What does it feel like?

Plunging onto sunlit cold water

Green parrots fillimg foreign disiduous trees with their unending squarl

You’d never love a woman … I think as I thaw my hands on the Auger

There’s a horse on my grandmother’s mountain

If you let him, he’ll turn you feral

The thrashing of his incessant lathering and earnest beat of heavy hooves

When I look at you and see that same yearning for muscular motion, the tinder of musk in beckoning air

To break you open

Where the fight against ourselves is an insate red nerve

blooming ragged at night

He can harness your urge and capture the perversity of four flung desires

By the roughshod step of his weight and how

Turning against you he is a metal to your alchemical veins

No. You’d not be a woman I could translate into rain …

Your poise is for the male gaze, the ballerina turned by key, in spectacle

As you age I find myself liking more

The softening of your ferocity, how you became tired of competing and told him

Love me as I am or snuff yourself out with the pinch of two thumbs

I have no time for men who don’t know how to support a real woman

That day I saw you running wild eyed along the river

Your usual poise lost in the gathering of fear

It was the first time you’d tried to imagine yourself alone

Waking up in cold sheets no warmth between your legs to bequeath his appetite of you

I wanted to take you in then. Breathe your pain through me like sage and let you fall into my solace

Your beauty grows ever redolent with the passing of time, for every grey hair you lament, I find another cause to desire

I did not embrace you on that day. You thought me cold and unfeeling. Perhaps you’d known all along

And if you’d had the guts you might have said; well what are you waiting for? Take me, here’s your chance at last

Though both of us were too aware what words like that could do …

Flung to earth like admonishments and flashbangs
Flickering out, impotent fireworks without reliable fuse

For life is never the fantasy

And you were the fantasy

So I returned you, an unopened valentine

Red cheeked and hurting in vain ways, to run backward

Into your kitchen, through the hall, up the stairs

Where he waited. Unable anymore than you. To remove those entwined vines

And seeing you, the girl of you, still thick on your face, how your dancers body stood light and timorous in the doorway

Gathered you in his arms the way you needed, with the strength of a man

While my strength lay in knowing

Some love is but a day long, a life time of moments, cut out paper exposed to the elements, unable to withstand

The resounding silence of all that is unsaid

(an imaginary story of Rachel Carson’s lifelong love for her neighbor).

26 Replies to “Rachel”

  1. Yes to this:

    “The softening of your ferocity, how you became tired of competing and told him

    Love me as I am or snuff yourself out with the pinch of two thumbs

    I have no time for men who don’t know how to support a real woman”

    I love this, Candice! What a creative adventure!

  2. Oh, yes. It’s been many years, but one of those that changes how one sees the world. In a talk he gave in the early 70s, Gregory Bateson commented, rather unhappily, on how it took ten years from the publication for governments to begin to take action to ban DDT, the necessity of which she made so clear and urgent.

  3. Indeed. The ability to love intensely and yet put boundaries on its expression and action is a special kind of integrity and respect for the other and oneself.

  4. We have several religious traditions that oppose access to any form of birth control (the more souls for God the better, no matter how poor or hungry), and an economic theory of infinite growth, and nation states that see more population as more power. Thomas Malthus issued the warning in 1798 that population would eventually outrun resources. People have been looking for a way to prove him wrong ever since.

  5. Sigh. This is one of the issues I have with Mormons and The Catholique Church and Islam because they all continue to talk of us ‘seeding the earth’ with children with no idea of the consequence. How can they not see the damage this does? I don’t understand. I really don’t.

  6. Ideology and theology have a remarkable way of blinding people to any course but more of the same. Part of it is in the idea that this life is a “vale of tears” and a test for the one to follow. I can’t buy the idea that we are born to suffer. Even though some pain is unavoidable, much is avoidable or ameliorate-able with wisdom and care.

  7. Yes. I will be interested in what you think of my analysis of Candace Owens as she is controversial to say the least. I try to be objective and use critical thinking but more and more I am shut down and told I am a Republican. I’m not. I am an Independent who values being objective – which gets me into hot water 😉 I would say we are treading a thin line in terms of what we ‘sanction’ and what we say is worthy of vilifying. probably it needs to be fairer.

  8. Where is that analysis of Owens? It’s not ringing a bell at the moment.

    Trying to find a middle path has its hazards. I remember getting in a News Group back in the days before the internet about “men’s issues” and attempting to clarify what two camps, one saying fathers should have veto power over abortions, and the other not, were really arguing about. I got flamed by both sides in the “If you don’t agree with us completely, then you agree with them completely.” mode.

    In the sanctioning and vilifying department, people seem to pick out something and judge the speaker on that without considering it in the context of that person’s other statements and their lived experience. Fairness is hard to come by when that happens.

  9. EXACTLY if you don’t agree completely you are somehow a traitor but some issues DO have middle ground! Most really. I try to be there when I can because otherwise I’m just an extremist who is not listening. I couldn’t agree with you more

  10. I remember the televised debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal. They were lively, sometimes fierce, and rarely uncivil battles of wits between two serious intellectuals at opposite ends of the political spectrum, not politicians, both masters of critical thinking and unafraid of challenge. They seemed to enjoy it, at least as good mental exercise. That wouldn’t happen on TV now. Of course, it was happening at a time when (I think it was) Playhouse 90 could do productions on network TV of “Waiting For Godot” and “No Exit”.

  11. Right? It wouldn’t happen now because now you have to AGREE and if you do not AGREE you are CONDEMNED EVEN MORE and there is no room for debate (true debate) and it’s very one sided oftentimes. Sad because without critical thinking there is really NO thinking. How things have changed.

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