It is impossible to watch leaves fall to the ground, crudely or exquisitely, depending on my mood, without remembering my father’s broad tall frame doing the same, beginning to grow back, shrink down into something skeletal at this same time of year thirteen years ago.
Last week, I sat at the bar of a café and tried to finish the last chapter of Hold Still and came upon Sally Mann’s Body Farm photos, carcasses unabashedly decomposing buck naked against the earth. I closed the book abruptly so as not to disturb the patrons beside me at the café, seemingly on vacation, happily sipping their cheery cappuccinos with perfectly foamed leaves and hearts etched into the rich brown brew.
While attending the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, under the tutelage of Bhanu Kapil, I began studying the body and anatomy as part of a book of poems about the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For research purposes, I went to a public screening of Stan Brakhage’s The Art of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, a film which documents autopsies, to more intimately know the boundaries, textures and depths of the body.
After three days of labor and three hours of trying to push my son out of my body, my midwife asked my husband if he had heard about the bombing at the Boston Marathon. She knew his mother would be traveling from Boston for the birth and just saw the news on the t.v. screen, in the waiting room, while grabbing a cup of coffee. I lay there, on my back, focused, staring ahead as if into a void, as if I didn’t hear what she said, due to my commitment to let go and not engage in worldly matters, while simultaneously wishing silently to myself that a massive attack on human beings wasn’t brought up while trying with every muscle of my body to release a new life, full of flesh and blood and vitality, into the world; wishing I could remain ignorant about the malevolence and wretchedness of human beings, if only for this moment, to feel that I was birthing my son into a world of security and sanctity.
Place names, these place names will never be the same after a mass shooting – Columbine, New Town, they can never be separated from what happened there, but as Sally Mann asks, “Would a stranger, coming upon it, say a century later . . . sense the sad, lost, secret of the place . . .? New Town – where my aunt and uncle lived and raised their three children. Their house on the market at the time of the shooting. This would be their horrifying last memory, after so many happy years, in a place they called home.
Two years ago my mother-in-law lay in surgery at Bingham and Women‘s hospital, hooked to a machine that kept her breathing, her chest open, heart exposed like Catholicism’s iconography of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, light streaming out it (in my vision), a young meticulous surgeon, Dr. Davidson, weighing over the intricacies of her vital organ, bringing her enlarged heart fresh life, like an alchemist, turning what is silver into gold, performing the miracles of modern science, at once common place, routine, and, yet, extraordinary.
Less than a year after her surgery, there was a shooting at Bingham and Women’s hospital. A nondescript man, without an appointment, went into the waiting room of the Watkins Cardiovascular Clinic and asked repeatedly to speak with Dr. Davidson. When available, the doctor lead him to exam room number fifteen.
As my mother-in-law’s strength, endurance, and vitality only grew, her doctor’s life was taken from him suddenly, violently, unexpectedly and unrepentantly on an ordinary day -his wife pregnant with their fourth child – an infant whose skin would never feel the warmth of her father’s flesh.
A few weeks ago, I could not get the image of two missing women, blithe lovers by all reports, twenty and twenty-two, out of my mind; their blood stained, bullet riddled car left visible, like an evil monument, partially submerged in the French Broad River, just a quarter mile from my home.
There was an investigation on my street in connection with their disappearance, caution tape strewn across the dead end road, where thick broken car glass, aquablue in the sunlight, was unapologetically strewn.
One day, while leaving the house at least twenty-vultures flew overhead. Everything seemed marked by an eerie bleakness.
The effect it had on me, I think, was made worse not only by the fact of its proximity to my home, and the utter senselessness of the brutal violence, and that these women resembled so many friends I’ve had over the years, but that for several weeks I had been reflecting deeply on the French Broad River, intimately thinking about its geology and history – the beginnings of a piece about one of the oldest rivers in the world whose vein, near my home, divides the central and west parts of the city.
One night, as I switched off the light to go to sleep, I took a sip of water in the dark. As I reached to set the glass back on the side table, a nightmarish image of their 1980s royal blue VW flashed in my mind, and the glass of water fell and cracked into thousands of shards beside me. I could do nothing but lay beside the ruins until sleep took me.
And while I grieved for these women who I never knew and would never know, as the stories and photos of them in the media started to mesh into the fabric of my internal thoughts, search parties dove into the depths of the French Broad River soon discovering them and pulling their young bodies from the weedy depths.
A week later, my mom called and said, “Something happened in France. Don’t listen to the news,” she warned, knowing I was already rattled.
I immediately texted my friends in Paris, want to make sure you two are safe and sound, thinking of you. As if the Atlantic didn’t separate us, in less than a minute they wrote back that they were safe and that the city was shut down. They were at their hotel suspended, stuck in a moment in history.
Bombs strapped on human bodies in public squares, the ultimate defilement of the sanctity of the body and humanity. A man shot during the November Paris attacks said something like, “When you see the destruction a single bullet does to the human body, it is devastating.” His phrase, a single bullet, struck me as incredibly poignant, during a time that a single bullet is so rarely reported.
Then more reports in the news this week, a mass shooting in San Bernadino, California… every few days another announcement. And another and another.
At a children’s music celebration the leader sings, “We feel that peace is coming, we feel that peace is coming, we feel that peace is coming for everyone.” I’m struck by the optimism and hope and all the contradictions brought out in the irony of this simple wishful prayer. My son later that afternoon sings it to me while smiling. Is there a more beautiful and impossible sentiment? But I so want this to be true for him, and for all children, not a fairy tale, not something that can never be.
Last night, while driving, my husband informed me that an acquaintance’s twenty-two year old son died a few days ago while kayaking in Ecuador. I felt a pang run through me. I hit my fist to my chest, primitively, and made a quiet guttural sigh.
In temple, later that night, the people in mourning stood for a moment amongst themselves before the rest of the congregation rose in solidarity beside them as the words Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, (Holy, Holy, Holy) slightly echoed into the vast space of the high, wood beamed, ceiling.
Very powerful piece. I think you should try to get this published. I’ve been thinking of similar themes.