Diane Seuss

I suck so many cough drops that my pee is mentholated. Not for
pleasure.
For pain. I cough. It hurts. Though as a kid if given the choice of
candies
I’d pick Vicks lozenges. From there it was boys clothes. Wore a pack
of candy cigarettes in the T-shirt pocket. Vicks in the pocket of my
jeans.
Had access to matches from the bowling alley. Charred the cigarette
end, once
set the whole pack on fire. Yes, I played with matches. No one knew
or cared.
That was my luck. I learned early to swallow pills so I could take
knockoff
One A Day vitamins we got free from my mom’s friend who worked
in the pill factory.
I’d suck off the sweet coating before swallowing the iron that made
my little turds
black. I was glad my dad was sick. It gave me access to him. I could
sit next to him
and hold his cold bones in my hands. Trace the blue veins and the
incision
that wrapped his torso like a feather boa or a boa constrictor. I was
a quiet child
but I schemed behind the silence. Already setting up the terms of
my survival
like chess pieces whose royalty I coveted. Black army on a stolen
board.

Here on this edge I have had many diminutive visions. That all at its
essence is dove-gray.
Wipe the lipstick o the mouth of anything and there you will nd
dove-gray. With my
thumb I have smudged away the sky’s blue and the water’s blue and
found, when I kicked it
with my shoe, even the sand at its essence is pelican-gray. I am
remembering Eden.
How everything swaggered with color. How the hollyhocks nished
each other’s sentences.
How I missed predatory animals and worrying about being eaten.
How I missed being eaten.
How the ocean and the continent are essentially love on a terrible
mission to meet up with itself.
How even with the surface roiling, the depths are calmly nursing
away at love. That look the late
nurser gets in its eyes as it sucks: a habitual, complacent peace. How
to mother that peace, to wean
it, is a terrible career. And to smudge beauty is to discover ugliness.
And to smudge ugliness is to be
knocked back by splendor. How every apple is the poison apple.
How rosy the skin. How sweet
the esh. How to suck the apple’s poison is the one true meal, the
invocation and the Last
Supper. How stillness nests at the base of wind’s spine. How even
gravestones buckle and swell
with the tides. And coffins are little wayward ships making their
way toward love’s other shore.

My first crush was Wild Bill Hickok, not the actual guy but the guy
who portrayed him
on TV, Guy Madison, who died of emphysema, whose grandson was
killed in action in Iraq.
What did cowboys do all day, I wondered. Aside from gunghting.
Figuring out whether
they’d be good or bad, which determined the color of the hat. My
hat, how did my mother
afford it, bought at West’s Variety, powder blue. My gun, a toy. I
was wise enough at age
three to own my projections. I would become what I loved. My
mother didn’t hover
as I decided what I’d do with what I was. Her best friend made a
particle board lid for the crib
so she could go out on the cement slab and drink highballs,
unimpeded by kids, who all
turned out fine and loved her madly, though half of them died
young in motorcycle wrecks.
My mother didn’t care if I rescued or killed or swung from a noose
until I was dead. That
was my domain. Her domain was TV dinners and James Joyce.
Mikel’s first crush was the body
of a young hung TV cowboy who swung from the noose in a spiral
pattern. Mikel called home
his projections and likewise died young and hung. I decided my
kind of cowboy would read
tall tales from a tall book called Tall Tales about tornadoes and card
games and white whales.

Freak accidents do happen, girl said it ten, twelve times that night,
her pronouncement curled in my head for decades, a tequila worm,
my sister and I snowbound in a cold house, our mother stranded
somewhere,
sleeping, she said, in a public library, I pictured her under a blanket
of paperbacks, power out so we tracked each other’s breath
in the flashlight beam, that girl, somebody from the neighborhood,
made it through the snow to play a role in our tragedy, maybe
snowshoed,
wouldn’t put it past her, freak accidents, she said, moving the
candle
to the center of the table because fire turns little girls to cinders, I
was eight,
my sister twelve, blizzard brought out her kinder nature, normally
she’d
have used this as a chance to murder me, we ate saltines and
margarine
huddled in bed, don’t choke, the freak-girl said, wind whining,
power lines
writhing and crackling across 13th St., our father shivering in his
coffin
under all that snow, oh, that freckled oracle, Lizzy Ferris was her
name.

Who wants to be soft? I don’t. I’ve even seen a hermit crab
outgrow its shell and drag its perilous softness into a doll’s head.
Crab, I empathize. As a kid, I fed my big baby doll’s bare foot
into a rotating fan blade. I wasn’t mean, not at all. Inquisitive.
Doll donated her toe to science. I mixed potions: iodine, nightshade,
and some incongruity like a few drops of my dad’s aftershave. He
was
dead by then, but there was a quarter of a bottle of Aqua Velva
in the medicine chest, which I used sparingly. I wasn’t planning to
poison
anyone, even my sister, who showed me how to harden up by
folding
her arms across her chest and scowling at dad’s abdominal tumor.
Our mom slammed the door and drove to Lake Michigan. I pictured
her
making her way into the sheltering undertow. The Rev. Larry
Whiteford
sang “When the Gates Swing Open” at the funeral, and the three of
us
sat there like Mt. Rushmore. Anyway, dad was a softie, Jesus, a
softie.

I was raised in a rectangle. Aluminum. There was a rectangular
toy box, red. Sometimes, I’d take out the toys and climb inside.
Rectangle within a rectangle. In my mind, I’d sing a song called
“My Tiny Childhood.” Sometimes, I’d let a doll stay. I liked to sit
in the pile of dirty laundry that had overowed the clothes hamper.
A yeasty, mortal smell. I smelled that way in England after a
grueling
journey over the English Channel on a ferry from Hoek van Holland
to Harwich. An East German man with a red face, he could not hear
nor speak but gestured wildly for another drink. A British soldier
with scented pomade in his hair. Two Scottish soldiers, twins, kilts,
one of whom wrote my mother a postcard asking for my hand.
By the time she got it, I was long gone, had climbed many stairs
to a blue rectangle in London, clock tower bell bonging outside
the window, slept for hours unburdened by conscience, like a baby.

No need to sparkle,” Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room
of One’s Own, oh, would that it were true, I loved the kids
who didn’t, June, can’t remember her last name, tilt of her
head like an off-brand flower on the wane, her little rotten
teeth the color of pencil lead, housedresses even in 4th grade,
and that boy Danny Davis, gray house, horse, eyes, clothes,
Fingertips and prints, freckles not copper-colored but like metal
shavings you could clean up with a magnet. Now Mrs. LaPointe
was a dug-up bone but Miss Edge sparkled, taught the half-
and-half class, 3rd and 4th grades cut down the middle
of the room like sheet cake, wore a lavender chiffon dress
with a gauzy cape to school, aquamarine eye shadow, “Sweetie,”
she whispered to me, leaning down, breath a perfume, “your
daddy’s dead,” tears stuck to her cheeks like leeches or jewels.

I was not a large child, though large in silence, learned
from pods and brambles and cattail’s velvet fruit. Like
the world, which began as a pea-sized notion under
the mattress of an oversensitive girl, I grew vast, too vast,
it was said, for my landscape’s monsters: cows, mudpuppies,
bullfrogs, Polyphemus moths with purple eyespots on their wings,
nightcrawlers in the worm bin, catalpas inside out on the hook,
nature, outmoded as stockings with a seam up the back, as rations
and iron pills and traction for back pain, dad strung up
and weighed down until they figured out it was a tumor. I flew
far away to feel molecular, but even among the throng, my life
was enormous, a raucous tragedy, having outgrown its theater’s
cherubs and filmy purple curtains and thereby gushing
out into the street,filling it with arterial soliloquys.

What is it you feel, I asked Kurt when you listen to
Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major, his face was so lit up
and I wondered, “the music is unlike the world I live
or think in, it’s from somewhere else, unfamiliar and unknown,
not because it is relevant to the familiar and comfortable,
but because it brings me to that place that I didn’t/couldn’t
imagine existed. And sometimes that unfamiliar place is closer
to my world than I realize, and sometimes it’s endlessly distant,”
that’s what he wrote in an email when I asked him
to remind me what he’d said earlier, o the cu, “I don’t
recall exactly what I said,” he began, a sentence written
in iambic pentameter, and then the rest, later he spoke of two
of his brothers who died as children, leukemia and fire,
his face, soft, I’m listening to Ravel now, its irrelevancy.

Listening to “Summertime” played by Kurt Rohde on
viola, when did my heart break, at birth, all of our little
hearts like little acorns break. You must go to it,
whatever it is, like a ayed dog it will not come to you,
for I am like Tony, a provocateur at heart, and he has a tumor
in his pancreas so where did all the provocation get him,
Pam would say it’s not your job to rip the Band-Aid
from someone else’s wound and clearly she is right,
why say or do anything, I suppose “I love you” will suffice
but now and then, the Band-Aid’s little upturned corner
beckons like dead Ahab lashed to the whale’s side, something
presses to be said or read, listened to or forgotten, a tune
that opens your flesh, removes the bones, fillets you till you die,
the jumping fish, the rich daddy, the hush baby don’t you cry.