Sheila Black
3 poems
**
My Life: A Swipe a Psychedelia a Philadelphia a Flash in the Pan
My brain slept for a long time and was profoundly linked to the past
.....................................like Kennewick [Wo] man who in prehistoric ways knew
...........................what the first neighbor looked like
...............................................the one I remember in 1954—Fanny-- with curly
...........................black hair and a disabled son who was called retarded then in
...........................whispers – her air conditioning window unit which sat within
...........................three or four feet from our window sounded its buzzing watery
...........................vibrating noise moving from low pitch to high pitch and low again
...........................then a kind of mid range blatting sound that some might say was its
...........................neutral
.....................................sang all night long right by our open bedroom window
...........................reminding me of my brother who died fifteen years ago.
Listening at windows listening to the crows listening to the babbling chirping listening to the illuminated night
opening my mouth to speak only silence or silence only if no one is listening.
In the fall Dad always left for several months..............traveling
..........we thought to South America............................(that being his favorite place to disappear)
came home late instead....Christmas Eve after two months of....Mother & all eight of us
and we waited and waited to choose the tree.......................It was a moment
a firmament......................like a small crowd waiting to strip a deer or scale a fish,
all standing....all waiting for Dad to get there so we could put up our tree.
It was a pink and green moment...................................An important foment
an election...........a confection.......................an inaugural ball
a confirmation
Memories are crowds wanting to get out of the concert,
Memories line up then disappear except the intense
or the past tense too many tenses to remember
I will give you the highlights...or just the lights
So many red moments so many blue.
Then like all the golden moments expected of Ozzie and Harriet,
a lost period.............a series of several unreal periods, a few commas.
My brother born three years later curly headed blue-eyed blond, sweet like an angel on earth and then gone thirty-seven years later like concrete— an immovable moment,
an unchangeable moment
In between 1 and 37..............................all that time...all those events
somewhere in there
I became visibly invisible
And in these momentary fields and plays of imagination,
children everywhere between the first three children and the other five,
with their way out West Texas ghost stories,
the lost cowboys out on the range,
winds that whipped tumbleweed
from Tejas to Mexico and then over to California and our favorite,
tarantulas so big and fat when they jump on you and they do jump
people are so scared they die on the spot
yes tarantulas walking by late at night are common.
a mysterious, yellow sun world filled with reverence,
a Western desert hologram.........................Screams of joy and screams of fear,
all the elements found in Shakespeare:
love hate jealousy remorse guilt pride envy greed lust
not much lust....................................unless you count our parents
anxious and wobbly yet insecure expressions of many selves,
identities being made, found, and lost.....competition and human struggle and
melodrama......lots of that
exploration and wandering, climbing and falling,
Our cut bare leather feet filled with glass & stickers. First stitches: 8. Second stitches: 6.
Third Stitches: 3. All saved. Baseball bat hits and large lumps: 2. Falling out of trees:
endless. Older brother saves: once. maybe twice.
Our playground, a "rough road" as we called it......so like life
an entire world on one hill
across the street and over the park
no Grandmothers house we go
the creek called Santa Rita, filled with tadpoles, crawdads,........and sun perch
surrounded by a tall brown grassy park in front of tall brown and beige brick house
behind trees struggling to get ahead
tall brown trees waiting for us every day....some transplanted firs...our personal sentinels
This: a too cute to world with. This: a worlded life.
Cactus clusters defined this landscape always cropping up on the edges of our neat neighborhood— spiny, sharp, tough.
More stickers than you could shake a stick at
In these hot. hot. sun, 108 degree years; the sparkling black asphalt years,
our tar footed tracks years
our Mother’s dusty sheets and wrinkled clothes....our waving clothesline behind the plum
trees, sprinkled with white petals................and the deeply-cracked
big muddy expanse of Lake Nazareth but no redemption...where we jumped
from the bridge as much as we could one summer
when there WAS water and as long as the bridge-jumping fad lasted.
And the never-to-be-seen-again-Lake-Concho dried up blown away, now a neighborhood
addition a suburb so to speak right past a mall.......sitting at the edge of you wouldn't
believe on top of this ancient desiccated bone filled shale-like tributary of nothingness.
It was one bubbling summer dairy queen existence: Found: 1.35 cents. Brian Brain and I
have our first banana splits: 70 cents each. He had a nickel. I had a dollar thirty-five.
Late in 1957 the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. "SUCCESSfully" launched ICBM Intercontinental
Ballistic Missiles. The same brother of the banana splits tossed our pet rabbit around and
around one day and didn't seem to notice it was alive,..................finally got his by one
mean sister
and the "bike ridin' champeen" hitting his head with a tin toy drum
seven times and in the fracas he pulled out a silver and blue boy scout knife,
and I was stabbed in the forehead
but only because I was reading in the vicinity of the knife.
In 1958 5000 US troops landed in Lebanon to maintain order
in Iraq after a pro-Western Lebanese government was ousted. HMMMMM?
Dairy Queen— now there's a romantic dark and cool like a real Texas bar
place for a kids imagination, a photograph negative to remember
one FLASH kids and ice cream
second FLASH Dad and Uncles,
third FLASH dark beer, not root beer,
fourth FLASH, deer heads, and moose, no soda jerks around.
In 1957, there were 414 UFO sightings
reported to the Air Force near Levelland, TX.........They said,
they looked like egg shaped flashing balls of light sometimes bluish green
circling, hovering, and flashing
Occasionally the sweet smell of a knotty pine morning like a crisp cold winter hunting morning smothered in grey wool or brown flannel blankets snuggling and shiver.
Nice
Breaths of air seen in front of each mouth shaped like miniature clouds.
Occasionally the compilation of mesquite cactus deer piss onion
Uncle Fred's onion sandwiches the pungent odors pouring into the pungent
young nostrils and Uncle Franklin’s cigars
forty years later poems.
Finally we all left for St. Louis trek summers driving up the motel cold linoleum the road
to Joplin winding and two-laned..................then the landscape changes
taking on Missouri's green greener world and the
infinite car games I spy Beetles the car not the band
name that road sign
how many miles have we gone now dad
blue car red car green car yellow
rubbing Dad's neck and finally. finally Grandpa’s knees .Grandma’s big warm and soft
Grandma's singing Pop-goes-the-Weasel and their piano's clinking tinkling sound.
Her strange Gaelic vowels and consonants crooning and so real like Ireland was in the living room at the piano singing Erin Go Bragh foreeevvverrrrr
now an overused bowdlerized slogan.......then a TRUTH
spilled from the mouth of a craggy faced round potato-like woman in accents sublime
instead of that simple Weasel song she learned while
coming to AMERICA
building her new life on a street in St. Louis.......Cote Brilliante Ave
a brilliant sign....this leftover original French presence....croissants too in the background
mixed with a strange Irish European descent and even stranger language
the mystery of it all..............the saints hovering over us the Shelalagh stick
that Grandpa shook mightily swearing in Gaelic at us and pointing his stick when we moved or talked too much
the hovering Chinese Buddha figurine hands folded in prayer on the mantel who made Grandpa seem like he was lying
every time he said his Catholic prayers in front of it
and the great joy and ultimate coolness of throwing our Texas horned toad pets with their spiny bodies and head and their eyes spitting blood over the fence at the screwdriver brandishing fist first black children we had ever seen in 1957.
This is not over yet we thought. We didn't know then and we don't know now what it means to be a different color. We already knew different languages
habla espanol in San Angelo meant something else unspoken only whispered
barrera de colores de colores de colores . barrera del color
but difference was in our bones since we were already descended immigrants...migrants ascended already ingrates descended...different in our neighborhood already descended different in our school,
different in the size of our family
and different in our religion .in this. Bible belt world...different in our religion
our origination .our conviction
our pigeon differences were the things that drove still drives our family
and in this peculiar cultural Irish hologram. holgram. whole gram holistic grain
whole grain existence
the fractal universe where we began...the place we landed
West Texas...shaped our multi-facets...our world. in the
radial ways we kept noticing as we looked back at them.
**
Waken Awakening
Shimmer. “Chimera. Cold feet.” Shivering.
a fear that time comes in quickly choking on
the food and gulping down the drink.
Terraphobia: a fear that wide-open land may eat the soles of my feet
forcing me to my knees. Pride: the neck won’t bend.
I avoid the telephone as well as anyone, except the constant ringing in my ears.
Kindness makes me cry. Waves of tears pour out of my neck.
A restless ocean balances the solidity of earth but halls close in with sucking noises.
An imagination looks like fingers waving from a great distance,
finger-painting everything it sees.
The window opens wide enough to see the sky dripping into the water;
two or three thin bands of a pink & orange chemical burn off
light one end of the blue field and give one gleam of hope.
I am turning into shorter and shorter sentences with the advent of my
in the event of my
with the release of m...y
dre
dreams only surface
when I let go.
**
The House Of Atreus
Euphemism the tool function of the PC
wouldn’t look up euphemism
very close to people-pleasing in writing
like Orestes, last man in the House of Atreus,
who tried to avoid Tantalus’s curse passed down
to him and who finally redeemed himself
and his family with communication and surrender.
Why all those murders first though?
Why all the carving and eating of children?
Is God really a gory, whore-mongering, incestuous pedophile?
Is it necessary for the sins of the father to be
visited upon the sons?...murdering slicing....raping
frying relatives. revenge.....today it’s more psycho.....logical.
Date rape wasn’t even spoken about until the eighties
and nineties and even then women were
accused of soliciting the rape with their clothing.
Women murder now.
I could murder someone in my head.
I was at a weekend course in Chicago once
and we were asked to tell a secret that we
had never told anyone;
one woman said she could murder someone;
one man said he liked to dress in women’s
clothing. He was a famous politician
in local government there.
I said I had been date raped,
but I didn’t know it was rape then.
In 1969, it was called promiscuity.
Small towns in Texas and villages on the Aegean Sea
have distinct markers, places where people gather,
like the local bar or the local photography shop
often by the high school among the young and innocent.
The secret lives of bars and photography
shops made Orestes’ family simply modern
with the usual sex, corruption, death, and
redemption if you dig deep enough.
One time a man in San Angelo
wanted to meet the wife of his brother-in-law’s
brother who lived on a ranch, which would have been
convenient for a clandestine meeting because the drive
there was 26 miles from the highway into the land
before you reach the first cattle guard
gate and then you have to go another
10 miles to the second cattle guard.
In the passing fields, bluebonnets and
Indian Paint spread out like carpets, raw yellow
weeds deftly clutching the rough mesquite
while the newly cut, or broken and twisted
branches set in several separated stacks waited,
ready to be loaded for firewood when
the ranch hand came by; although
she often liked to collect the wood herself.
Thyestes after being asked to avenge
the murders of his children
raped his only daughter instead.
Violence against women, going on
for thousands of years, hasn’t ended yet.
Some say it’s slowed down a bit
since they’ve become liberated
which may be another myth
proliferated until the 22nd century
when men will disappear,
just like the guy who left on what he said
was a hunting trip, his bones found years later
way out in a western ranching wilderness
36 miles off the beaten track,
and then we will become a world of
women, although that might be lonely
for the heterosexual population.
But maybe by that time having sex
won’t be necessary like Woody
Allen’s orgasmo machine in Sleeper.
Allen, now there’s a case of life
imitating art. Klytaemnestra and her lover plot
Agamemnon’s death because he killed
one of their daughters while
Mia Farrow accuses Woody
of sleeping with one of their children,
which he did and God knows what with
one of the others. God knows something
or if he did know something
then it must be deeper than our surface
understanding.
Mia, on the other hand, married
Frank Sinatra, briefly, when she was nineteen
so maybe she knew what
Woody was up to after all.
And the legacy of the Farrows,
her parents, anyway, who had a similar
scandalous or at least psychologically
disturbing breeding ground
filled with intrigue and finally suicide,
may have occurred when she was looking,
or maybe that was Jane Fonda and her mother.
They all seem to be a little bit off the center bead.
Drama, passed down through the ages
in interesting myths and stories, those tragic comedies,
Clouds and Frogs certainly lifted my spirits.
Today its hard to tell the difference between
reality and reality
stories colored as they are with
bits of the truth as if there was an actual “is the truth”
really is all there is, as in “it is what it is,”
someone said philosophically one day.
I guess thinking that made the girl lying
on the ground with her pants pulled down
feel better and when God or gods are running
around telling us what to do like Apollo forcing
Orestes to avenge Agamemnon’s death
knowing that he will be driven mad by the Furies
if he kills his mother, then why not
make up your own truth and just say it is God.
I have been wondering for thirty-six years
how I didn’t notice.....in the walk to the park,
the blanket...the tree limb hanging down
over my head....all its leaves sharply outlined
like a black magic marker had traced them,
the night sounds.....crickets and frogs
the flickering lights in the distance...the slow moving clouds
the drinking and the dancing at the bar
the seductive words the powerful words
the hypnotizing words.
I guess Orestes’ identification with his father,
Agamemnon, was the right thing to do
to become a man
but he needed a woman, Athene, to create
balance in his life and make everything right again.
After a year of mental anguish brought on by the Furies,
the goddess, Athene, restored him to sanity
in the first ever......human court
releasing him from the curse on his family.
Curses come in many forms though
and without goddesses and Furies to drive
everyone insane, morality and social mores
do a pretty good job.
Communities have as much power as gods
with young girls. Their mothers ought to
but if mothers don’t communicate
then people in general will. The curse of not knowing,
the curse of suppression, the curse of
religion, the curse of unexplainable differences,
the curse of sang froid in four girls and
a wealth of emotion in one girl;
the curse of beauty and innocence
the curse of stupidity;
these curses pile up over time
passed down from the old country
where hoary old priests say things like
impure...impure...impure
breasts, they mean, uncovered especially,
or those impure legs, too
and sitting next to boys---
also impure. Bring a large telephone book
if you go to a movie with a boy
then you can read it as it separates you from any
intruding body parts, happily serving two functions.
The Greeks didn’t think as much about the impurities,
but rather more about offenses against the gods.
Thyestes' daughter, Pelopia, killed herself when
she found out her father had raped her and that
her son, Aegisthus, was also her brother.
Girls searching for love find it in the oddest places.
Even when they are not searching,
they will find husbands willy or nilly
in passive acceptance of their impurities,
they just have to be virgins first
but even if they lose their virginity,
their husbands will find it for them
and they willy or nilly will get married,
with or without love perpetuating their curses
until sons are born
and the line is carried on and the curse
is passed down. And those sons
may have to make amends for their parents
their grandparents and their great-grandparents
along with the gods who advised them
like Orestes who didn’t want to kill anyone
was saved by Athene, who was just,
and who loved human beings.
**
return to sawbuck 2.3
**
Sheila Black returned to college in 2004 to pursue a Master of Arts in English Literature at the University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma and graduated in 2006. She has been published in the following online journals as well as a few print journals: BigCityLit, Big Bridge, The Texas Observer, Stylus, Midland Review, and she won the Graduate Student Association Poetry Prize in 2005. She teaches composition courses and creative writing as an Adjunct Professor of English at Tulsa Community College and sometimes at the University of Tulsa. She participates in local community poetry readings and organizes them for her students sometimes as well. In February, she participated in a poetry reading at the Living Arts Center in Tulsa at the Valentines Day show whose main themes were poems about love and lust. She also performed in March at the University of Tulsa Graduate Student Conference Poetry Evening.
**
My Life: A Swipe a Psychedelia a Philadelphia a Flash in the Pan
My brain slept for a long time and was profoundly linked to the past
.....................................like Kennewick [Wo] man who in prehistoric ways knew
...........................what the first neighbor looked like
...............................................the one I remember in 1954—Fanny-- with curly
...........................black hair and a disabled son who was called retarded then in
...........................whispers – her air conditioning window unit which sat within
...........................three or four feet from our window sounded its buzzing watery
...........................vibrating noise moving from low pitch to high pitch and low again
...........................then a kind of mid range blatting sound that some might say was its
...........................neutral
.....................................sang all night long right by our open bedroom window
...........................reminding me of my brother who died fifteen years ago.
Listening at windows listening to the crows listening to the babbling chirping listening to the illuminated night
opening my mouth to speak only silence or silence only if no one is listening.
In the fall Dad always left for several months..............traveling
..........we thought to South America............................(that being his favorite place to disappear)
came home late instead....Christmas Eve after two months of....Mother & all eight of us
and we waited and waited to choose the tree.......................It was a moment
a firmament......................like a small crowd waiting to strip a deer or scale a fish,
all standing....all waiting for Dad to get there so we could put up our tree.
It was a pink and green moment...................................An important foment
an election...........a confection.......................an inaugural ball
a confirmation
Memories are crowds wanting to get out of the concert,
Memories line up then disappear except the intense
or the past tense too many tenses to remember
I will give you the highlights...or just the lights
So many red moments so many blue.
Then like all the golden moments expected of Ozzie and Harriet,
a lost period.............a series of several unreal periods, a few commas.
My brother born three years later curly headed blue-eyed blond, sweet like an angel on earth and then gone thirty-seven years later like concrete— an immovable moment,
an unchangeable moment
In between 1 and 37..............................all that time...all those events
somewhere in there
I became visibly invisible
And in these momentary fields and plays of imagination,
children everywhere between the first three children and the other five,
with their way out West Texas ghost stories,
the lost cowboys out on the range,
winds that whipped tumbleweed
from Tejas to Mexico and then over to California and our favorite,
tarantulas so big and fat when they jump on you and they do jump
people are so scared they die on the spot
yes tarantulas walking by late at night are common.
a mysterious, yellow sun world filled with reverence,
a Western desert hologram.........................Screams of joy and screams of fear,
all the elements found in Shakespeare:
love hate jealousy remorse guilt pride envy greed lust
not much lust....................................unless you count our parents
anxious and wobbly yet insecure expressions of many selves,
identities being made, found, and lost.....competition and human struggle and
melodrama......lots of that
exploration and wandering, climbing and falling,
Our cut bare leather feet filled with glass & stickers. First stitches: 8. Second stitches: 6.
Third Stitches: 3. All saved. Baseball bat hits and large lumps: 2. Falling out of trees:
endless. Older brother saves: once. maybe twice.
Our playground, a "rough road" as we called it......so like life
an entire world on one hill
across the street and over the park
no Grandmothers house we go
the creek called Santa Rita, filled with tadpoles, crawdads,........and sun perch
surrounded by a tall brown grassy park in front of tall brown and beige brick house
behind trees struggling to get ahead
tall brown trees waiting for us every day....some transplanted firs...our personal sentinels
This: a too cute to world with. This: a worlded life.
Cactus clusters defined this landscape always cropping up on the edges of our neat neighborhood— spiny, sharp, tough.
More stickers than you could shake a stick at
In these hot. hot. sun, 108 degree years; the sparkling black asphalt years,
our tar footed tracks years
our Mother’s dusty sheets and wrinkled clothes....our waving clothesline behind the plum
trees, sprinkled with white petals................and the deeply-cracked
big muddy expanse of Lake Nazareth but no redemption...where we jumped
from the bridge as much as we could one summer
when there WAS water and as long as the bridge-jumping fad lasted.
And the never-to-be-seen-again-Lake-Concho dried up blown away, now a neighborhood
addition a suburb so to speak right past a mall.......sitting at the edge of you wouldn't
believe on top of this ancient desiccated bone filled shale-like tributary of nothingness.
It was one bubbling summer dairy queen existence: Found: 1.35 cents. Brian Brain and I
have our first banana splits: 70 cents each. He had a nickel. I had a dollar thirty-five.
Late in 1957 the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. "SUCCESSfully" launched ICBM Intercontinental
Ballistic Missiles. The same brother of the banana splits tossed our pet rabbit around and
around one day and didn't seem to notice it was alive,..................finally got his by one
mean sister
and the "bike ridin' champeen" hitting his head with a tin toy drum
seven times and in the fracas he pulled out a silver and blue boy scout knife,
and I was stabbed in the forehead
but only because I was reading in the vicinity of the knife.
In 1958 5000 US troops landed in Lebanon to maintain order
in Iraq after a pro-Western Lebanese government was ousted. HMMMMM?
Dairy Queen— now there's a romantic dark and cool like a real Texas bar
place for a kids imagination, a photograph negative to remember
one FLASH kids and ice cream
second FLASH Dad and Uncles,
third FLASH dark beer, not root beer,
fourth FLASH, deer heads, and moose, no soda jerks around.
In 1957, there were 414 UFO sightings
reported to the Air Force near Levelland, TX.........They said,
they looked like egg shaped flashing balls of light sometimes bluish green
circling, hovering, and flashing
Occasionally the sweet smell of a knotty pine morning like a crisp cold winter hunting morning smothered in grey wool or brown flannel blankets snuggling and shiver.
Nice
Breaths of air seen in front of each mouth shaped like miniature clouds.
Occasionally the compilation of mesquite cactus deer piss onion
Uncle Fred's onion sandwiches the pungent odors pouring into the pungent
young nostrils and Uncle Franklin’s cigars
forty years later poems.
Finally we all left for St. Louis trek summers driving up the motel cold linoleum the road
to Joplin winding and two-laned..................then the landscape changes
taking on Missouri's green greener world and the
infinite car games I spy Beetles the car not the band
name that road sign
how many miles have we gone now dad
blue car red car green car yellow
rubbing Dad's neck and finally. finally Grandpa’s knees .Grandma’s big warm and soft
Grandma's singing Pop-goes-the-Weasel and their piano's clinking tinkling sound.
Her strange Gaelic vowels and consonants crooning and so real like Ireland was in the living room at the piano singing Erin Go Bragh foreeevvverrrrr
now an overused bowdlerized slogan.......then a TRUTH
spilled from the mouth of a craggy faced round potato-like woman in accents sublime
instead of that simple Weasel song she learned while
coming to AMERICA
building her new life on a street in St. Louis.......Cote Brilliante Ave
a brilliant sign....this leftover original French presence....croissants too in the background
mixed with a strange Irish European descent and even stranger language
the mystery of it all..............the saints hovering over us the Shelalagh stick
that Grandpa shook mightily swearing in Gaelic at us and pointing his stick when we moved or talked too much
the hovering Chinese Buddha figurine hands folded in prayer on the mantel who made Grandpa seem like he was lying
every time he said his Catholic prayers in front of it
and the great joy and ultimate coolness of throwing our Texas horned toad pets with their spiny bodies and head and their eyes spitting blood over the fence at the screwdriver brandishing fist first black children we had ever seen in 1957.
This is not over yet we thought. We didn't know then and we don't know now what it means to be a different color. We already knew different languages
habla espanol in San Angelo meant something else unspoken only whispered
barrera de colores de colores de colores . barrera del color
but difference was in our bones since we were already descended immigrants...migrants ascended already ingrates descended...different in our neighborhood already descended different in our school,
different in the size of our family
and different in our religion .in this. Bible belt world...different in our religion
our origination .our conviction
our pigeon differences were the things that drove still drives our family
and in this peculiar cultural Irish hologram. holgram. whole gram holistic grain
whole grain existence
the fractal universe where we began...the place we landed
West Texas...shaped our multi-facets...our world. in the
radial ways we kept noticing as we looked back at them.
**
Waken Awakening
Shimmer. “Chimera. Cold feet.” Shivering.
a fear that time comes in quickly choking on
the food and gulping down the drink.
Terraphobia: a fear that wide-open land may eat the soles of my feet
forcing me to my knees. Pride: the neck won’t bend.
I avoid the telephone as well as anyone, except the constant ringing in my ears.
Kindness makes me cry. Waves of tears pour out of my neck.
A restless ocean balances the solidity of earth but halls close in with sucking noises.
An imagination looks like fingers waving from a great distance,
finger-painting everything it sees.
The window opens wide enough to see the sky dripping into the water;
two or three thin bands of a pink & orange chemical burn off
light one end of the blue field and give one gleam of hope.
I am turning into shorter and shorter sentences with the advent of my
in the event of my
with the release of m...y
dre
dreams only surface
when I let go.
**
The House Of Atreus
Euphemism the tool function of the PC
wouldn’t look up euphemism
very close to people-pleasing in writing
like Orestes, last man in the House of Atreus,
who tried to avoid Tantalus’s curse passed down
to him and who finally redeemed himself
and his family with communication and surrender.
Why all those murders first though?
Why all the carving and eating of children?
Is God really a gory, whore-mongering, incestuous pedophile?
Is it necessary for the sins of the father to be
visited upon the sons?...murdering slicing....raping
frying relatives. revenge.....today it’s more psycho.....logical.
Date rape wasn’t even spoken about until the eighties
and nineties and even then women were
accused of soliciting the rape with their clothing.
Women murder now.
I could murder someone in my head.
I was at a weekend course in Chicago once
and we were asked to tell a secret that we
had never told anyone;
one woman said she could murder someone;
one man said he liked to dress in women’s
clothing. He was a famous politician
in local government there.
I said I had been date raped,
but I didn’t know it was rape then.
In 1969, it was called promiscuity.
Small towns in Texas and villages on the Aegean Sea
have distinct markers, places where people gather,
like the local bar or the local photography shop
often by the high school among the young and innocent.
The secret lives of bars and photography
shops made Orestes’ family simply modern
with the usual sex, corruption, death, and
redemption if you dig deep enough.
One time a man in San Angelo
wanted to meet the wife of his brother-in-law’s
brother who lived on a ranch, which would have been
convenient for a clandestine meeting because the drive
there was 26 miles from the highway into the land
before you reach the first cattle guard
gate and then you have to go another
10 miles to the second cattle guard.
In the passing fields, bluebonnets and
Indian Paint spread out like carpets, raw yellow
weeds deftly clutching the rough mesquite
while the newly cut, or broken and twisted
branches set in several separated stacks waited,
ready to be loaded for firewood when
the ranch hand came by; although
she often liked to collect the wood herself.
Thyestes after being asked to avenge
the murders of his children
raped his only daughter instead.
Violence against women, going on
for thousands of years, hasn’t ended yet.
Some say it’s slowed down a bit
since they’ve become liberated
which may be another myth
proliferated until the 22nd century
when men will disappear,
just like the guy who left on what he said
was a hunting trip, his bones found years later
way out in a western ranching wilderness
36 miles off the beaten track,
and then we will become a world of
women, although that might be lonely
for the heterosexual population.
But maybe by that time having sex
won’t be necessary like Woody
Allen’s orgasmo machine in Sleeper.
Allen, now there’s a case of life
imitating art. Klytaemnestra and her lover plot
Agamemnon’s death because he killed
one of their daughters while
Mia Farrow accuses Woody
of sleeping with one of their children,
which he did and God knows what with
one of the others. God knows something
or if he did know something
then it must be deeper than our surface
understanding.
Mia, on the other hand, married
Frank Sinatra, briefly, when she was nineteen
so maybe she knew what
Woody was up to after all.
And the legacy of the Farrows,
her parents, anyway, who had a similar
scandalous or at least psychologically
disturbing breeding ground
filled with intrigue and finally suicide,
may have occurred when she was looking,
or maybe that was Jane Fonda and her mother.
They all seem to be a little bit off the center bead.
Drama, passed down through the ages
in interesting myths and stories, those tragic comedies,
Clouds and Frogs certainly lifted my spirits.
Today its hard to tell the difference between
reality and reality
stories colored as they are with
bits of the truth as if there was an actual “is the truth”
really is all there is, as in “it is what it is,”
someone said philosophically one day.
I guess thinking that made the girl lying
on the ground with her pants pulled down
feel better and when God or gods are running
around telling us what to do like Apollo forcing
Orestes to avenge Agamemnon’s death
knowing that he will be driven mad by the Furies
if he kills his mother, then why not
make up your own truth and just say it is God.
I have been wondering for thirty-six years
how I didn’t notice.....in the walk to the park,
the blanket...the tree limb hanging down
over my head....all its leaves sharply outlined
like a black magic marker had traced them,
the night sounds.....crickets and frogs
the flickering lights in the distance...the slow moving clouds
the drinking and the dancing at the bar
the seductive words the powerful words
the hypnotizing words.
I guess Orestes’ identification with his father,
Agamemnon, was the right thing to do
to become a man
but he needed a woman, Athene, to create
balance in his life and make everything right again.
After a year of mental anguish brought on by the Furies,
the goddess, Athene, restored him to sanity
in the first ever......human court
releasing him from the curse on his family.
Curses come in many forms though
and without goddesses and Furies to drive
everyone insane, morality and social mores
do a pretty good job.
Communities have as much power as gods
with young girls. Their mothers ought to
but if mothers don’t communicate
then people in general will. The curse of not knowing,
the curse of suppression, the curse of
religion, the curse of unexplainable differences,
the curse of sang froid in four girls and
a wealth of emotion in one girl;
the curse of beauty and innocence
the curse of stupidity;
these curses pile up over time
passed down from the old country
where hoary old priests say things like
impure...impure...impure
breasts, they mean, uncovered especially,
or those impure legs, too
and sitting next to boys---
also impure. Bring a large telephone book
if you go to a movie with a boy
then you can read it as it separates you from any
intruding body parts, happily serving two functions.
The Greeks didn’t think as much about the impurities,
but rather more about offenses against the gods.
Thyestes' daughter, Pelopia, killed herself when
she found out her father had raped her and that
her son, Aegisthus, was also her brother.
Girls searching for love find it in the oddest places.
Even when they are not searching,
they will find husbands willy or nilly
in passive acceptance of their impurities,
they just have to be virgins first
but even if they lose their virginity,
their husbands will find it for them
and they willy or nilly will get married,
with or without love perpetuating their curses
until sons are born
and the line is carried on and the curse
is passed down. And those sons
may have to make amends for their parents
their grandparents and their great-grandparents
along with the gods who advised them
like Orestes who didn’t want to kill anyone
was saved by Athene, who was just,
and who loved human beings.
**
return to sawbuck 2.3
**
Sheila Black returned to college in 2004 to pursue a Master of Arts in English Literature at the University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma and graduated in 2006. She has been published in the following online journals as well as a few print journals: BigCityLit, Big Bridge, The Texas Observer, Stylus, Midland Review, and she won the Graduate Student Association Poetry Prize in 2005. She teaches composition courses and creative writing as an Adjunct Professor of English at Tulsa Community College and sometimes at the University of Tulsa. She participates in local community poetry readings and organizes them for her students sometimes as well. In February, she participated in a poetry reading at the Living Arts Center in Tulsa at the Valentines Day show whose main themes were poems about love and lust. She also performed in March at the University of Tulsa Graduate Student Conference Poetry Evening.
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