i#

Once upon a time there was a princess – named Sabella in the old tale – who had no heart. And I want to learn how to anger the Fairies enough to earn her fate. How to rouse the oldest one, forgotten at some Christening ceremony, or unmet with appropriate gifts – the great hag-Fairie. How to give her such offense? So she will come and snatch out my own, and fly it away to the treacherous Ice Mountain, into the frigid dark reaches of the fragile Ice Castle, and place it, encased in sparkling gemstone, on the castle’s vast throne, impossible to reach.

ii#

I’ve been reading Tony Hoagland, and something about his ability to be heartless reaches itself into me. He can destroy worlds with a pen. He can write award-winning poems full of bitter venom, lashings out at ex-lovers, or current wives. Why can’t I? Be heartless? I try to write a poem capturing something of the cool confines of my life. Not even savage, but a constrained semi-lament about my husband’s busied distracted distance, but I have no bile. And when I read what I write, I feel only confine of discomfort, sharp edge of shame, think of his soft eyes, and slide once more to the bottom of this this impossibly golden cage again to clutch my aching head. I lack ruthlessness.

iii#

The week has been a spinning plunge. Through despair. Through tortured longing. Malignant aloneness. Barely bottled self-destruction. You know the feeling. Helpless struggle to detach from it all, from everything. From me. I cannot write. I cannot untangle. I cannot deal with this heart. So I read. I go out walking. Today, to the prairie wetlands to sit in the damp grass after a noontime rain. Here, is Mary Oliver. I had written out “Wild Geese” in blue ink to memorize, but the page has blurred with the dampness of my hand, and now my hand is blue too. But some lines are still readable. I sit by the lotus pools and see, indeed, that the rains have moved across the prairies leaving clear pebbles, impossibly large and crystalline – sparkling gemstones, nestled on the floating lotus leaves. Collected there. It is all beauty. Untouchable. And I see. Beauty, yes. But I cannot bring myself to be touched. Everything is too distant. No intent. It is not for me.

iv#

I saw a Chekhov play, or rather the movie of a Chekhov play, at a theatre. In it, Masha says, “I dress in black to match my life.” Masha says, “No one can imagine how I suffer.” Masha says to write a dedication for her: To Masha, who, forgetful of her origin, for some unknown reason is living in this world. Her lines get a laugh from the audience with bleak reliability in spite of the actress’s haggard eyes. Masha says, “Love must be plucked out the moment it springs up in the heart . . . I shall tear my passion out by the roots.” Impossible task, for she spends the whole length of the play calling out her beloved’s name. Pure futility.

v#

There is another story. This one of the Irish gods, the Tuatha Dé Danann, of the goddess Étaín. She is easily bored. She is restless. She knows no peace. She goes to Midyir, the creator god, to ask him to make her a world, but he is busy with his other worldly things. Frustrated and constrained, she heartlessly wishes all the worlds would clash in fire and flame – just for her entertainment. But the goddess Fuamach hears and says, “You have the heart of a fly. Be a fly,” and she is. She flits. Her story is long, Étaín’s. She is offered a beautiful house in the world of Fairie, but feels trapped there. Later on, on earth, in Ireland, she will be swallowed as the fly by a queen and, impossibly, be born a princess, beautiful beyond beauty. Not of this world. Ever restless. Restless. Unsatisfied with anything, everything somehow reminding her of the gods’ forgotten worlds. She cannot remember. She cannot love. That is not my problem.

vi#

The lotus leaves in the pools of the prairie don’t just float there. They continue to thrust themselves out – out of the water – up – up to the skies. One cups a pebble of rainwater like a sparkling gem. It doesn’t pool. It is rounded – a perfect stone of impermanence. Heartless beauty. There is no stolen heart enthroned there. And the lotus flowers too thrust, as fists, then an impossible delicate rapaciousness of yellow, then seed pods, tight and green, then brown and old and open again. The beauty overwhelms. Its urgency. But it is impersonal. The world of nature doesn’t care if I see, or if no one sees.

vii#

I have a friend – the Zen poet Ryōkan known as the great-hearted fool, writing 200 years ago. I like to go walking with him. Or we sit in a hut together, talking of poetry. He writes to me: Sometimes I sit quietly / Listening to the sound of falling leaves / Peaceful indeed is the life of a monk, / Cut off from all worldly matters. / Then why do I shed these tears? I understand. But he didn’t write that for me. And he is not my friend. A temporal and spatial impossibility. And I don’t go walking with him. And the dry-inked words on that page are distant and impersonal. Even the poem where he wants to gather up all / the suffering people / in this floating world in his monks’ robes – that is of a different world. Everything is too far away. I am alone.

viii#

Back to Chekhov. Only the characters that love – out, beyond themselves – suffer. Tortured, their agony drips from their oft-stilted lines. Perhaps that’s what happens, a hundred years later, when Russian is translated to American English. “What if I were to follow you?” asks the son of his beloved. “That would be impossible.” “I love you.” “Hush,” she replies. She has ambitions. She wants to be an actress, like his mother. She kisses him passionately, but is able to put her heart aside, only to lose it again to the worldly writer. He comes in later. The characters that flourish are the impersonal. The ruthless. The heartless. The boy’s mother. She calls the overflowing idealistic loving labors of the naïve soul “decadent rubbish.” She crushes.

ix#

My mother knew how to be heartless, to crush, to leave all tenderness locked away somewhere – beyond all reach. She could listen to the infant’s screams in the wooden crib, later the weeping of the toddler in the play pen, and remain unmoved, busy with her other worldly things. Unmoved, or moved to violent screams. She could smash her stone-boned hands across the sobbing child’s face. And words. Sometimes her crushing words were, perhaps, to get a reaction from her captive audience, to feed her restlessness, to set fire to other’s worlds for her own caged entertainment. But I think, at some level, she meant well. She meant to detach me from my too-much suffering. To beat it out of me. To, like the Fairie-hag, make me heartless, and thus thrive. Impossible task. It didn’t work. I never learn, do I?

x#

The king and the queen suspect something is wrong with their little princess, Sabella. She is full of gifts, but without tenderness. She sings charmingly, but without meaning. She is “nothing but a beautiful image.” The fatal wrongness: for those who love, no one cannot long be loved. I’m not sure that is true. In any case, the Fairies are assembled. The impossible truth becomes known. Heartless. Shock and mourning. Her image, her beauty, is displayed in all the towns. Five hundred princes perish in the frozen wastes of Ice Mountain to capture that heart. But all that drama aside, the princess herself, a girl of perfect objectivity (but not without humor) is completely satisfied with her loveless life, although wearied by others’ sentiment and folly. Perfect impersonalness.

xi#

I want to be like that princess. To watch the stories of human drama float around me, and be untouched. I want to do what Masha says, and pull all passion up by the roots, before the agonies of hopeless love can dig in. I want to read Hoagland’s sharp, bitter violence, and learn from him – but I am drawn to his softer poems. I want to be detached like the Zen poets – but even they cannot escape all worldliness. I end up falling into Lorca and Neruda, who gush blood of passion yet somehow soak and thrive in it, creating their wet-inked worlds. My attempts at ruthlessness rot and sink. I cannot root out my softness – to the imaginary disgust of my distant mother. Sabella rolls her eyes. Étaín wouldn’t even bother. Ryōkan nods, except he doesn’t. Perhaps Lorca and Neruda would understand. My roots are deep in the soft, life-giving pond muck that is me. Like lotus leaves, I can only reach out and up. I think of Mary Oliver, and to my despair, what the soft animal of my body wants, is, naively, idealistically, simply its own softness. The decadent rubbish. The personal. What’s wanting is to be the softness that I am and the reachingness and to love. Even if everything is impersonal and impossible.

xii#

The heartless mother in the Chekhov play, the aging actress, is restless. She calls for horses during harvest time. She needs the horses to get out, to escape the confines of the house, to go up to Moscow, to the theatre, to her audiences – for her beauty to be displayed. It is impossible. Not a horse to be had. She screams. She tantrums. She needs drama. Her son threatens her identity with his idealistic naiveté – so she crushes him. She must crush and crush and crush his reaching up and out lest he remind her of something deeply buried within herself. He is decadence. And – aside from that – she will not release her lover, the writer Trigorin. She needs him to uphold her being, her beauty, her image. So now, the caged Trigorin is restless too. Ah – the son’s young lover, the ambitious, beautiful girl who also wants to be an actress. Bored Trigorin, trapped in another’s world, makes a decision: he destroys her out of idleness.

xiii#

The princess that was the Irish goddess Étaín that was the fly that now is a princess marries the high king of Ireland, and thus is now a queen. But nothing pleases her. She cannot love anyone or anything. One day, into the castle the fool comes singing, spreading rushes and the buds of flowers. She treads upon them, unnoticing. But she notices his song, and wishes for the same lightheartedness. The fool scolds her: “You won’t let anything live. You won’t give a bud the chance to blossom . . . you would burn down a world just to warm your hands.” That’s when a young god comes in, disguised as a magician and minstrel and juggler. Uncharacteristically, Étaín is shamed by the words of the fool. She is kind. She offers the magician the bud of a flower, which he turns into a flying white bird. That’s when the creator god Midyir enters, disguised as well, with his chessboard, to win her. He tells her, “I would make a world for you,” and she suddenly remembers all-all-all. But she says, “Oh, Midyir, in all the worlds I would be a stranger, for I have never made a world for myself.”

xiv#

I cannot be a princess without a heart. I never was a beauty or a princess to begin with. I cannot even become the great hag-Fairie that can steal hearts away. I have inhabited too many worlds, but am always the stranger. I have tried to pull my passions up by the roots, but the violence only wearies me. It leads me astray. I would know the peaceful life of the Zen monk, but then, always, the tears. The water birds on the prairie cry, as if in solidarity, but that is impossible. Beauty is heartless, impersonal. This world does not need my audience. Mary Oliver says the world offers itself to my imagination, but I wanted to be good, instead. I cannot be ruthless. I wanted the knee-crawl torture – the repentance of the decadent lover. I wanted to tell about my despair, but the world just goes on. I wanted to write down everything, but who would be my audience? And wouldn’t they, as when Masha speaks, just laugh? It is better to be impersonal, but that is impossible. Far ahead, up the prairie path, there are horses.

xv#

In the Chekhov play, the writer Trigorin writes everything down. The mother-actress’s brother had wanted to be a writer, but never did. Now he’s dying. Konstantin, her son, the lover, is a writer. He cannot, will not, root out his tortured idealism, his passionate love. Can he become heartless? In an act of heartlessness, he shoots a flying waterbird, a white gull. People take the bird as a symbol for the girl, the ambitious young actress, who is destroyed by Trigorin. But the bird is Konstantin. On himself, he uses the same rifle. Only the characters who love beyond themselves – upwards and outward – are tortured. The heartless thrive, the ones that can only turn in and in. The Princess Sabella does not suffer as long as she has no heart. But fairytales are impossible. Ryōkan withdrew from this world, but he suffered. And Hoagland, the sharp one, he suffered, except when he escaped his own tortured world for the wet world of springs and dragonflies and floating feathers. I try to escape into the world of nature, but I cannot escape myself. I find it all impersonal, impersonal, and I am sick of all the violence, and nothing works. Not in or out or upwards.

xvi#

I leave the world of the lotus pools and go sit near the horses. Not too close – they are wild, after all, and there were warnings. They crop the grass, and, over time, move closer. They are beautiful. Impersonal. I watch them. I try to write their beauty. Sable and umber. Chestnut, chocolate, and ginger-brown. Long-necked, they reach down, ripping and grinding the rain-greened grass. They snap at flies. They do not look at me. They crop grass and move ever closer. If only I could be like them, caught up only in the wild business of being. Sure in my own satin skin. The impossible desire not to desire, to be that impersonal. But I acknowledge the impossibility. Like any fool spreading flower buds in the rushes, I must love and witness crushing – and suffer. But, oh, to accept all suffering. That would be, I think, some kind of wisdom, some kind of salvation. To accept the impersonal nature of the world I’m in. The wind strokes my touch-starved skin, plays with my hair. I remind myself – false anthropomorphization – it is impersonal. I should find some sort of comfort there.

xvii#

The goddess Étaín suffers as long as she is trapped in worlds of other’s making. I do not know how to make a world. I write, sometimes absorbed in the distant heart-deep pain, sometimes absorbed in the mundane. I have inhabited, caged and constrained, the worlds of many others, but I do not know how to make my own. Time passes. I am absorbed within. The horses have been cropping and cropping and slowly moving. I am surrounded. I look up. Directly in front of me is the misfit horse, the one apart from the herd. The mare with the gnarled mane, the wounded leg. She is not beautiful. She has come. She is staring at me, only a few feet away. She is not cropping grass. She is not moving on. She is staring at me, ears sometimes forward, sometimes back. I cannot tell if she is calm or threatened and in pain and angry. She stares intensely. I do the only thing I can think of. I sit still. I speak softly. I begin to recite poetry. The Neruda. The Lorca. In Spanish. An impossibly long time goes by. My voice drones, low and soothing. Soothing, impassioned words. I watch her intense eyes, staring and staring. This is not impersonal.

xviii#

The princess Sabella, of course, gets her heart back. Is that a happy ending? She will marry the hero, the unexpected one, clever and Fairie-blessed, who suffered, but captured it. Étaín learns to reach up and out of herself and, at the very least, offer her appreciation to the world within which she is constrained. Could that be making her own world? In a year, Midyir returns and takes her away, and I am still unclear. How does that work? The Chekhov play will end with a rifle report for the one with a heart. Who knows about the reaction of his actress-mother? I suspect it will just add to her notoriety, and thus her audience, and thus, in the end, to her heartless happiness. My audience right now is a wounded wild mare, staring intently at me as I recite sonorous ardent poetry in Spanish. I don’t know if she’s soothed or is going to trample me. But what else is there to do? Only full-heartedly enter this strange world we two have made here – disregarding any confused stares of passersby – persisting, without repentance or shame. What is this? What am I doing? Then. Then she sinks to her knees. Then rests fully on the ground, still gazing at me. Her eyelids droop. She rests. I have, impossibly, given her rest. The others, too. Now I see. At a distance, the horses, on the ground or standing motionless, sagging. Their endless crop, crop, cropping of the grass, their moving over the prairie, pauses for the while. Even the birds are silent. My audience. We have created a temporary world. A world of rest.

xix#

Mary Oliver says that the world, urgently, announces my place in the family of things. It is a strange family, this. Is it impersonal or impossibly personal? How can I remove my heart when it is so deeply rooted in the softness that is so hopelessly me? The horses rest around me, lulled by the voices of long-dead poet-lovers. And me. Lorca, tortured and killed by the crush of Spanish fascism. Neruda, who escaped the Chilean same, and lived on to love and be loved and to gush. I find no pattern here. But I, too, am lulled. What is softness – the decadent ideals, the shameful naiveté – reaches up and out. And perhaps it becomes the torture, yet also becomes the reaching green. It collects the clear-pebbled rain. But, is there meaning? I have no answers. The questions themselves, impossible. The distance and suffering subside into quiet for a while. No happily-ever-after. Still a tangle of confusion. But a moment of pure here, pure now, as clear as the pebbled rain. Softer than any sparkling gemstone. Until I must stand. Until I must go. Gently. Gently. To face others’ worldly needs. When I go, I will look back. I will see the mare, too, has stood and turned to leave. She will also walk away. But for this moment, there is rest. There is wound. There is through and rooted and deep. There is. Irresistible reaching.