Allegory
By Diane Seuss
I loved the north. I remember that.
The quality of light, yet I don’t have the will
to describe it. Thimbleberries,
things out of fairy tales.
Green water overpowering the night.
That impersonal bashing sound.
Cold fingers combing through stones.
Looking for something. I don’t remember
what. Blue fingers. Lips.
A blue garment I called my power shirt.
Green-blue. Big enough it floated in the wind
and barely touched me. Grief
that I had to leave and everything
leaving represented, an ache
in my guts, work, a premonition, but still
the belief I would one day return.
It would all be here waiting for me,
unchanged. But even the body
of water grows tired of itself.
——
I yearned only for what I had.
I am tempted to list those things,
but the time for listing is over.
I’ll mention that there was a monastery.
Monks with long beards who made jam
from wild berries and baked heavy
loaves of bread. In their literature
they wrote of winter as their season of suffering.
There are worse things than winter, I wanted to say,
handing them money for bread.
I wanted to lift my shirt and show them my long scar.
When I was still bleeding, I changed my tampon
in the woods behind the monastery and left
the used one behind like the scat of a wild animal.
Blood in the air, the scent of it like wet pennies.
Tearing into those loaves.
The wind with its one-track mind.
It had broken me down and starved me.
——
It was a place filled with plotless stories,
music without melody.
How can I explain. I’m sure you’ve heard
discordant music, but that’s not what I mean.
And you’ve read stories in which nothing happens.
Maybe composed of a series of low-grade epiphanies.
Or flamboyant description that in the end comes to nothing.
Sooner or later, those authors all died of syphilis.
The tubercular ones were the meaning-makers,
as if meaning would keep them alive.
But meaning, in a gale, is the first to go.
In the north, all forms stood for themselves.
There was no need to fill them with anything.
Chalices in which wine would be superfluous.
And every moment a form, a string of tongueless bells.
——
There is a poetry of rage and a poetry of hope.
Each fuels the other, looks in the mirror and sees
the other. Or wields the other. Isn’t it funny
to imagine hope, not much more than a toddler,
wielding rage in its fist like a cudgel?
When I was in college and working on a paper
about Hawthorne’s story “My Kinsman, Major
Molineux,” I had to find “cudgel” in a dictionary.
We were to explicate the symbol of the cudgel.
Later it would be the gold doubloon in Moby-Dick.
What is “explicate,” I wondered. What is “cudgel”?
Dictionaries then were musty and heavy and old.
You had to go to them. They did not come to you.
When I was north, I read books with flimsy pages.
Books without symbols. Only facts.
And photographs, not drawings.
I did not have to rise to them, or kneel at their feet.
When the house burned, struck
by lightning, they burned with it.
——
The air in the north was cold and thin.
There were enemies but not tyrants then.
Ghost towns and towns. Ships and shipwrecks.
Ships and mirages of ships.
Who could tell the difference?
A herd of white deer whose ghosts,
after the deer were shot, looked as they had in life,
white, their eyes rimmed pink.
——
Sandhill cranes flew over,
their calls like bones rattling in a wooden box.
It seemed as if one gravedigger covered the whole region,
his face bashed in by his own shovel.
At a bar called Chum’s I shot
pool with the locals, drank myself under the table.
Whatever filled my glass was colorless and lethal.
No one spoke to me, as people in the north
did not speak to strangers, and I was a stranger.
One murky country song played over and over
until I began to believe it was the only song in the world.
During the day, the light in the trees was green-gold.
That’s all I’m going to say about it.
There are too many poems about light.
——
Whatever the north was, I miss it.
My life since has grown thick without it.
Thick, like sorghum syrup, with experience.
Heavy with memory’s tonnage, such a drag, such a load.
It has no place here. Be, or leave.
I wish I was less, a recipe composed of a single ingredient.
I once knew a singer with a voice like that.
The high, thin sound of the white plastic flutes
we were forced to play in elementary school.
Each note the same as the last,
and each instrument the same as the next,
like a lineup of factory-raised chicken eggs.
The thin-voiced singer moved to Ireland.
Bartended. Smoked a pack a day.
Some would say her voice was ruined,
husky now, dragging itself through the lower registers.
Many thought we looked alike but I couldn’t see it.
Now that her long hair is frizzed by time,
her garden unruly, her hem scraping the floor,
and her voice raw and low as something that echoes up
from an open pit mine, I see the resemblance.
——
In the north, there was not much to buy and little to sell
but for bread, and jam, and meat pies wrapped in wax paper.
I collected materials from the woods floor,
and using a toy hammer and tiny gold nails
built a boat that would carry a message out into water.
I enjoyed building it and composing the message,
which was not unlike every other message sent into water.
It was a child’s message, really.
I rolled it into a scroll, and encased it in a plastic film cannister,
and attached it to the boat with waterproof wood glue,
but as soon as I launched it into deep water,
and watched it drift and bob toward sunset,
I lost faith in it, or interest.
Once it sailed away, it seemed to have little to do with me,
or nothing at all to do with me.
——
During the plague,
which has become a way of life,
I collected the ends of bars of Ivory soap,
worn too thin for bathing or hand-washing,
but useful maybe later when things like soap
begin to disappear off grocery shelves,
or what’s left of the money dries up.
I imagine tethering the scraps together
with rubber bands I’ve saved and lassoed
to the glass door handle that leads to the attic.
One long winter of the plague a raccoon lived
there, in the attic. I could hear its claws as it wandered
in circles over my head. My ceiling, its floor.
I know you’ve lived it, too. You understand
that you can cross a hundred bridges
but there is no way to go north again,
by which I mean it’s time to put to bed,
like the row of the giant’s children
in their matching nightcaps,
our allegories of innocence.
