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Prose Poetry from Web del SolTo Prevent Rust, Weeping, and Bleeding
by Sara Berkeley
Estragon: What is it?
Vladimir: I don't know. A willow.
Estragon: Where are the leaves?
Vladimir: It must be dead.
Estragon: No more weeping.
She had a metal head. It had begun to rust in places. Sometimes she felt old.
* Set deep in the head were two eyes. Through these eyes, she looked at the world. How could she be sure that what she saw was what was really there?
* She met a man. At first she fought from a great distance against the idea of him. After a short time she realized that the way she felt about this man was beyond romance; that it was ludicrous to pretend she wanted to be anywhere but with him. She discovered how to be alone with him. She learned from him. Together, they began to tease out what love meant to them. It seemed they had all the time in the world.
* Inside her, placed obliquely between the lungs and enclosed in the membranous cavity of the pericardium, was a heart. Although she had never seen it, she could feel it beat and she believed it was there, resting on the diaphragm, weighing between eight and ten ounces, about one one-hundred-and-fiftieth of her total body weight. The division of her heart into four cavities was indicated by grooves on its surface. That the upper cavities had a separate name from the lower cavities she considered typical of the capaciousness of human civilization.
* After a while, it became clear to her that the man saw other women. She knew that this simple fact was part of something larger that she did not understand. In spite of this, for the first time she looked into the future without fear. Inside her metal head, the future took the form of a long, straight road that would lead her through a landscape of great beauty and harshness, beyond the distant mountains, into the boundless unknown. One night, he told her about the other women. He said he wanted to stop, to be with only her. He said he thought about it all the time. They agreed it need not undermine what they were building. She said he could keep doing it or he could stop, she would love him anyway. He said he'd stop.
* The right half of her heart contained venous blood, also called impure. Her arteries, aside from the pulmonary, contained blood that was pure. In their course throughout her body, the arteries underwent enormous ramification, echoing out to minute arterioles, which in their turn squirmed and microscopically split into a dense mesh of capillaries. It surprised her that the blood would bother to find its way through this maze. Sometimes she wished it would skimp a little, leave her without feeling for a while.
* One bright day they married. The night before, she lay alone in a big house on the coast. The only sound was the sea pounding outside and the thin scratch of her pen. The dress was downstairs, in a dark place, waiting; the pieces of the puzzle were all in place. Salt tears ran down her metal cheeks. She felt at the same time like a grown woman and a very young girl; she could feel all the girls and women she had ever been connect, associate, unite, amalgamate, fuse. In uncertain command of her myriad parts and personalities, she felt, for the first time, whole. Afterwards, looking at the photographs, she saw them, bride and groom, lit with a radiance that came out of nowhere, unbidden, undisguised. They honeymooned in a hot place, an island. He didn't look at the other women in their hotel, the slender women on the beaches in their high-sided bikinis. He looked only at her, sat across from her at dinner each night, watching her with love and tenderness. After they made love in the late afternoons, he rolled back, exhausted, smoked a cigarette, far away. She realized it could ruin them, his passion, if they weren't careful, and that in this case, being careful included being honest. Her failure of courage kept her silent. This was not how it would always be. "We are four days into marriage," she wrote, "and the honeymoon is pretty much completely serene and untroubled. I want no danger at the moment. Trouble and challenge to our happiness can come later, that's alright, I expect it. But not now."
* Under ordinary circumstances, the positions of the upper and lower eyelids meant that about the lower three-fourths of her cornea was exposed. On the margins of the lids were two small openings, the start of the lachrymal canals. In their natural condition, the lids were maintained in their position, touching the conjunctiva of the eyeball, by a muscle that allowed the tears running over the surface to find their way easily into the lachrymal canals. Normally, tears from the lachrymal gland washed gently across her eyes, into the canals, and along the nasal duct into the cavity of her nose. Occasionally, there were too many of them to find their way. This was the case some summer nights, driving home through the haze of evening sun, telling herself in a voice as neutral as she could keep it the stories of the other women. Her lachrymal gland, lodged in a depression on the inner side of her frontal bone, about the size and shape of an almond, worked overtime. Tears welled inside the lower lid, spilled over, coursed down the metal cheeks, dripped off the chin and soaked into her shirt just above the second rib. Her throat ached. Soon, she knew, the soft, ferromagnetic constituent of her genetic makeup would react with the tears and oxidize to rust. Odd how the red-brown coating, commonly seen as a corrosion or degradation of what was pure, was also used by jewellers as a polishing agent. Jeweller's rouge. Watch and clockmakers in the previous century used a rouge leather to touch up highly polished surfaces until they could see their faces in them. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, she saw her eyes were red and swollen. Twelve miles from home: if she stopped crying now she'd look ok when she got there.
* Six months married, she wrote him a letter early one Sunday after a sleepless night. She told him again what Jerry Garcia's wife said in another context to her husband a year before he died: you can choose to do it for the rest of your life and I'll love you anyway. She told him she was scared and why. They were ugly facts that he had scarcely bothered to hide from her. Days when he couldn't be found. Nights he stayed away. Restaurant receipts on the kitchen counter. She held her courage like a rod with a big fish biting. Over the bay where they lived, helicopters dipped giant buckets in the water, then lifted them, dripping gallons, up over the ridge to where a wildfire blazed. They spent two days marooned in their hillside home, bags packed, ready to flee. He held her close to him, told her it was all over, all the playing around. He cried and said if she'd take him, he would stay with her forever. By midnight the following Saturday the fire was contained. They unpacked. Nothing had changed. But he was a kind man. "Honestly" she told herself driving home, "he doesn't want to hurt me. He doesn't know himself why he does it. Women just drive him mad. And he's good to me. Never angry, never in the remotest sense abusive, verbally or physically. Believe me-I don't know that I'd stay if he were violent. But he's exuberant, a happy man. Who can say that about their beloved? He has ideas, he trips over himself explaining them, he speaks animatedly, his brain teems. He's fun." She stopped then, and thought for a while. Deep in the pulmonary artery, ventricular diastole interrupted the course of the blood, expanding the semilunar valves, checking the flow. Then the blood continued its regurgitation toward the heart. She swallowed. "There are two of him," she told thin air. "I married them both. I love them both."
* Heartache. Was there any reason why pain should reside in the heart? In order to examine the interior of the organ, the origin of her life, her vital energy, her heartsblood, she would, she learned, have to make an incision on the posterior surface of the left auricle from the pulmonary veins on one side to those on the other. The incision would need to be made a little way into the vessels. Then a second incision from the middle of the first, down to the appendix. And there it was. Quite unimpressive really, a hollow fist of muscle, pulsing in the electric light. It looked perfectly healthy to her untrained eye. No sign of inflammation, no obvious interruptions in the steady pumping motion, no cause for alarm. Puzzling, then, the common belief that grief was palpable, a pain of the heart. "Not that I'm grieving," she told herself. "It's not that bad. It could be a lot worse." Aligning the fleshy edges of the incisions she'd made, she held them neatly closed until the bleeding stopped.
* He held her in his arms. She kissed his neck. "I love your neck," she said, her voice muffled by the collar of his shirt, "the way it joins your head to the rest of you." She surfaced, whispered close into his ear "That's in case you couldn't remember what your neck was for." He smiled. "I came up to tell you I really love you tonight," he said.
* His leathery hands worked gently. A slow, circular motion, more caress than scour. She thought of him as a jeweller, cleaning old clock faces and coins, polishing the metal till it sang. Beneath his hands, the rust fell away in a fine reddish-brown powder. She smiled, thinking of how he slept in the mornings with the cat in his arms. "I don't want to hurt you," he said, his hands working over the contours of her high cheekbones. "You're not," she said. When he was done, he stepped back, admiring her. She felt radiant.
* "I wouldn't say 'Till death do us part'," a friend told her, "because I didn't know what might happen, how I might change. I know I'm not the woman I was ten years ago. I'm not the woman he married." They agreed that marriage was a constant struggle, a series of compromises, a blend of pain and joy. She thought of the vows she had made with him, and of her belief that she would want to love him no matter how he grew, or what he changed into. She thought about the core of him, the marrow of the man she loved. She wanted love without conditions, without rules.
* "I don't know what to do," she told him. "You're doing everything right," he said. "I want to know if you have a plan," she said. "I want to stop seeing other women," he said. "That's not having a plan," she said, "because nothing's changing, you know? He said he knew. He looked at her helplessly. He wanted to do it, he said, he wanted to try. It was time, he knew that.
* The swing between anger and love is a natural one, she wrote. I know, because I pushed off with my own two feet. Is it a big thing or a small thing? she wrote. I don't know anymore, it changes shape so skillfully and so often. And come to think of it, this feels more like washing than weeping.