marriage in the mangosteens

for corset, steven, diego, mojo, john, jacob, marie, emily, sheema, zaizul, eglantine and all the other great story tellers that I love.

 

 

 

When you marry someone you also marry their clothes.

Their hats and scarfs.

Their shirts.

Their indocile, unwilling shoes.

 

All of this you learn to love

with a cloth smile.

 

In the parts of the world colonized

by Europeans, you learn to ache

when you spot a missing leg

or a flattened breast

 

knowing that something prehistoric

has occurred. That when early man,

unable to visualize repair, would find

that a body part no longer worked,

he lopped it off and covered the missing

parts with mud and perfumed leaves.

And no one called him mad.

 

Blessed, Mrs. Lisowski, who's husband built the house

that this morning I fried my bacon in; she who

had survived Ravensbruck,

the holocaustean womens concentration camp,

says of hunger now, 'that upon her release,

chasing down cows in a pasture in wild hunger

and drinking their blood,

that every grain of salt,

every lump of flour should

mean God's utterance'

 

and I believe her, even

before she unfolds from a weathered journal

her winkel, color coded triangle, as proof

of her existence, since others

had questioned what had really happened.

 

But madness does happen.

As does memory, as shall resurrection. Because

when you marry someone you also marry

their closets. The most unlikely cool place

for scarfs and hats.

And shirts.

And those indocile,

unwilling shoes.

Reviews

[Corset]

"But madness does happen. As does memory, as shall resurrection. Because when you marry someone you also marry their closets. The most unlikely cool place for scarfs and hats. And shirts. And those indocile,
unwilling shoes."

Yes it does and it often becomes a best friend this madness, there is a lot of memory in mine, after the intial shock wears off the memory bounces back and the love and devotion takes hold at this point, where you say ok, you wear clothes and we both have closets, sometimes things escape from closets, we look at them real hard in the eye and decide if we are perfect enough to throw stones at them, or do we clear them out together, or is it something you need to do alone, but in anycase, when you are married you deal with those clothes, just as you say, when you marry you acceot that oerson clothes closet and all so that you will be accepted too for your own faults and you grow old with that person, because you know every person has a closet and ...the the best we can hope for is that you wear the same size. :P

[Lyn Anderson]

This is an outstanding journey. Your ability to roll the everyday into the story and make it all come out in this intriguing, surreal package is unparalleled in this place. If there was an apostrophe askew, I missed it, in the dream.

[h d e rushin]

beautiful words kl.....I love you so...dana

[Terpsichore]

'When you marry someone you also marry their clothes.
Their hats and scarfs.
Their shirts.
Their indocile, unwilling shoes.'

'But madness does happen, indeed it does' ; and in this case, Mrs Lisowski's yellow star would have to be pride of the closet.

Enjoy scrolling the back pages at writer's cafe, I regularly unearth little gems.

T

[h d e rushin]

thank you my dear friend....just finding my way back to the café after a brief absence. You used the word "gems", thank you for that ......dana

[Cool Handless Luke]

A very thoughtful poem h d e. And very true. I am in the process of ridding myself of some of "those indocile, unwilling shoes." Those poignant lines hole a lot of meaning for me in strange way I cannot relate here. Suffice it to say this is a very nice piece of wordsmithing!

[TL Boehm]

WOW. I think this is the second time I've read you and just been stunned. I'd pick a line and copy paste, but there would be so many....
What permeates my thoughts as I ponder this poem is the juxtaposition of "normal" and what we have come to know as "Tragic" the way life spins and we live it out - that whole part about frying bacon in a house built by the spouse of a holocaust survivor...there it is - that "thing" that you've done. Aching when we see a person who is missing a limb - because of the resonance of what caused the loss. That is how humanity is supposed to run but I think we think on autopilot. Such a good poem - it caused me to stop and think...hard.

[emmajoy]

A brilliantly empathic poem, a pointer to those who are n't reading it because they're missing a kind of spiritual caress .. a gentle but specific nudge into what it is to be a human being. Apart from that .. clothes are the skin we chose to add to what is given at birth, we display either what we are or how we want to be seen. And when we marry, we share even those secrets, because that's what they are. Surely? Perhaps?

[Marie Anzalone]

dana: first, thank you. It has been a loooong time since anyone has written anything for me that was not a breakdown of the numerous ways in which I am a complete failure as a human being; so seeing my name on this along with the greats- that alone made my eyes well with tears.

Then I read the piece. And sat on it for a day, reread it, twice. Let its weight stir up the muck of ingratitude and failure in action from the stagnant places of my own heart; let those particles float and choke out the life, before letting them be swept away by a cleansing new current. For that is what words like this do- they incise, they purge, they cleanse, they make us really sit back and think- and the end result is, they force us to be better human beings by our ingestion of their bitter but cleansing healing. There have been times in my own life where I have wondered if it was real, if it ever happened. As I packed to come into a new land, a new life, I was amazed at what I felt was important enough for its weight to be put into a 50 lb suitcase- and what I had to so far leave behind. I go back over memories- certificates, awards, photos, gifts great and small, a whole library that I amassed and read- including a treasured book on understanding Auschwitz. All of that is still in the US. With me are a hand-woven piece of cloth, a jewelry-making setup, and a book of Neruda's collected works. A battered notebook. When I transition from one country to the other, the difference is so vast; I find myself wondering which one is real? More importantly, which one brings out my own reality, more? In parts of the world never dominated by Europeans, like here in Western Guatemala, you see the missing body parts everywhere still. It is as just part of the scenery that our indocile shoes walk through. If you're really lucky, you don;t just marry into a pair that fits- you use them to support the feet that start small revolutions.

[Tree]

This is a poem that means something. You read this and you come away with other lives, millions of them imprinted on your mind. There is so much to learn from a 30 foot pile of shoes. Some of the most disturbing images that came out of the holocaust were not the mangled twisted bodies of the dead, but of their shoes. Their personal effects. And this very human reaction to the clothes and shoes of someone you loved, or love, or maybe never even knew, can be seen on the most individual of levels. A moving experience, this poem

Diego

[Emily B]

it could be that the tears were close already, but on reading Mrs. Lisowski's proof of existence, the tears crowded closer and threated to rain

my god, you wreak havoc with a poet heart