moving is floating ears
-- Leslie Scalapino, The Tango
She has the head of a woman and the body of a bird. A fish, the tail of a fish. She does not wear a mask
I am watching her swim and I am 5 years old. I have decided to call her Gloria. Gloria swirls her tail and fins. Gloria is gorgeous. A man on a loud speaker asks her to do something under the water. He does not call her by name
Ask any mermaid you happen to see
I am reading while she´s swimming. I am crouched down deep in the back floor of the 1960 Oldsmobile. We are driving around Lake Okechobee on the way to Miami -- I am 5 years old. We´re driving around the lake in this 1960 Oldsmobile and I´m deep down in the pocket of the floor facing the back seat. The road winds around the lake, steep and slanting down towards the lake. I always think we´re falling into the water. I think my whole family will drown. Somehow we always manage to get to Miami without drowning. My family is going to Miami to visit my distant cousin and her family. My distant cousin is only 3 and has long black tresses her mother combs back into a pony tail. I like to watch her mother comb back her long tresses every morning. I wish my mother would let my hair grow long. I stick a nylon stocking on my head and pretend to have long tresses like my distant cousin. It feels right but looks ridiculous. Every morning the mother of my distant cousin combs her long tangled hair back into a smooth wave
We never slide into Lake Okechobee while driving around it in the Oldsmobile. But when I am 8 and living in Rapid City, I read a Reader´s Digest article about a woman who drives off the road around Lake Okechobee and the car falls into the lake. The windows are rolled up, and the pressure of the water holds the window panes tight. The woman can´t get out. She dies -- not of drowning, but of suffocation
I learned to swim early. But I never learned to swim well. I made the Minnow´s Club in Rapid City at the downtown YMCA. But I could never pass the test for Fish. I was afraid to dive off the side of the swimming pool. I wouldn´t dive off the side of the pool until I completely gave up trying to pass the test for Fish. After I gave up on ever becoming a Fish, one day I did it -- I just I dived off the side of the pool. Next, I went to the diving board in the deep end and I dove off that, too. Then I got so I would dive off the high-dive board every summer at the big outdoor pool at the city recreation. I would plunged down deep from the high-dive. I would sink and sink
I always wanted to swim like Gloria, who is a mermaid at Weeki Wachee Springs. We go there when I am 5 to watch the mermaids swim, because it is near Tampa, where we happen to live. The man on the loudspeaker is asking the mermaid I call Gloria to plunge down deeper, into the bottomless pit of the spring. Somewhere near the bottomless pit of the spring, he says, lives a large hairy fish. He tells Gloria to go down and see this bottomless pit. This is all for the entertainment of the people standing in a little steel bulb facing Gloria through a window pane. The people couldn´t see the underwater pit. They were told by the man that it exists. The people are watching Gloria, who is swishing her tail in the water, from this bulb-like steel frame with a plate-glass window facing the spring
Gloria was poised and elegant -- but also a little afraid. She was paid to swish her fish tail this way and that, as strands of her brunette hair floated above her head in the light wave toward the water´s surface. Strand by strand, her brunette hair makes a light motion like the bubbles that rise toward the surface. I witness this series of movements -- the tail swish, the hair strands floating -- through the stillness of the plate glass. I´m looking halfway in -- from the side view of the water. The water hits the glass, the glass is still -- against the water line -- divides view -- in half
City sloth not
here Italian architecture not
here close up far -- both -- elating everything vision is
half-way
"As Trunks floating on ears of elephants" -- not even in night -- rose
by name
her name:
Gloria
(ask any mermaid you happen to see)
under water -- a hose
divides her from me -- she breathes -- the hose, a post-World War II invention -- a sailor comes home from the Pacific Theater of war, hires women to make a theater out of a spring -- women learn to swim while breathing through a rubber hose --
(women spit poison into the hose)
technology -- advances -- time moves the seasons like the bodies move the motion of
a water -- lake, a spring
time passages like rubber-hose parts -- bodies pass
indirectly -- no time
passes -- indirectly I am 5 years old and
completely innocent, just drinking
my juice from a plastic orange container surely a
marketing device to sell
Florida Orange Juice (club people meet to play, see picture attached)
it has a green straw -- I have a mat
where I sleep, I am
5 going on 6 years old not counting all the
births I intend to make -- the poetry -- I heard
a poet knowing
only she can write -- while others are reading -- the one who
writes at readings -- others write later -- write one´s own
writing -- but writing belongs
not to any one
in particular -- passes through
a hose -- a way of breathing --
plunge into the spring water -- spring of youth -- I am
5 years old -- technology of
breath -- mesmerizing but
unreflective -- spring -- reflects
pool of child narcissism -- spring (breath) a
thought
So I´ve got this plan to sleep on a mat, in agreement with two 5-year-old twins who are exactly my age but two of them like doubles with whom I´ve pre-arranged an adventure for early morning but I throw the rocks at their window to wake them up from sleep and the twins don´t wake up -- only the mother, who screams: "What are you doing?"
Clicking contours -- rubber colors -- rise
we are "running together on the rise" -- Can I
("reflected")-- make sense of -- what I see underwater?
Under poetry -- a thought shifts -- tide pools rise -- in the news every body is plastered against a sea bowl
green with mysterious returns -- I return here to the life of Sisyphus, who makes up for
loss with his passage through time -- like dying -- water passing over
mournful graves, old villages, surreptitious towns -- crisscrossing boundaries -- cultures mixed up -- languages awash in -- a swath of
wide destruction -- no longer a ribbon -- but a huge wave
that wipes out humanity, leaves
no soul waiting
rising
or dead
As I´m writing this partly above gleaming -- "rise" -- her body sinks
into the lake, the spring at Weeki Wachee, she shakes
her head
NO
-- the man in the loud-speaker wants her to go down --
plunge
deep
into a chasm
below
in anticipation
for entertainment
God knows what a nightmare is -- I feel the plastic orange bulb coating my palm
a glove of Florida orange juice
a marketing device with a lead straw, now I recognize the falsity of the sublime -- shadows of Florida palms (sucking on the tube) go
down
to other shadows
descending -- waiting
So she
shakes her head
"NO" -- I never saw such an emphatic positioning -- as night -- rose -- I decide
to be a writer
(Gloria
tells the man on the loud speaker
she doesn´t want to do it)
I never saw her again
I suppose she lost her job
Q: "What´s the best tuna?´"
A: "Chicken of the Sea"
(And there´s the story of me,
not yet 5, collapsing in a redwood forest
under a large tree
on another coast line, in a different history, me refusing to
move while
family members anticipated my movement
hiding their buttocks behind
a fern that formed a shade
I happen to see
every one of these bodies
blocking the sunlight -- Do they think I am stupid? -- a line -- a rose -- a play, a game -- I spy
rose time -- I´m not even tired yet, not even
time for Gloria yet: they should have known suppleness was the game)
With my brother I am singing
every commercial jingle -- we knew enough to go on TV --
next to the lime-green car whose trunk
is open
Another coastline -- the Indian Ocean -- awash with new boundaries -- barriers -- open channels swashing, splashing -- covering
formerly islands
what´s intact
what´s present in
past nightmare, really, the sea
rhythms of sea bowls -- unacceptable, in fact, the collapsing mind can´t think -- can´t
nest -- anywhere -- cadavers float
ears of elephants, solid debris -- timber of houses -- once body parts
lovers, slaves, the bourgeoisie
bikini-clad vacation bodies float the sea --
No animals here -- action distinguishes humans for their
particular
vulnerability
When someone is different, perceiving is a social space I feel the plastic orange bulb in my
hand
I ask the mermaid why the green plastic straw feels like lead in my mouth? What is this marketing device? Why the rubber hose? What is this
integer economy -- a rubber hose holds
bubbles just right -- I am watching the mermaid under the sea, sucking in distress -- her tube tight -- my orange bulb
tight -- this steel bulb of darkness -- I am not hiding but she can´t see me
Does she even know her golden gown
waving in the spring
influences me?
A mermaid´s mantle -- one beds down
by river sides, by water sides, everyone seeks
their lost platforms
like once I found a lost drive-in movie theater
overgrown with weeds, no crowds, no pajamas in station-wagons
no boxes hanging on the car window
no teenagers behind glass panes making out in the dark
Her answer is firm:
she doesn´t want to
do it
Silence -- the unanswerable in facial ticks How to watch a nod of negation under the sea
while drinking Florida orange juice from a plastic bulb?
Must take account of (Silence) the bobbing tendencies the water´s firmness
when watching a woman under the sea wearing fish fins for a living
one thinks about how many women and children are swept by the Indian Ocean
-- how many houses awash in bodies of sand?
Once playful, a lover entices through the distance, better
the frozen plastic the green glove, the sleeve
the car window, time freezes, I am
5 years old and
counting I give you sermons -- enjoy the morality of
the play, the ink darkling -- when newspapers, not helicopters, save you from strangers -- from depths -- not accountably deep -- but it´s
only a spring with a chasm, not an ocean -- a lake -- I get ahead of
"my" self -- monster in a fishy cup -- a
soup dish catches the tail of
another disaster:
my father teaching me to scale a fish
in the bloody sink, and he didn´t want to
do it when I told him I was
going to run away
like the boy in the book live in the woods
while down the block my brother tried it
but he was too ineffectual (he had my father carry the suitcases)
could not get as far as the corner bus stop
where the summer before I had successfully sold
lemonade -- my brother tripped up
The blue
wavvvveeee eeeeeee!
-- the moment catching
slight of an occasional
bulb of plastic -- bobbing the sea
I asked the mermaid -- she believed wideness
would be discouraged: When someone is different
they will pound you
So she did it for the money For just above minimum wage
and dental benefits
she plunged into the spring backwards
Did a flip and a flop
for the fish she left the hose
flapping -- And no one could see
as I passed, then returned, the boss
having made my journey backwards
to wait on what she gets paid for:
sexual slavery
Chicken of the sea:
I am not afraid
But better prepare the face mask
It won´t matter to Gloria
after that
(With thanks to "Chicken of the Sea," vocal artist Pamela Z, and Leslie Scalapino -- whose reading in December 2004 of The Tango at the City College of New York gave this poem its deep structure. "Ask Any Mermaid" is part of a book-length series entitled Sisyphus My Love.)
© Laura Hinton 2005
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