Three Poems by Abigail George

 

Susan Sontag

I am blue and gold. My gum swells. I hurt.

I carry this hurt-ax, grind my teeth and

check messages. The gull carries a knife in

its beak, smiles at me, swallows driftwood

while flying overhead. The boy chews gum.

The baby watches Teacher Rachel. My father

sleeps while my mother makes cornflakes

and coffee. I pull the blanket over my head.

Cancer. Do you know that shark-infested 

Path like you know these wildflowers in my hands?

Only the wolf and these cancer cells matter.

The black sheep, this wise blood of disease.  

Ah, the bittersweet art of thyroid and heart.

Promises of it all. Life. It's honey and milk. The 

calm search has taken over this clay vessel.

All my cells, like a duck, take to river water.

My brain cells. The craft of my writing. The 

wings of the entire establishment of the 

ephemera camp system inside my negative 

head. The sad heatwave. I am a free artist. 

Shark teeth. An empty androgynous artist

With a shocking bipolar mystique. Black hole.

There is a sharp, electric link. Timing. In the 

chain alphabet. Always has been. All my life I 

have sought feminist writing. Art in language.

A spacious museum. She gave the sun to me. 

There was an ocean behind her illness. The stars.

I had a distant relative that passed from breast

cancer. But that feels like a long time ago. Clocks. 

I think that’s exactly what death is. Just an infinite 

black hole. I enter the tunnel with some urgency 

and follow the light of the sun and along the way Elmo

teaches me the rock alphabet parrot fashion.

Hope is the peanut butter sandwich and tea my brother is making

On waking and in heavy emotional 

pain, it was family and Anne Lamott, 

that Christian writer and grandmother

that taught me the self-help of how to 

study the mental birds and hope, feel 

alive while my depression made me feel 

negative, fragile and helpless. It was yellow

hope, green peas and the orange sun melting 

into the peanut-volcano of each other 

that taught me that you must marry for love. 

That to be addicted to green silences

is that most feminine of journeys to a 

woman. That if I follow her writing

instructions as if I was following an 

ingredient list made up of raisins and 

bananas, tea and Leonard Cohen's oranges,

will it only be then that I can call myself

a writer in the rod of the mist, the beam

of the sun. In this tech age I'm growing old.

In this void in flux. This sublimity. This helpless 

balancing act. It was her books with their 

magnificent, stooping tumult, with their 

flowers and star-power that gave me the 

spinning hope I needed. I watch the boy, 

I study his father's energy (who is making 

peanut butter sandwiches for our lunch). I 

remember how peanut butter sandwiches 

tasted in the hospital. Across from me the 

boy, my cub, eats raisins, and another seed of hope, 

tangled, nourished with light, grows within me.

After listening to Leonard Cohen's Suzanne I revised the following poem

My father has decided he doesn’t want 

to live anymore. Robert Frost once said that 

poetry begins with a lump in the throat. The 

year is pure, this summer, this salt on this 

hard-boiled egg. Lovers, on some level leave 

whatever becomes memory behind. The clock 

is no longer within my grasp, my reach. The leader sets 

the tone and time is leaving me. With its walls,

bittersweet return, its fields of graceful sea,

snow, its silence, its hours, its longing comes 

the healthy knowledge of the infinite wave

that springs forth mightily. Tell me about grief,

your childhood, I want to whisper to him, sweet nothing,

but he's a ghost. The man has already fallen in 

love with another woman. I wash the dishes.

Wipe the counter. Feed the baby and then

watch her sleep. I remember how I had it

good once like gold but don’t anymore. It was

my fault that I believe in tea, butter, burning 

incense, picking wildflowers in the  wilderness.

I believed in the complex torment and all 

the ancestral worship of quietness, the primitive 

man. I thought that was what you, a woman,

was supposed to do. Inspire closely enough, push,

motivate, encourage, fall in love, be quiet, 

calm, stay in love, pretend to be happy, smile, 

accept his behaviour, his cold treatment and his silences. 

I thought I always had to believe in him. That 

was the source of the Nile. The stars and light 

above Cairo. For S., with your dark hair pose,

my prize. Your prayer mat, you were my Solzhenitsyn, 

my Ludwig Wittgenstein, my love, my apricot.

By Abigail George