after Mary Oliver.
There is an etiquette to this, the rules for the dance, though I don’t know them well. Rules are guideposts. We steer with them in mind. We give life to that which our light touches. It is not enough to profess why rules should be followed. I find it important to consider who makes the rules and why they are qualified to make them. Still, I listen. I let rules speak and I don’t interrupt. In a way, I always knew this would be an endpoint. It was always going to be writing to break things wide open. It might be argued that this is me making my own rules. Hand over heart, swearing to god, If I want honest responses, I should tell the truth, I whisper to myself. I will follow the rules.
When fist meets face, the sound sticks to the walls, reverberates for weeks, nowhere to go. The living room becomes a eulogy to the moment anger paints bruises on flesh. The stairs up, an ode. The second floor landing, a fever dream of every memory he thinks about now, years later, where he could not escape fast enough. Still, escaping is the only way he learned what survival mean. Squirm your way out. Shake and crack under summer sun, skin red from prolonging the inevitable. “Get a switch from the yard. I’m going to beat your ass with it.” To which I say to myself, find the sweet honeysuckle flower over and over and over again, trying to convince myself that there is a chance in his haste, his blind fury, that he forgets. There is a chance that he loses interest, loses his own plot, gets distracted on his way to finding me because I took too long, thrashes at something new, someone new. It was never that easy. Never that simple.
On my worst days, I imagined him hoping that all is forgotten, that on my way to get the very thing that would swell skin, arms and legs and back red hot from lashes that he stored from his father, and his father’s father. It’s not his fault, I’d try to convince myself. Though beautiful things happened between moments where I knew without a shadow of a doubt that if I started crying–if my face resembled anything outside of stone coldness–the lashes would rain down harder.
Now, decades later, the sun rises and sets and my mother is not here to witness. Wild geese crane their necks to bear their own witnessing. It is not enough to simply see. Invisible land mines laid before him cannot be avoided. Harm is not easily erased by beautiful things.
I remember everything. All of it. Every raised hand balled into a fist, “if you don’t get this right, we are going to go in the room and box.” Every silent moment where sudden anger spilled over, voice roaring like chainsaws do right before they cut down what once stood for thousands of years. I wonder to myself often if it is a gift to remember or if remembering keeps me in a moment that cannot easily climb its way out of me forever. I wonder out loud if it is selfish of me to consider my mother not being in pain anymore as not a good enough reason why she should not be here. Dust kicks itself up, some invisible shapeshifter taking aim, ready to morph its way into my eyes, my ears and nose and throat, ready to scratch in me the softness that I inherited from her, each time I sting my way through telling this particular story. My body shakes. I do not want to remember. I do not want to forget.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver is a quintessential poem whose lines tuck themselves under your favorite person’s tongue. She knew what she was doing when she said in one comfortable breath: You do not have to be good. It is the permission that all of us wanted when we were young (and even now) to let go of what other people expect of us and just be who we are today. It moves me to tears when I remember it in the middle of the night. You do not have to be good, I tell myself, over and over and over again until the very last sheep jumps over the fence, over the moon, and I drift off, finally.
You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves. I did not love what I knew I would love because harm disguised as discipline stole from me the experience of just being a kid. Perhaps taking care has always been in my blood, or perhaps it was something learned, something that I was forced to learn as I was surrounded by rage. I assure you: no pre-teen should ever have to worry whether or not their mother is going to be okay. No teenager should ever have to dream of a life different than their own where they were taught to submit to authority no matter what. No person coming of age should have to stand in the corner “until your feet feel like they are a part of the floor” for making mistakes kids make. For learning the way kids learn. All these years later, I am still telling myself that I do not have to be good. That no man can take from me that which is already gone. And let’s be clear about this: it’s always a man, isn’t it? Not all men, but it’s always a man.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on. Each time fist smashed flesh, the world went on. Batter after batter, swinging for the fences, each swing lands like a crash. There are no parachutes on this plane. No miracles on the road north of center. Once, in grad school, I had a fever dream: everything was happy and joyful until it wasn’t. The sky was clear until it couldn’t be, the sun blocked by that same familiar fist blown up in size to fit the shell of a meteor. When the fist connected, I woke, sweat pooling, heart managing to climb through my chest, my breath, a snagged slipknot. I sit up in a sob. It is the sound I’ve always remembered. A deep bruise inflaming tissue, swelling the site. Holy water can’t fix this but we’ll still call it holy. It is hard to love when you are afraid. It is hard to love when you feel hard to love. When I was a boy, I dreamt of places far away from Center Road. I needed not to exist in a world where my mom face could be contorted, where bruising took up more real estate than any amount of love. She, despite a broken down body, had a heart full of spirit, glad to just be here at all. The beaten path was all she knew.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain / are moving across the landscapes, / over the prairies and the deep trees, / the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, / are heading home again. I do not want to go home again. I never knew what was on the other side of the door of that childhood home growing up. Is today going to be a good day? Did we accidentally wake him this morning? Will he be waiting for us when we return? My mother mostly worked night shifts at a restaurant. She would get home at 1:30am and be up again a few hours later to get her kids, all three of us, off to school. I walked to and from the bus stop–a mile there, a mile back–every morning and late afternoon. I knew that if I did not get home early enough, my mom would be off to work again. I prayed for the days she had off. Prayed that those days could be the days where all of her children could sit with her and ask her tough questions like when it rains, do you think that is God crying? or what is your earliest memory of your mom and dad? or where did you get that bruise on your wrist, your arm, your face? We kids, so full of questions, did not get answers, not for all of the years between then and now. Some questions we already had answers to. The bruises, for example. Unanswered prayers. We knew they would be met with dead air. In the end, we settle for unanswered things by resolving to live inside the questions, proof that wrestling with the wind can be a kind of shelter. We need not say anything except I love you and share space, holding each other like the prayer itself, hoping we float with it to a place–together–far away from here.
It can be said that over the years, you learn to speak a different language than those that harm you. If everything you say and do is used against you, it is okay to find the thing that those people cannot understand. We learned to say the things that could not be said out loud. He might hear us. He might go looking. Our shared language between mother and son came in the form of hushed whispers and quiet weeping. Look what he did to us I’d say with my eyes. Look what he always does to us. The years between 14 and now became the physical distance that memories need in order to settle. I always hoped that there would be a day that we could talk about all of it out loud. I hoped that it would not feel so heavy all the time. I hoped we might find ease, that we would become a family that bares it all, leaving out nothing, so as to say, “here I am. Here I am. Right here. I’m not going anywhere. I will stay until the very end.” We couldn’t have known the ending would be so soon. Still, we sang songs out of key, hands trembling every time I’d visit home.
A few years ago, sitting in a car dealership trying to find reliable transportation so she could make it to and from health appointments, I confessed to mom that she has never been a villain in my story. I didn’t plan it. It just… happened. Came right out without even thinking about it. I told her I could never blame her for the things all of us faced living in a home where the “right” thing to do was to shut up and sit down and don’t make a single noise or he would make sure there was no more noise to make. I confessed to her that I wish we could talk about it, the harm. I wish we could unpack it together and tell our stories. It was not the first (or the last) time that she would fall into apology after apology. I never meant to put you in harms way, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Don’t be, I’d tell her. It is not your apology to make. Sitting here now, I can only hope she knew that there wasn’t a single moment she was responsible for that ended in tragedy. Not a single moment that ended where I felt unlovable because of her. I hope she knew. I burn and I hope.
The night before my mother died, I told her that it’s okay to let go. I whispered that her kids would take care of each other. The nurse said that she could still hear us even though she may not show it. By then, metastatic masses had already exercised its way across her body like holy garb, stretching like a prayerful moment. She could open her eyes but could not see. She was not looking at you because she was not looking at all. Her eyes moved from open to closed, she gasped for breath, sucking in as much as her frail body could hold, eyes widening again before leveling off. Every moment felt like it would not end. I squeezed her hand. Maybe she could feel it and know. Maybe like all the years before, we spoke our own language to each other, saying goodbye for the last time. She squeezed my hand back. I leaned in. I told her I loved her and thanked her for being a good mom. I kissed her palm. I prayed to her god without knowing if they can hear me. I just wanted the air to come back, to fill her with a deep sigh of relief and for all of this to slowly melt away like nightmares do when morning comes. I want things that I cannot have.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things.
I first studied Mary Oliver in a college English class. Rules for the Dance. A handbook for learning how to read and write in specific, metered ways. Wild Geese was not a poem that professor would have us read for this class, but I stumbled my way across it in a dimly lit dorm room. It is a poem of fruit-bearing trees, of grace. A stark and gentle reminder that each of us has a place, wild and free. When I first read it, time paused, even if only for a moment, the way only Mary Oliver does. I remembered the fist, my mother’s face bruised for days, the lie we all told so nobody would get in trouble. I remembered that my mother used to say this, too, shall pass. I don’t know if I believe it yet. This, too, has not yet passed. I am still living in the early afternoon hours of May 15. I do not want to remember. I do not want to forget.
Like day becoming night and night finding day, there is an order to this, even if we cannot see it. Each of us, a tiny miracle against all the odds. It is a feat that any of us exist at all. And yet, we are born and already on our way to an ending. Some sooner than we think. We may never know when the end is the end. Between epiphanies, certainty melts away. The soft body of the animal living inside of us loves what it loves and all we have to show for it are geese flocking, winter bellowing forth in the middle of summer, endlessly preparing for the stories not yet told. Every day, she begins with a prayer. She’s on her knees repenting for fake sins, insisting that it is all her fault, that it has always been her fault. At night, I hear it. The indelible, agonizing sound of a man attempting with brute force to break in her the endless spirit, missing it entirely, and settling for making shapes on top of that same bruise I cannot seem to forget.
-rfw
Author’s note: if you read this and are wondering if these fragments of stories are about you, know that, like my mother, it is not my intent for harm to find you. It’s just that actions have consequences. Telling these stories with honesty is the very least thing I can do to honor her. Not your god nor any of mine are creators of unexercised forgiveness. If these stories are not reflective of the cadence and the light you want them to be told–if you thought the stories died when she did–please know it is no longer up to you. The hand of the harmful does not get to run these stories through the most flowery filters. When I was a child, I spake like an adult. It is time for you, too, to put aside childish things. Only then will forgiveness find you, your creator or mine. Only then will you be free.
R. Francis Williford 
Leave a comment