Marriage’s Lineage of Imagery and The Poetry of Motherhood

I wrote this post last year, but due to the surreal anguish and ongoing questions (would we be ok? would we be reunited?) I waited. In synchronous harmony, I am preparing to teach Poetry of Motherhood again, but this time, selecting poems from the sun-filled home I inhabit with my husband.

When my husband-to-be flew out to Iowa City to woo me thirteen years ago with all the muscled vigor of a grown man—certainly no longer looking anything like the freckled kid I remembered from sixth grade—and asked me to marry him, his eye was caught by an image on my shelf of Guinevere knighting Lancelot (artwork by Edmund Blair Leighton). That, he proclaimed, should be our theme. 

So we hired a dress-maker; she skillfully replicated the long draping sleeves of Guinevere’s gown, sketched out and sewed to red pigskin the black griffin-like bird of Lancelot’s heraldry to my husband’s tunic. I remember sort of glossing over the metaphor of the entangled love triangle between Guinevere and Lancelot and Arthur, choosing to focus on the parallel spiritual solace Guin and Lance may have found in the later years of their acquaintance.

Our wedding guests arrived adorned in period costume. We hired a harpist who by chance could also fulfill my husband’s request for closing processional by bagpipe; under the canopy of redwoods, we married in a stone amphitheater to the low sweet trill of a hermit thrush. We filled our years with children and jobs and the stresses of our economic times, which lead to my husband taking a second job in a city a flight’s distance from us.

 After two years of the inevitable strain our situation placed on our marriage we found ourselves facing a crisis of trust. I feared irreparable damage. Wriggling under the clarifying purification pain provides, I farmed out my three children and stayed with my aunt in an attempt to gain perspective. Simultaneously, I happened to be on the hunt for poems to use in my Poetry of Motherhood class, grateful for the distraction work lent from the psychic sorting obsessing both heart and head. Tea in hand, from across the room, I spotted the pale green spine of a book titled, “Ireland in Poetry.”

When I slid the book free, I found two familiar figures gracing the cover. In slightly different costume (her dress, blue--not white, his head, covered in chain mail--not bared), but so close to the image we’d used on our wedding invitation, I felt as if the figures were speaking directly to me: All is not lost. But you are, for now, turned away from one another. What relief—I could acceptance our distance. And take comfort in the image of gripped dress sleeve linking the forlorn lovers. Later that night, a poet friend of mine said: Why don’t you advise your husband to forgive himself, and you, do the same: forgive yourself. She was hinting at two equally important halves of forgiveness: forgiving the other person matters little if self-blame runs riot in the background of one's inner monologue.

While my husband and I still had hours of emotional thicket to clear, both the image and the suggestions from my friend (which I voiced to my husband) seemed solid reminders of possible redemption. Another friend chimed in with: The only way through perceived betrayal is through…through the physical grip on the body, through the triggered childhood griefs that attach likes boxcars to the engine of one’s particular train. At least the caboose, vibrant red, has room for two to stand viewing side by side the ground crossed to get here, retreating, retreating.

Notes and further reading:

Book cover: Ireland in Poetry, Edited by Charles Sullivan. Cover image, "The Meeting on the Turret Stairs," by Sir Frederick Burton, 1864. Watercolor on paper. The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

A beautiful collection of poems; for Poetry of Motherhood, I chose for my students, the poem Cliona, by Catherine Twomey, a mother daughter poem graced by the opening lines , "You are letting her go / from you slowly / so gently she hardly / knows."

A plea for compassion for new fathers: Notecard to a Nursing Mother: Let The Husband Be Where He Is (a follow-up to Postcard to a Nursing Mother: Be Where You Are) at Mother Writer Mentor, where I'll be teaching Poetry of Motherhood.

Hope you'll join me for Poetry of Motherhood (April 22). Check out this video I made last year with my daughter's help out on our back deck in the redwoods, "Introduction to Poetry of Motherhood" for a better idea of our class. Also know we aren't strictly in the business of writing poetry. We write to prompts and while poetry is welcome, it isn't required. We had a great time last year.

For a look at the quandaries and intricacies of blogging about the personal and traversing the public/private line, see an interview Edith O'Nuallain (yes, of Ireland) conducted with me earlier this month (posted in two installments): On the Art and Craft of Transformative Blogging and Part 2.


 

The Three Percent Girl: The Chrysalis and the Coffin

artwork by Jaime Zollars

In its first moments out of the chrysalis, the butterfly voids a drop of excreta that has been accumulating during pupation.  This drop is frequently red and sometimes voided during first flight….A shower of butterflies may produce a shower of blood. The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation by Marion Woodman

 I’ve missed blogging from my heart. I’ve been quiet, observing, waiting until I could say what I need to say with equanimity, taking the advice I give my women blogging students.

 And so, here goes. I’m recovering recently from marital tension (particulars best left undisclosed, but entirely understandable after two, going on three years of two-city living). And so, my body has been the 3% host of my presence, with 97% of my awareness drifting in search of viable ground in an attempt to anchor my family again to the homestead where I try to restore the joint heart of the entity my husband and I created thirteen years ago when we said I do.

I do wonder what happens next. I do wonder why I’m at this juncture. Except it must be exactly where I need to be to grow, even if arriving at first flight involves the red rain Woodman refers to in the quote above. You can focus on the rain, or you can focus on the view from above, the wet, so newly unfurled wings.

But more likely, I need to position myself in the middle, neither observing the wings from an aerial perspective nor observing the fallout, but resting calmly, blindly, in the long black root of the thorax, where I do nothing but sense where wings begin and the rush of air on the downbeat and the up.

I see women’s fragility everywhere I go. In the locker room at the gym, a beautiful graying blonde in her sixties shyly tells me she loves my green dress, the thin black sandals I’m wearing. She used to wear sandals, she says. “But I can’t wear them, now,” she confides… “you know, varicose veins…” I watch her from the mirror where I’m Nefertiti-ing my eyes so I exist a little more, eye-liner for the self-esteem, her pale blue eyes darting away from mine.  On my way out I touch her shoulder, say to her, “You enjoy those strong legs of yours.” She laughs, and I hope she thinks about all the places they’ve carried her.

A female poet friend of mine, in response to my confusion, suggests burying something or a version of someone (metaphorically, of course) in response, to plant something new, to start over in order to restore trust. Her words drive me down to my writing cabin, where I stand in front of a piece of artwork my brother gave me three years ago by Jaime Zollars.

It used to hang in my bedroom, until a friend said to me, “I would never hang that image where I sleep.” I suppose for its graphic underworld content, how it might invite one’s dreamer to soak in the image, lead one into strange forests. But I am in a strange forest, and I find the image comforting.

I had some assumptions backwards when I first saw it, a little afraid, I was, just like my friend: why the red coffin beneath the little girl, the pale pink flower on the earth’s surface losing a petal in the wind, why does the child float innocently towards the flower, totally unaware that mere yards beneath her bare feet, the white spider of rootlets siphon a shade of pink from the coffin’s red for each pale petal above.

This time, I don’t fear some force swallowing the girl child from beneath, but marvel instead how the umbilical root cord releases her out of the blood coffin to the sky, ever a flower, primally, eternally in bloom, meeting a mirror image of herself on the earth’s surface.

There’s little left to do for now. Wait it out. Observe the heart mending. No seeing yet where the path leads from here. I can walk it alone but I would rather not. But is that either/or opposition accurate anymore, or useful? Time to grow up, again. Differentiate, but not fear it means the end, signals instead a beginning.

Which, in the course of a healthy marriage, I imagine you do—differentiate, take stock, take responsibility for power you may have relinquished, revisit the ground rules--over and over again. When you are both willing to grow.

 Hello underworld, hello fairytale perfectly suited to us both in this marriage. Classical music, to and from, everywhere I drive--the silver serenade of violins--traces the tiny fractures where adrenaline courses. I sleep with curtains open, the slight night wind pushing aside the tree branches just enough to give me a trio of stars, dual physical and astral anchor points, destinations from which I draw strength.

 Further Reading/Image Hunting:

The talent of Jaime Zollars moves me across selves, if that makes sense—the images, for me, bypass the rational, right to the soul, and accurately depict an array of emotional states we’ve inhabited as human beings, are inhabiting, fear inhabiting, love inhabiting, wish we could shift, and/or wish we could more fully inhabit. Whimsical and archetypal (fairytale meets totem meets high desert meets inner city), settings are often crowned with childlike folk, fragile but sturdy, the promise of resilience barely masked by their beautiful and deceptively innocent faces. See more of Jaime's work: Jaime Zollars.