Opaque
Her mother pried,
her father harped and criticized,
the priests undressed her soul.
To outwit them, she became opaque.
Her curtained eyes gave off no luster.
At concealment she became a master.
Flab hushed the language of the body
and kept her essence sealed.
Her body bloated but her voice grew small.
She sugared it with nicety.
She squashed all authenticity.
No blushes. No tears.
Silent laughter, a covered mouth.
See how she sits with her feet tucked under her.
Most hours of the day, she sits.
Her hands she keeps folded whether she is praying or not.
It is like being manacled.
No one asks about plans or interests.
Ask her. She will say "Anesthetist."
Unconsciousness! This is her destiny--
in sterile robes, to usher the sick to Morpheus.
She will be ready. In the methods
of stupor, she will be wise.
She is apprenticing even as she sits before us:
corpse-still, crypt-quiet, with unlit eyes.
I would praise what saves us.
Through assaults and shamings, what saves us.
In ridicule, and violation.
A boy is mocked. It is the custom here--
the body all wrong or the speech peculiar.
He endures. What saves him?
A girl is slapped in front of others.
Look: the mark is on her, indelible.
She moves on. What saves her?
Not her parents, locked in their mutual blame,
and no monsignor saves her.
School--odious echoes and memorization,
coercive, diminishing, dull-eyed, robotic and rote.
Still many learn. What saves them?
Home--constant invasions.
Enemas, rectal thermometers,
fault-finding, prying, disgrace.
No escape, yet the child is saved.
I praise what saves her.
I praise what sparks the flint of her secret hope--
small spark.
Where terrors would infiltrate--
small spark.
Among the desolate and the injured--
small spark.
Next to an outhouse in a weedy park
in the despairing shade, in the rubble,
the lady's slipper dangles, cepes drip,
green jack tips in a green pulpit.
A freak of nature--
that was our first impression
of those eerie critters
flying double in the sweaty air,
locked at the loins,
swarming around the sun-struck hotel pool.
Our love was new in those days
and our loss was new.
Living together had taught us
the limits of ecstasy.
Abortion had tutored us in ecstasy's price.
We'd come to Florida
for the absolution of its nodding fronds,
for the benediction of its tropic incense.
We had not expected gospel from the insects!
But the gloria of love bugs
sounded everywhere.
Drivers screened their engines
against their evangelizing clog.
A decade later, we return.
Rapt in our lounge chairs,
toweling our slackening girth,
we smile as a young couple
swipes at love bugs by the eternal pool.
O Siamese fliers, your sideshow captivates,
you cleave and yet you soar!
Emblems of young love's incessant coupling
and long love's abiding clasp,
someday may you still be news,
cruising by our drowsy heads,
lighting on our weathered wrists,
lighting on the weathered wrists
of all the ancient couples
lying double in the sweaty air
in the final quantum of our lives
in buggy Florida.
--Kate Bernadette Benedict
CONTENTS