A Shadow in Yucatan (7 page)

The barefoot
forest dug its feet deep in layered leaves...sniffed guardedly at
mosses, reticulate with green.
Cold water ran, still sluggish, over the lip of stone.

Bark clutched
at wisps of lichen shawl.
Twigs picked frosty teeth.
Only the drifting fog at her feet was pungent as briar smoke.

Insensate
spring drowned in dream under a skin of milk.
All of growing saved its breath to bite her clotted lip.

Only garrulous
crows coming to rest clattered keys in the canopy.

From a lonely
farm on a swirling hill a single dog barked, sharp.
The gruel of a day in winter congealed the larded moon.

In a cold
chancel of leaded glass, the women with imminent child knelt down
and pressed her face to the earth.
History accepted her.

A root took her
slim wrist.

The midwives of
the forest gave the sweet dark soil to sniff.

The seasons of
the future roped her amphibious waist, drew the slip-line tighter,
grazing the forks of trees, tethered the halter of coming calf in
the throat of the unplumbed sea.

(The rope was a
five ply nerve, clamped with strong white teeth. The intrepid
monkey-muscle would follow it, through gasping and sweat and
help-me-God into and out of death)

All this
prepared in stillness, in the screed of the darkling wood...
Builders in the fan vault dropped two feathers at her feet.

*****

Stephanie bit
the threads of reluctance, and lay down in the blanket leaves;
determined to take the first stage alone, with the help of the
awestruck moon.

She
spread-eagled to contact as much as she could of the wiser belly of
earth; harked to be taught by silence how to make love with
death.

A last late
pigeon shuttered the day, finally for sleep.

A hoot-owl
beckoned the stars.
The dark rolled the sun in its sleeve...
The host of heaven would navigate the perilous pass to port.

From a great
height she spotted it, white foam on her saucer sea, smelt an
intangible waft of salt, but it only washed to her feet...
Retreating without menace, it promised to come back.

Watching, the
night dropped rosary beads rhythmically in her lap, eased its
kneeling slightly, blew softly on her scalp...

She sank into
weightlessness, wandered into time where colour was all
summer...
Only thought was motion, and all of will was freed.

This time the
wave’s crest finger drew her on like a ring, pushed her over its
knuckle, and settled her in flesh.
She was fastened, and she knew it, on the blade of a paring
knife.

She steadied
the rising fish-flash fear, and took slower deeper breath.

Surgeon trees
consulted, sprinkling water on her face.
The wind took her pulse with a turning leaf.
A night-jar threaded a song, single pearls of sweetness from the
pod of splitting throat.

She held the
hand of a loving log, who gently braced her back.

The tide was
coming in.
The swell now held a throb, the harbinger of distant waves
gathering out on the reef.

Defined by foam
still singly, but successions now in view...

She turned her
mind to the prow of a boat, pitiful small, probing the treacherous
coral ring, seeking its blind way through.

She would need
to haul on the ropes of pain to guide it into the lea; through a
ring of bright fire, onto the shuddering sand.

The forest
acquiesced.
They had delved from the deep, a flawless moleskin vessel, filled
with God’s right hand.
To vouchsafe it into Creation, they needed the hand of man.

*****

Flushed from
the covert of the brush-beat wood, Stephanie half ran...
Handed from pillar to nave pillar span, a pheasant confused by a
straight chalk line...
Time held panic on a running rein, flicker fused to the
tight-lipped sky...
until she crashed through bracken onto the moon-washed lawn...

A scalpel
nicked at her pelvis, and dropped a cloudburst at her feet.
She waded through surf of her making, up the steps of a
porch...

Poseidon had
escorted her over his figured prow.
Timely oarsmen synchronized his escape from the sycophant
shore.

She was
abandoned to the little men in a soiled and soaking skirt

*****

The interior
was linen paint, the floor a well-swept bed.
She was pushed to a couch and climbed on it, like a cat with broken
legs.

This wave broke
in a paroxysm...

All about were
squeaking screens, and running feet, and tubing, a syringe in front
of spectacles...a sudden jab in the thigh...

The merciless
voices receded with the return of the dignified sky.

Her head was
inaccessible to confusion, panic, or shame...
She would bestow her body to kernel the child, and split from stem
to stern.
Her tireless knees rowed boulders of pain which crushed her bones
like rock salt, gnawed loose the links of her spine...

The cry of life
escaped her, as in fire she crowned her king.

Then frog
bright limbs swum from her, and she was floating in light....

‘
How is he? Oh how
is he?’

‘
A perfect baby
boy’

‘
Let me see, let me
hold him...’

‘
No, my dear. That
wouldn’t be wise, or right.
Lie back, you’ve done a wonderful job...
We’ll take care of the child.’

The feet that
marched him under a sheet drained away all sense.
She simply stared bewildered when they showed her the
afterbirth.

(They stitched,
washed and brushed, and wheeled her to lie in the dark; brought her
tea routinely, and gave something to help her sleep.)

While the
galaxy broadcast new stars, Christopher slept in a plastic tray,
under a pale blue shawl.

PART TWO

In the clean swept chapel where
the requiem was wrung, baptism in light has left a watermark on a
transparent chalice with its liquid listlessness.

Lilac veins
draw the opalescent bone, the fragility of wrist and jaw, the clean
clarity of gaze.

All of this
distilled in milk, unconsumed and trickling steadily...

*****

Outside the
trees accept the vestments of methodical summer, daily obstructing
more of the sky.
Casting shadows to merge with the shadows of clouds, pre-occupied
with purpose that has its acorn centre in harvest’s half closed
eye.

Leaving she,
who felt she’d seeded it, beached with grey salt rind.
A shell not yet stripped of its ganglion, moist in its mantle,
transparent as glass.

Trodden, half
buried, by the passage of meals, the changing jugs of water, the
slanting leading question, the surreptitious look.

Stephanie burns
to extinction, un-protesting as wax.

Discarded by
the synchrony of her and nature’s pulse, she answers questions
timidly, signs papers without reading...
accepts the lunatic lie.

Starting like a
dreaming dog when a hastening tread at the end of endless corridor
frees a hiccoughing cry...

Tomorrow they
take the baby away.
(She has gained consent to send an unsigned letter, and a home made
teddy bear)

When she has
signed the last release, she’ll be free to leave...

Reincarnation

Miriam knits
with wire fingers intermittently oiled by nuts.
Persistence is a change of stitch; reward a needle of salt...

Oi veh! A bikini I
might have managed, so for why do I start a cape?
Midsummer now, it almost seems, and who knows if she likes the
shape?
A boy we always knew it would be, and a beautiful child she
said...that woman from the agency...but why can’t Stephanie
write?’

Distraction
fills the kettle. The mailman is overdue.

A letter it is, at
long last...too short for any news...Mein Gott she says she would
rather walk!...but ah, in a taxi she comes...This afternoon? Is it
the ninth? And the florist too far down-town...if only a nursery
with nice white crib...Now don’t you start again...

*****

The black
bull-terrier motor scents the rolling redolent street...
Slows to claim an azalea outside number forty eight...

A moment’s
frozen action drains the pneumatic pulse. Welcome becomes fearful,
too elusive to define, the austerity of grief too wooden to
succumb...
The familiar, now untouchable, purged in a foreign fire...

Unreachable,
discalced, worshipful and meet, enclosed in skins of suffering, in
themselves too sweet to be discarded easily...

The impulse
that would rush to greet, and in exuberance obscure, is held to the
doorknob by a thread of respect.

Nothing now can
be assumed...

Except that all
is new, built only on shared knowledge, archaic, inescapable, and
bitter as the single time-scarred Yew.

*****

‘
Ai, to see you,
just to look at you is, for me, enough’

The spittle
syllables fall like flares over arctic wastes....

Stephanie drops
her shoulder-bag.
Considers the sun on the parched back lawn,
the limp black mango leaves,
the stain of shade on the old settee...

Then she grasps
the anxious waiting wrist, as if to nail with words. To spear hope
or expectation with a hooked complicity

‘
You must realise I
am dead inside, and I want to stay that way...
I shall destroy your generosity, because I cannot, now,
respond...’

‘
So for what return
have I ever asked? It is enough to care for you, of course you are
alone. The food and comfort I prepare for you, must comfort
me’

The puckered
old mouth twitches, the apron’s quickly smoothed...
Restraints, sharp reined, un-sluice the weir dammed by
sympathy...

The gorged
stomach of injustice heaves, all barriers collapse...
The old nurse finds herself close held to the mother’s aching
breast.

Past weeks have been timeless with
sleep, sedated in dreamlessness; existence weighted beneath a
stone, cast in a still mill-pool.
The skin on the surface pricked by a nymph, surfacing only to share
the solace of meals, before submerging again.

The future is
shorn of impetus, the past of relevance.
The quicksand of the present is a drugged oblivion.

Miriam rocks,
with tapping feet, pushing the needle home.
It is a ravelling of faith, that the garment will be worn.

*****

There are signs
of dim intelligence, (the observance of the squirrel’s track down
from the wire to the wall); the foot outstretched to the threadbare
warmth; the start to the blue jay’s call.

Nothing of news
is newsworthy, no import far from home...
The unthinking gaze is focussed on the edge of a wrapping
shawl.

So what do I do to
resurrect where help is hopelessness?
The future must teach forgetfulness, but should she try to
forget?
Life must go on, if it happens that way, there’s no sense in
aimlessness.
This afternoon we go for a walk, down to the beach and back.
If she resists I’ll tell her straight...I need the exercise.

There is no
hook to recover resolve from the bottomless pit of despair.
Lethargy, that toothless crone, skims perpetual indifference from
the cream of richer care.

Convalescence
must be shamed into shouldering its load.
Without the swinging carrot, it’s like flailing at the dead.

Nevertheless it
must be done.
Without slackening the rein, the stubborn white-eyed yearling led
to walk again.

Miriam, as
smithy, blows on tempered common-sense.
Stephanie, wordless, accepts the fetlock’s added strength.

‘
In two weeks, you
go back to work...the routine will be therapy, unthinking,
automatic...
In time you can think again...You’ve just had a vacation...Anyway,
nobody will ask.’