Darkwood of Error
Begun in 2003 and completed in 2010, Darkwood of Error is a book-length poetic sequence that quietly challenges the authority of the controlling religious and social structures of our world, suggesting that tolerance, born of open dialogue, befits us more than dominance. It is a text that speaks richly about the difficulties women face and have faced historically.
Eve has been banished from Paradise to the endtimes because she swallowed, not the apple, but forbidden angel words. She wants to speak but can’t. A peculiar sort, the quite-quite, the half-half, Eve falls in love with the Archangel, with men, with women, with hips, but nothing works: not pink tassels, not roses, not sugar daddies. She becomes a bar-tender in a strip club, moves to mountain caves, and spends time wandering in war-zones, burying the dead, and then, finally, at the end, speaks.
The complete work allows various philosophical, poetic, and art historical foundations to move as echoic waves against the deeply rooted western cosmogonical narrative of Eve, Paradise, and angels, and the result is an intersection of eastern and western philosophy that reveals connection rather than separation. What follows are various poems that have been excised published independently.
[Feet like Rivers: watercolor/gouache Tia Ballantine 2007]
I wish to thank the editors of these fine journals for their continuing support of my work. I am forever grateful for the kindness of family and friends who have provided me shelter and good cheer while I wrote the poems and then edited the book.
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Published: Living Water 10 (2005).
In the beginning, all dark was banished
by a voice singing small: let there be light.
The voice sang land into being – and night.
The voice rolled fruits behind teeth and polished
up the moon. The voice spoke words that vanished
into damp black earth, still unapparent.
(Some might call it stone.) The voice had talent,
an odd ability to revise mist
as wild civility, as parable,
as pain. When singing only consonants,
the voice spoke feet like rivers, skin like dance,
sky hands with fingers that clawed terrible
chasms into mud and formed two creatures.
Called to the first, commanded him: leave her.
When the voice finds body, it’s as blue light –
winged and prismatic, unconcerned with touch
or density, disturbed by nothing but
an intensity of exchange: the sight
of Adam with hands on Eve, hips untied.
When hands close circles, odoriferous wings
beat cold air to fume, call mermaids to sing
(the half-half, the quite-quite, oh so sublime,
so free) and when womb dark translucency
has shrunk to words, the voice moves circumference,
climbs the wordless, settles into distance.
Left behind, the Archangel stamps his feet.
Eyes open valleys. Stones breathe, and cliffs
step out. Eve feels her heart give way to mist.
The mist spins out to gold, then falls to song.
Eve’s glad her heart’s not stone, but Adam fears
what he can’t see. He wants stone valves set to keep
the heat below. Eve holds her hands to fog
until her skin runs with rain. She wraps clouds
about her head while Adam stamps mud flat.
He makes noise with teeth and lips. Eve backs up
to color. Dodging the building pressure,
she leans on green and feels her mouth turn red.
When she fits her hips to earth, Adam’s eyes
turn her, but before his hands can touch her,
the sky grows wings. Soon, the muddy ground crowds
with angels, stomping and swearing. They spit
light, use hands to draw transparent circles.
Ankle deep in earth, Adam moves his tongue fast.
When his voice sounds rivers and nights that end
as waves, words rain beaches to seas edged white
with the spume of birth. Eve’s mouth stays shut,
but she opens her arms. Words like frogs’ eggs
bounce against her skin, hover close as clouds.
When she touches them, they bloom. Vowels flood
her toes with color. After the voice speaks
angels, what happens? Adam just listens
like any decent schizophrenic might,
but alarmed by angelic talking light,
Eve stiffens, slips stones beneath folds of skin.
Adam answers the disembodied voice.
Eve puts her ear to earth; she likes the noise.
No one’s image: these creatures pulled from mud.
(when the voice speaks, it’s not as flesh and blood)
Locked down by skin and bone, Eve enjoys touch,
but terrified, Adam wants absence back.
‘Nothing’ won’t survive presence; so, he stacks
the words the angels speak as pyramids,
lays traps for stars. Blood rushes to his head.
He tastes muscle, breath, finds his tongue. Adam craves
absence, but he’ll settle for reorganizing
the solid things of earth. Eve can’t agree.
Order disturbs her hearing birds and bees.
After Adam takes to sermonizing,
Eve grows annoyed and motions to angels
to restore the void. They shoot her daggers.
Somehow Eve senses that the Archangel wants
her gone, so she takes a walk past crisped brooks
where roses tangle with privets on banks
arranged with mantled vines. Adam’s voice haunts
her, settles nights as ocean tides. She wants
him to talk to her, but he finds angels
more engaging. This distance spells danger,
but she can’t tell him that. What Adam wants,
Adam gets. Down by the spring, water spills
to a pool where she sees her face swept free
of clouds. She touches image, tries to speak,
moves her tongue against her teeth. Her mouth fills
with perfumed air that tastes like unripe fruit,
dry like stone. She breathes out, but finds no words.
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Published: Queer Poetry 5 (2005).
This is not her paradise, but she’s glad
of that. Sun goes, night makes holes of brick walls
defaced by neon. When she touches skin, all
names rise past her eyes. Red sings blue to mad.
She no longer needs angels or Adam
to tell her things. “Traffic,” flame says. “City,”
stone explains. Every leaf on every tree
sings names for every thing: strange forbidden
memories mapped by rain. Long after midnight,
she walks empty, listens. Sudden language
seems the norm. Tangled sound invites passage
to rooms trapped behind walls where neon light
speaks crowds. The crazy overlap of words
attracts her. Speaking, she thinks, might just work.
* * *
After the music stops, she still hears horns,
the sound of toes tapping on the universe:
Drum Boogie: yeah, it’s a killer. What’s worse
than a world without jazz? Eve looks around,
sees masks with shells for eyes. She’s going down
fast, won’t come up again real soon, but first
some words for G O D: eating those words was worth
real money. First bite: lightning strike. She found
space inside that bite: color, hollow bones
stained dark blue, echoes of murderous thunder.
Whenever she spoke, he crept inside her.
She tastes footprints on her tongue. If she shouts,
ashes trap the sun. And if she swallows:
her heart explodes the silence down below.
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Published: Hawai`i Pacific Review 20 (2006): 28.
“It’s the storm,” the woman says. “It’s the storm,”
Eve repeats. “Lie down, lie down and sleep.”
“I will,” the woman says. “I can’t,” says Eve
and touches woman skin. She feels alarmed.
As Eve, she’s unattached, but as woman,
she lives in strange confusion. If she sleeps,
the dark speaks time. Eve hears voices bleeding
universes. ‘Woman’ hears only words
broken from spines, scratched on skin as history.
Eve doesn’t know quite what to make of it.
She’s both cast of mud and attached to blood
and bone. Not storm but electricity.
Eve stops speaking. Now, when she breathes the rain,
she tastes all the angels left at the gate.
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Published: Queer Poetry 5 (2005).
What Eve recalls of that day: a white bear
and a pregnant woman in the same room
with a map of the mind. True, she assumes
green walls meant something. Without windows there
is no way out (or in for that matter)
but she’s not trapped by walls. Bodies, she says,
are real when minds are unmasked. Near her face,
angels sang songs that made her sound sadder.
Black bears kept perfect time with silver spoons –
now, she's locked to a voice she cannot own.
When color ends, Eve knows she’s left alone.
She counts rows of corpses, comets exhumed
from painted skies. No one (except you) knows
she died after giving birth to roses.
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Published: Snakeskin 88 (March 2003).
EVE AND THE ARCHANGEL IN PARADISE
All day without knowing, the woman dreams
him, between Flaubert, Cezanne and flat turns
of cars and yellowed torsos, then confirms
by neon what she missed. It seems extreme
this loneliness. She waits for him to leave,
rubs her thumb past eyes, feels the press of arms
like liquid spilled across her breast. No harm.
She sleeps, naked and alone, wakes to thieves
stealing cars below. She counts six red birds
perched atop a chain-link fence, then outlines
with her finger the black freighter, anchored
beyond the breakers. She wants to tell him
of color and fences. Instead, she folds
red silk squares, stacks apples in wooden bowls.
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Published: Five Fingers Review: Uncanny Love (September 2005): 150.
EVE’S DREAM
After that business with the serpent, Eve
discovers joy by sleeping near portraits
of creatures with fur and claws. One Thursday,
she sleeps near a painter with fur-trimmed sleeves:
he stands firm, mouth aligned with disbelief.
The painting’s old, Eve older still, but fit
for dreams. She dreams of clotted milk and stale
bread, Vermeer’s uneven heat locked beneath
flames on charts of beachless coasts, dry light tacked
to corners, scrawled dark blue. She wakes and sees
painted eyes, signatures. She’s undeceived,
touches first her leg, then her lower back –
feels pressure, muscle, blood. All the same
she runs her finger on the portrait’s frame.
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Published: Queer Poetry 5 (2005).
HUNGER
Eve believes he’s the best looking man she
has ever seen, even when he keeps his
glasses on (in the midst of it all) she
discovers she’s pleased (in spite of all this).
She breathes him. He winds his arms around his
lover’s neck, sighs, whispers songs in his ear.
(Angels are like that) She thinks she sees his
eyes flash red to green. Boom. He disappears.
(Angels are like that) She counts cockroaches
dodges latter rain, watches stars confess
to lies. Astounded by her loneliness
she turns the TV off. Moonlight touches
cold edges on her bed. She falls asleep
reading Takuboku: POEMS TO EAT.
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Published: The Red Wheelbarrow 12 (2006): 24.
At 8 a.m., sea winds funnel gold flags
into blue squares between buildings and far
distance: Blue black sky still attached to stars.
Eve dreams more sirens, ripping bombers wracked
to brick. Wings are gone. Orange trees cut to black,
and jasmine’s ringed by flames that burn the shed -
Perfumed smoke settles thick about the dead.
At five, a woman walks by, begging rags.
She wraps what’s left of bones and flesh. At six,
she’ll walk upriver past oil refineries
to trees with loose earth and stones, then bury
rag-wrapped bundles, sing as the Phoenix sings.
When planes return, she’ll open mouths, close eyes,
keep her hands pressed firmly to breasts and thighs.
* * *
When noise rises to such a steady pitch,
Eve’s bones sound like razor blades. Then, she needs
to rest. She can’t. Her body’s trapped by years,
confused by angels (naked ghosts) back-lit
by flames of burning buildings. If she sits
with knees tucked to her chest, she dreams skies clear.
She can’t. Watching explosions wrap yew trees
with butterfly wings and leaves, she forfeits
paradise, spits out battered angel wings
then feels her skin grow cold. Below, the street
trembles. A beggar with fire at his feet
looks up amazed. All is changed (undying)
love remains. A tiny green bird with framed
eyes perches on the fence and sings the rain.
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Published: Poets Against the War. Sam Hamill, ed. New York: Nation Books, 2003. pp. 29-30.
DESTINY IS MEMORY
After bombs remove oil-stained pavement, bricks,
and what’s left of the garden wall, Eve finds
a shoelace and three plastic cups designed
to look like Mickey Mouse. Under thick black
ash, a patch of blue. In for the long haul –
he’d say, shoulder pressed to hers, hands resting
on her thigh, breath collapsed. They watched western
skies go gray. Now, out of clouds, books fall:
Complete Milton lands near The Silent Clowns.
Shakespeare breaks its spine against the carcass
of the kitchen sink. Pages flutter past
flame . . . kin with ken and kind with kind confound
disorder, horror, fear, and mutiny.
A fire burns the last remaining tree.
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Published: The Red Wheelbarrow 12 (2006): 24.
Months later after battles end, Eve knows
her landscape’s changed. Her mind has moved aside
to give her heart some space. She feels disguised.
Reaching out, she pulls channels of air close
beside her, waits as night pressures explode
oceans of pin-prick stars, make masks from tides
of sound. She lifts one gloved hand past her eyes
then stops, allows her arms to drop. She’s cold.
Beneath the highway overpass, a man
draws pictures of stick figures, crawling out
of unexplained squares – with hands and feet bound
and heads round like stones. Eve watches his hand
move in slender arcs, imagines dances
with the moon leading and dawn enchanted.
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Published: Snakeskin 88 (March 2003).
WHAT IS DECENT
The woman in the white cotton wrapper
pours herself a cup of jasmine tea, tries
to cut a slice of bread. Outside night sky,
a blue neon star newly placed traps her
into thinking about birth: warm water
that reeks of paralysis and a revised
tale of past history. Locked on either side
of the high-rise star mount, red light markers
keep planes from crashing into Bethlehem.
She’s in love with a man who loves a man
who told him good-bye. She holds her hand
flat to sea wind, rubs thumbs along the rim
of her tea cup – translucent bone china
cracked by the last earthquake inside her.
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Published: Queer Poetry 5 (2005).
Exiled from her body, Eve sits apart
and watches women with hands like water
turn wide hips against the wind. She suffers
a loneliness that builds as hips move hearts
and eyes stay tunneled away from hers. A hard
distance, this absence. These last years taught her
that anguish makes a lousy instructor.
She’s learned little from sorrow. If she starts
again, she’ll start blind. When the archangel
returns with flowers, finally takes her hand,
it’s too late. Earth opens holes in dry land,
ciphers wider than hips, where she might fall.
Your face would put out Jesus, the poet
said. More than faces get erased, she knows.
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Published: War, Literature and the Arts 2009
Say your prayers: in passing, on beaches,
on freighters anchored beyond breakers.
The man with the gun is apt to forget
those sounds that made him mad. Two male finches
prepare a shelter inside a shelter
as apology from fools who think she
has nothing more to say. She drops between
whispers, sews sequins to ribs as filters,
thinks that fantasy might be worth the hype
but she missed the flash: clear blue jade, Hong Kong,
and injured questions sounding more wrong
than right. There are no answers, just searchlights
steeling lava cliffs. To survive, she falls
silent. She no longer feels maternal.
