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Dinosaur Bones: Forty-Six and Four
My daughter's four. Age of anal-retentiveness,
some opine, though nobody's cornered the market on
quibble-ability
like me, a perimenopausal Poster Crone
gone mad and muttering and dark, the Hamlet of our Home
who can't stop questioning
the nature of an existence gone primeval
on PremPhase and Prozac and my daughter's perpetual
questions,
both of us indulging our madness when the snapped pencils
Mei Li's strewn across carpet become, in our manic
imaginings,
triceratops shin-bones we examine
then fondle, whispering, "What magic"
as we both delve silently into our collective muttering
pasts,
hers splashed cobalt as dawn, mine a rawer glittering Ice
Age.
The Menopausal Recluse Courts The Ghosts of Good Will
I stalk all the salesclerks,
don't think them deranged
but "privileged in eccentricity,"
the wall-eyed man with wispy blond locks
who whispers like Truman Capote,
the nattering grayhair who fumbles with her cane
along cracked and yellowed linoleum.
This is my silent and secret world of Boo Radleys at dusk,
the Nebraska "shunned" who, stuttering,
marble-minded, quivering, shamble about
among stained and blood-splashed sweatshirts, clocks
that can't announce minutes, a broken-toothed Nutcracker
courting an invisible Clara
inside a rubbed-glittering, red-velvet case. It's not that I
celebrate
weirdness. Deformity. It's that I've learned to crave
off-kilteredness
as Sanity. Books mend me...words. Even while
I bleed: menopausal witch. A litany of dusklit rituals I
intone,
renouncing the normal,
reverberates like Big Ben's chimes inside a mind
that empties and fills with the blackest midnight tides,
a mind that scarcely seems mine
though it's the silence I sink inside
until it streams like a river winding through rocks,
coursing through black-green moss
clinging to each thought
until I wax and wane as eloquently as the tide,
a blood-drained childless loner.
Layers
My daughter revels in her burgeoning identity,
crouching
inside a cardboard box, folding the flaps
over
her head (over her chin-length Chinese bob),
lavish
in a pink Barbie dress with sequins
and a
bright Barbie cameo safety-pinned to the bodice,
the
intricate stitching, the sumptuous material
beribboned
for a princess, for a ballerina
whose
"becoming" my daughter shuns.
"I’m
not Barbie," she announces, scratching one ass cheek
then
flipping up her flounced skirt
to
reveal her breakfast-stretched tummy.
"I’m
Mei Ying in a dress." She refuses all labels
with
a ferocity I’d deem precocious--except,
precociously
menopausal,
I
indulge in this myself, smoking cigarettes with a grandiose
air
of suffering until they burn down to stubs, until they scald
my
chewed-nailed fingers, sit and smoke and stare out
a
smeared window at acres of green lawn
objectively
gorgeous yet studded
with
my cocker spaniel’s soakings,
watch
my daughter stroke, proudly,
her
enormously plump belly, finger her stublike "outie"
while
I drink coffee in my menstrual-stained nightgown,
laugh
even while sensing how coffee and nicotine have stained
my
teeth yellow. Some people resist aging. But there’s a dazzle
to
all this, the layers peeled off in five years, ten, to reveal
the
raw identity beneath, the embryolike being who may not
be
beautiful, may not be sentient,
yet
represents another stage, another level, linking us to some
disembodied
transcendence. I think about this
and
swallow my coffee: a material being, after all.
Terri Brown-Davidson is on the poetry and fiction faculty at Gotham Writers' Workshop.
Her poetry and fiction have appeared in more than 750 journals,
including TRIQUARTERLY, HAYDEN'S FERRY REVIEW, DENVER QUARTERLY,
THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW, and NEW YORK STORIES.
Email: Terri Brown Davidson
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