Aether E-Book

Catherine Graham

• Herausgeber: Buckrider Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 117

Beschreibung

In Æther Catherine Graham has created a luminous homage to family, to cancer and to the strange windings of truth. Swimming through time and space, Graham introduces her mother, her father and herself and the cancers that pull them apart and bring them together. Memories mesh with visitations and multiple stories unfold of pain and loss, hidden tragedy, forgiveness and growth. With an otherworldly delicacy Graham stitches it all together to create a book-length lyric essay of lingering and profound beauty, a paean to the complexity of love and survival.

Leseprobe

Cover

Also by Catherine Graham

POETRY

Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead: New and Selected Poems

The Celery Forest

Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects

Winterkill

The Red Element

Pupa

The Watch

FICTION

Quarry

Title Page

Aether

An Out-of-Body Lyric

Catherine Graham

Contents

Cover

Also by Catherine Graham

Title Page

Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Aether: An Out-of-Body Lyric

Acknowledgements

Notes

About the Author

Copyright

Dedication

for John Coates

Epigraph

Æther: according to ancient and medieval science, æther (Greek: αἰθήρ aithēr), also spelled aether or ether and also called quintessence, is the material that fills the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere.

Æther: a primordial god of the upper air.

Æther: a medium that in the wave theory of light permeates all space and transmits transverse waves.

Æther: a liquid that burns easily, that is used to turn solid substances into liquid, and that was used in medicine in the past to prevent patients from feeling pain during operations.

the æther: the air: the sky

Aether: An Out-of-Body Lyric

It’s not the hare’s

scream that haunts, it’s

the silence that follows.

◦

I am told to breathe in. “It isn’t work –” I’m out

before I can shape the air into words.

They are slicing the skin at my breast,

faceless, blue-dressed figures hovering.

I open my eyes. Princess Margaret’s white ceiling shines down. Tears – primal deep –

waiting to be released, accompany a renewed purity.

My mother is a keeper of secrets. Her hair, red all her life, even after

it grew back in. They had to tell me. I was eleven.

We had recently moved to the quarry.

“It’s cancer, isn’t it?” I said, holding

my school books tight to my chest.

They weren’t surprised that I knew,

though the reality of my knowing

became apparent only after I’d said those words.

Mom turned to me. “I’m sorry this had to happen to you.”

◦

This fortune-seeing inside dreams

beams yellow riddles, questions

scut exclamation points,

I can’t be more than whom.

◦

I was a shadow attached to mother’s legs, always tugging. Inside my mind I floated, away from all eyes watching me. I was in their line of vision then, they were assessing me, taking me in, my long brown hair split into pigtails with mother-curled ringlets hanging like hound’s ears, my deep-set dark blue eyes, my wonky uneven ears and freckles. I could see I was not what they wanted to see. Where did this come from, this deep dislike of self? The beauty that spoke never found me.

Your parents die and you become a writer.

I shall go on.

We never had a cat, but it did get my tongue.

Held it with its claws, the skin of its teeth –

You know that’s a lie.

Many lies have a spine of truth.

It’s how they stand up.

They say not to write in the first person. I is too much.

They bully others to make their own path.

But I know, deep down, they know I is a construct.

I is a water spider on a glassy lake

pushing past the inaction of pain.

The cedar tree outside the window is green

but the back leaves are rusting.

They hold on. They don’t fall.

I need more animus – raw, male energy. To act without doubt, without overthinking. How draining doubt is. To be in the pool of how others perceive you. To melt into a wicked-witch puddle and wait for the sun to appear from behind dark clouds, dry you into air.

I told my friend I feel like a floating head.

And yet my head remains to think and overthink.

Damn it. Why can’t I be the floating headless?

I once loved a boy who said he didn’t love books.

“Why read when you can live life instead?”

He liked to shoot duck and deer and listen to Willie Nelson.

Now I’ve painted his neck red.

And yet he was also clean-cut and caring. He only hunted

in season and ate what he killed. Antlered deer heads

hung on his parents’ walls. This was normal in their house.

As normal and frequent as windows in ours.

The deer eyes held a frozen expression but not one of pain.

Fake eyes, forever in stare.

They were heads but they weren’t floating.

An only child. “Aren’t you lonely?” They look at you with pity, the black circles of their pupils expanding toward outer space. Lonely doesn’t come from being alone. Lonely is the loss of self with others. I once lived with a man who gave me that wisdom. It was his everlasting gift: “You’ll never get published without me. You’re a bitter barren woman.”

◦

He makes me into a noun.

I can’t move.

◦

“Labelling a woman ‘bitter,’ is like calling them ‘crazy,’ it’s just another way to dismiss their feelings and whatever has happened to them as ‘all in her head.’ … No one wants the reputation of being a ‘bitter’ woman, so this manipulates women into keeping silent and the perpetrator remains protected and their behaviour remains unchallenged.”

– Sophie King, “How the concept of forgiveness is used to gaslight women,” Medium

I resonate with these words.

I never wanted children; he just assumed that I did.

He couldn’t see me at all.

Though in the beginning, I thought he could.

He had the eyes of a deer on a hunter’s wall,

looking without seeing, seeing without feeling.

That deer turned wolf.

◦

I wipe your absence

with clean-stained hands.

◦

You have to work hard to get mean words out of your system. Bitter barren woman. Bones heal. You are led through a tour of mending. Time accompanies you. Next thing you know, you’re it in a game of tag, home free in a game of hide-and-seek.

◦

Put well into the vault.

◦

When those “aren’t you lonely without a sibling?” types visit, they discover you have your own bathroom. “And look how big your bedroom is! So many toys.”

“Can I borrow your Malibu Barbie?” says Maryanne. “Wait. How about the new one with growing hair?” “Yes, you can take her.”

Later, in Maryanne’s mauve bedroom, you work up the courage to ask for the doll back. She pulls the doll out from beneath her mauve-painted bed, the mauve bedspread ringed with mauve eyelet, and shoves the doll at you: “Here!”

Holding your Barbie, you notice one leg is warped. She’s mangled. “What did you do to her?” “What do you mean? What are you saying I did?” Maryanne’s standing up now, looking down at you and your leg-mangled Barbie. She looks as tall as a parent, her hand on her hip.

In your mind you see your own finger wagging back at you:

I told you not to lend it to her.

She’s jealous of what you have.

She wants to steal your pleasure, your pretty hair-growing Barbie.

While running your hand along your Barbie’s leg,

you feel a pin puncture, a hole in the smooth plastic.

No amount of doctoring will heal this.

Your prize doll has been crippled.

Years later when your novel has been rejected by every publisher

your agent contacted, you think:

That hurt became a quarry. Quarry is a noun and a verb. I quarry your quarry. Your quarry I quarry. Quarry comes from the Latin word cor. Heart. My heart was quarried. We quarry your heart. That’s what all those rejections did, they quarried me. But not swiftly. Instead they ignited cancer cells. The cancer cells (yes, we all have them) inside my left breast.

Gross fact:

Quarry derives from the Latin cor, heart,

because hunters used to drape the entrails

of their chosen quarry on their dogs’ backs.

The cancer cells were mad

that I allowed my sense of self to be hurt

by all those rejections.

They took that heartbreaking energy

and fed on it.

We’ll show her.

This is how she treats us?

We expand. We multiply.

A scar is a fossil – ridges,

edges of a dead-sea animal.

Quarry

obsolete: a heap of the game killed in a hunt.

I’d gotten out of the monthly habit of checking. The anxiety over Quarry made my period stop, my reminder for self-examination. After self-checking for years, I’d had my scares with lumps, especially having breasts with dense tissue. I remember the panic and worry the first time I lay on my side in the half-lit ultrasound room, a pillow tucked behind me for support. When the technician pushed the cold hard device over the sensitive breast skin, the insides of my jellied breast appeared on the black and white screen as a strange subterranean world, a lunar landscape. During this time I learned words like fibroadenoma. Friendly words. All encounters with lumps were benign.

We live in vigilance after watching our mothers die.

Those twin sexual organs that hold milk for babies

and desire for others carry a terror for us.

We succumb to having them flattened like pancakes on mammogram plates.

We suck in our breath through winces of pain

and ignore the metallic buzzing of the taking image.

Our breasts don’t belong to us then.

Squeezed and handled with efficient gloved hands,

moulded like Play-Doh.

At night we dream they’re hacked off.

“We need to do a biopsy.”

I make the dead move like dolls with beating hearts and strings from marionettes. They live inside the folds of my notebooks. My strings become their strings – free will? No. The dead lead me to the next scene. The dead are here. It’s a miracle! My parents are more than fading remnants from a dream. They are in continuing conversations.

◦

So normal and real

I could almost touch you –

◦

You send the manuscript off to your agent in full first-day-of-school-shiny-clothes glow. Your parents live inside it. See? But they don’t see. Black scratches over fields of white paper. Tombstones up close. You’re not supposed to talk about rejections.

So the day came and the word cancer

entered my life from within.

I’m sorry this had to happen to you.

A man I thought I loved helped me through the early stages of grief – I’d lost both parents during my undergraduate years. An older man, one of my professors, fell in love with me. Heady words for a twenty-one-year-old: “I can’t stop thinking about you; I’ve fallen in love with you.” I can still hear the autumn leaves bristling in the dappled sunlight that marked the narrow footpath we were walking on, the warmth rising as blooms though my pores when he said those dreamy words.

“My wife understands. She wants me to be happy. She knows about you.”

They’ll say anything to get into your pants. I didn’t let him. And when his frustration rose to anger, for I still had romantic ties with my clean-cut boyfriend then, despite the deer heads, his mother, like mine, died of cancer so we had that in common, and I was considering his proposal at the time, and I told the professor that, he said, “Go ahead, marry him. Breed cancer.”

◦

Leaves spit at my face.

◦

Oliver Sacks gave me a power cord.

He handed it over to me like a gift and said,

“Make electric with it.”

This happened after he died.

Earlier that day I heard his voice on the radio,

a previously taped interview aired

as an acknowledgement of his death.

Did he know about my floating head?

Maybe that’s why he gifted me the power cord –

to connect me to him like an umbilical cord.

And to think Oliver Sacks gave it to me,

some anonymous Canadian poet still writing

poems about her dead parents.

◦

If I jump into pain

will it hurt me?

◦

Parents die in the world

but they never die in their children.

And yet a distance remains, edged with abstraction.

This changed under the spell of anaesthesia.

“Your mother’s going to have a woman’s operation.”

He made it sound like a game. Like something women do. I was used to her absence when I came home from school. If she wasn’t at the hospital working, she was in the master bedroom sleeping after her ICU night shift. Mornings were our time together. Dressed in her hospital whites: white cap, white dress, white nylons. I’d eat my bowl of Rice Krispies. She’d lop the top off of a soft-boiled egg – sitting pretty in a flower-rim porcelain cup – with a knife.

One late afternoon Dad and I went to visit her. I held his hand and walked double time to keep up with his strides down the long antiseptic-smelling corridor, the white floor mirroring the walls’ gloss. Nurses passed us. They had that same efficient face my mother had while busy but when they followed the length of my father’s arm and saw me, they smiled.

Dad stopped at a half-open door and then we walked straight in. For a moment I thought we’d entered a flower shop. Roses, carnations, daisies – flowers on all flat surfaces. A huge fruit basket sat on the floor, the wrapped cellophane like see-through skin.

“Honey,” said Mom. She held out her hand. She was wearing a blue gown, her head propped up on pillows, the bed slanted like a hill. The flower-scented air couldn’t compete with the cigarette smoke ghosting the room, the last tendrils disappearing from her scrunched-up butt lodged in the silver ashtray.

“Go on,” said Dad, nudging me.

I would not move.

“My mother is here with me,” I said to the nurse who shook

me awake after that first operation.

Tears dripped like water

off a body emerging from a bath.

“Can you get me a Kleenex?”

She didn’t respond.

She’d returned to the nurses’ station to talk to the other nurse.

They were complaining about their overworked schedule,

the lack of breaks.

Don’t you see, I wanted to shout, MY mother is here,

for the first time EVER since her death.

Give me a goddamn KLEENEX!

A tissue was placed in my hand.