep.

And I am here, fully clothed, denuded in the cold.

These are my incidental prayers.

Maybe that's a start.

Maybe that's a start.

8. Edgework

We accept in rectitude, recline in disbelief. Much is soldered that we do not wish to keep. Fear can run hot and cold    I can't quit smoking    don't want to enough    and last night

I lay beside my youngest daughter

this child I'm not
           allowed to love
                      enough

here only when she is not
           housed in sibilant stability    with a man
with whom I was once rooted
                        but whom I am no longer      old enough
                                             to understand.

So hard to bridge this new gap, to find fellowship and communion between these two camps, newly enemied, who have never met.

Why should we be unsullied? Why pass through unmarred? Cleave now the unkind dichotomies between martyrdom, which is sometimes called sainthood, and regret, that fetid miasma we hold deeper than bruising.

9. Boneyard

If I'd stayed in one place long enough, all that would be out in my own backyard at the moment could be reduced to corpses and phantoms. That, and the fellowship of those who dare to come inside, to meet me at this juncture - the one that's followed the last, and the one before that, this intersection that invariably precedes the next. I count myself lucky to have so many of those friends who do dare to come inside, year after year, relationship after relationship, still loving me. That, and so little more.

We drift. We denude. We change. Learn acceptance, find peace. Corner a glimpse of happiness. Hold still. Breathe. And let no one put that asunder.

Amen, amen.

This is a moment of profound gratitude. A touchstone of safety, harness to reality. And so little more.

Fear is just the tip of frigidity's iceberg. We will find our warmth again - not in the heat of anger, but in the vulnerable, imperfect embrace of trust. In the fragile flame of faith. Within the interstices of the thaw.

And now, a welcoming sea: suckling sargasso, resplendent release, sweet sforzando.

So many have helped me arrive here.

I love you all beyond the fiefdoms of arrogance, well past the chronologies of what is hardly real.

Thank you for imagining me.

We are forgiven.

Selah.