Fanny Howe - Second Childhood

tried to discover emotion.

He hit a horizon.

“Philosophy should only be written as poetry.”

In a Sabbath atmosphere you stand still and look backwards

for time has ceased its labors

and no cattle tremble.

You can contemplate the peripheries

and for a flash see the future as a field in a semi-circle.

Everything is even on the Sabbath. The died and the living.

Each person or place wants you as much as you want another.

Towards a just

and invisible image

behind each word

and its place in a sentence

we must have been sailing.

Scarcely defended, best

when lost from wanting perfect sense.

But still, recognizable.

Be like grass, the phantom told us:

lie flat, spring up.

Our veils were scrolls

you couldn’t walk into

but only mark the folds.

I’ve lost my child at the bend where we parted.

We will never come back to that hour.

Let me write about the place again the path so sandy

and the table cloth blowing in a wind from Newfoundland.

It was here it began. She left her bouillabaisse untouched

and headed out on the train.

Sort of, soft, gold at sunset, turrets and sandals

were hard to identify so many copies.

Let me concentrate on ancestral faces

and I will recognize hers

before my powers fail and our DNA has been smeared

on cups and cigarettes, bottles and gloves, bowls and spoons

and replicated, sucked or kissed into the lips of strangers.

I have to pass through the estuary

to investigate breakdown as a trail of nerve-endings

at the beginning of everything.

Scrapes like threads seeking holes.

It’s a strange textile that serves as a road map.

This one did:

its blue led to the edge.

Where could a fabric begin and end except as a running woman

who sews and passes it along?

So I ran with it in my hands.

A kind of eucharist.

No break in its material from the first day on earth

to the Sabbath where all are equal

and the cows covered in sackcloth.

Where has my mind gone?

The bloody thieves

are very quick.

You may have noticed I’m naked

and sliced by glass.

Soon words will be disappeared

and then the Celtic church

and seven friends

I will not name.

One word that contains

so many:

dearth, end, earth, ear, dirt, hen, red, dish, it and

I must examine each part

then cut the ropes without a heart and set out.

The slide downhill on my back to a ledge

and the sea out there and a city

to the left of the mud.

The place they call an area

preparing for an earthquake. Under-shade and crowds

of hungry old people lining for bread.

One woman collapsed on her side

and another helped her up

and I was let into the bunker

by the best kind of communist.

There was orange vomit on a large cape over a large woman.

The hills! No bells.

I went down for what reason.

Not to enter a cell.

Luckily no one was white.

We discovered we were in a loft space from the olden days

that I indicated pleased me

because I couldn’t get my body out no matter what.

I paused long enough to encounter

a slender elder with the delicate posture of a Rastafarian.

The people were indifferent as they are to whites but polite.

The lean man showed me the door in colorful clothing.

But there was a huge blast from the building beside us

And we ran up rickety stairs to look at what

was now a structure speared with broken glass and stone.

A worker was already being transported on a stretcher.

We looked around at the mess then went inside to discuss

our love of failures, every one of us.

I hauled so many children after me

with ropes and spears and nets

like sea-creatures that others would eat

without them I have no purpose.

As in the Gospel account, I believed in their belief.

But now there would be what? For he, the little one,

was kneeling and saying, You must run.

The lover I still loved stayed near the door

so I raced off, you stood, when the police came

seeking coherence in everything.

The total machine of retribution presses on.

Regardless of a prayer or what a person did.

This is incredible.

We’re breaking up.

A Trappist led me around as one of him

to a ship heading for the country where they edit the best films.

There was a city on deck: residential with pleasing evening trees

and then a downtown area until we couldn’t tell the suns

from the portholes on board.

The ship would transport us to a staging dock in Iona.

I would lose my luggage from the twentieth century

(though its particles and buckles were forged in eternity)

and make my private vows to the creator

in every theater we entered.

Together we traveled in a boat as it filled with night-water

from the bottom up.

By night-water one means fear.

So the refilling is adding a sting to the salt.

Living naked

still leaves you covered

by a surface of wood, feathers, fur or skin.

Bare skin, blue skin: a muff of lambskin

over the ears where the thief can get in.

It’s lucky the mind freezes before the heart.

Back there is the string of mountains your uncle painted

and you lost. Out there is the clotted cream

on a raspberry tart that he couldn’t finish.

There is the goose and the blackbird, the brindled donkey

and the trap. They stand on the thin black thread of your lineage.

Your scissors are split, your fiddle is cracked, its strings are thin

and your mouth is dry, your clothes American.

No more rush of notes as if a window is open inside.

Only if you are insane or asleep

and the gods and animals

pound their way in

on a divine night wind.

I have a fairy rosary called Silver who answers questions when I dangle her in the sun at the window.

So I’ve asked her if I have a big ego and she swings from side to side to say no.

We have other children for friends.

We don’t understand why we are here in the world with horrible grown-ups or what the lessons are that we’re supposed to learn.

It’s not helpful for us to hear ourselves described in religious, geriatric or psychological terms, because we don’t remember what they mean.

One cruel female said, “Don’t laugh so much. You’re not a child.”

My cheeks burned and my eyes grew hot.

I decided to stop becoming an adult. That day I chose to blur facts, fail at tests, and slouch under a hood.

School was my first testing ground. I misunderstood lessons, assignments, meanings of poems and stories, and misinterpreted the gestures of characters in novels. I was awestruck by geology but mixed up the ages of rocks. I stared and giggled, and refused to take orders and was punished.