Just Another Priestess
(for Hazel-Shea and Sam)
I grew up on stories of Sharon Doubiago
when I was a child-bride at nineteen
listening to Barry Eisenberg
call her the most beautiful woman in the world.
Now at 28, having a sorrow-packed miscarriage,
I am strapped to the bed for at least 48 hours
by a country doctor with a bottle of brandy
and a copy of Hard Country
which soaks my heart as deep vermillion
as my underpanties.
"Descendent of the most beautiful woman in Ducktown,
she wrote amd makes me see in this spilled blood
the faces of my own ancestors
weeping their Irish masks and my other half
belly-laughing their alcohol-dancing Indian heads
flung back at the stars and his unknown Swedish half.
i wonder what my face looked like
before my parents borned me...
I wonder what this dead baby's face
was gonna look like:
which one of the ancestors
would have risen from the grave
and made the lines in the palm of the hand
tell new fortunes I take back all I cast off
I want to know the relatives in the blacknwhite photos
in the books back home
even if I don't like their politics.
And the spilled blood of the unseen child
fell at first drop by drop then torrential
onto the asphalt parking lot
where the bus drops off oldest boychild from school
--it was the same exact place where two days before
that first child and I found dead
but still warm young sparrow
which I carried home in cupped hand
and we buried in then plaster of paris statue
of Mary mother of Emmanuel.
It's now I cry to that mother,
now it's one mother to another insisting,
But I grew his eyes within,
even though it was too early to have made eyes or fingernails
or anything but a faint steady heartbeat
the color of the Hard country life.
After coming home from the clinic
i spent long night staring in the dark bedroom;
the wall next to the window was painted by the moon
with the thin branches that showed up in black streaks
like the blood vessels inside the eyeballs
when you rub the lids hard against the retina
to stop the tears and in my mind
I saw Denis Flemming's painting of 4 or 5 bums
huddled around the trashcan in southside Chicago
and the emptiness on their faces is like my belly.
Like one too many gray misshapen river stones
the lies of modern medicine sit heavy below the belly
as a sweat-soaked blood-stained rag.
there are drugs to prevent miscarriages.
they cause cancer in the daughters.
there are fertility drugs
which cause more than one soul
to journey to earth through the birth canal.
We don't need them.
there are drugs for everything except the sorrow
of losing the unborn child.
Just another priestess says,
There is no drug or lobotomy to cure mysticism.
Robin Rule, from "Porch Language",
poems from award-winning book
California Arts Council in Literature for 1989
I grew up on stories of Sharon Doubiago
when I was a child-bride at nineteen
listening to Barry Eisenberg
call her the most beautiful woman in the world.
Now at 28, having a sorrow-packed miscarriage,
I am strapped to the bed for at least 48 hours
by a country doctor with a bottle of brandy
and a copy of Hard Country
which soaks my heart as deep vermillion
as my underpanties.
"Descendent of the most beautiful woman in Ducktown,
she wrote amd makes me see in this spilled blood
the faces of my own ancestors
weeping their Irish masks and my other half
belly-laughing their alcohol-dancing Indian heads
flung back at the stars and his unknown Swedish half.
i wonder what my face looked like
before my parents borned me...
I wonder what this dead baby's face
was gonna look like:
which one of the ancestors
would have risen from the grave
and made the lines in the palm of the hand
tell new fortunes I take back all I cast off
I want to know the relatives in the blacknwhite photos
in the books back home
even if I don't like their politics.
And the spilled blood of the unseen child
fell at first drop by drop then torrential
onto the asphalt parking lot
where the bus drops off oldest boychild from school
--it was the same exact place where two days before
that first child and I found dead
but still warm young sparrow
which I carried home in cupped hand
and we buried in then plaster of paris statue
of Mary mother of Emmanuel.
It's now I cry to that mother,
now it's one mother to another insisting,
But I grew his eyes within,
even though it was too early to have made eyes or fingernails
or anything but a faint steady heartbeat
the color of the Hard country life.
After coming home from the clinic
i spent long night staring in the dark bedroom;
the wall next to the window was painted by the moon
with the thin branches that showed up in black streaks
like the blood vessels inside the eyeballs
when you rub the lids hard against the retina
to stop the tears and in my mind
I saw Denis Flemming's painting of 4 or 5 bums
huddled around the trashcan in southside Chicago
and the emptiness on their faces is like my belly.
Like one too many gray misshapen river stones
the lies of modern medicine sit heavy below the belly
as a sweat-soaked blood-stained rag.
there are drugs to prevent miscarriages.
they cause cancer in the daughters.
there are fertility drugs
which cause more than one soul
to journey to earth through the birth canal.
We don't need them.
there are drugs for everything except the sorrow
of losing the unborn child.
Just another priestess says,
There is no drug or lobotomy to cure mysticism.
Robin Rule, from "Porch Language",
poems from award-winning book
California Arts Council in Literature for 1989