MUDLARK No. 2 (1996) ISSN 1081-3500 Copyright (c) MUDLARK 1996 Editor: William Slaughter E-Mail: mudlark@unf.edu URL: http://www.unf.edu/mudlark __________________________________________________ THE RAPE POEMS by Frances Driscoll Contents Wild Ribbons Common Expression Ray's Sentence First Recital Multiple Choice Incomplete Examination Difficult Word Some Lucky Girls Spotting Ray Baskets Parochial Air Entertaining Ray Vocabulary Words Outrageous Behavior Island of the Raped Women __________________________________________________ WILD RIBBONS This region gives the national wire cheap filler. Even our insects are of interest on slow days. A topless car wash. A topless doughnut shop. Segregated high school proms. We like different music, contented students say. The serial diaper thief still at large. A fetish, my son is sure, but I am not so certain. There is a problem with the roof. Whether this is related to climate, I have no idea but most things here are. Destruction by water, salt. Eating silver, art, delicate fabric seems a priority. My son is happy today. A girl with legs and serious potential has given him her number. He has gone almost a week without spilling butterscotch in large quantities at the fast food stand. On the beach he reads lines to me from the magazine that came in the mail. Happily explaining everything. This is all surrealism. This is good. This is bad. The introduction to a collection of seafood recipes moves my sister to tears. I lose their drift. The twice-convicted diaper thief released this time for lack of evidence still on my mind. And another story. One from home. White tulips wrapped in pink tissue placed at the warm spring scene. Children gone wild in perfectly pleasant weather. A young woman, near a pond, near fallen sycamores, nearly all her blood gone. She had been running in the park at that hour. That hour is not specified. There is no need. That hour is a bad hour. To be in the park. To be at home. To be. There is no good hour. But this is a pleasant afternoon and that kind of thinking doesn't really sound very American. I foresee instead a march down streets with the usual noise, signs. Take Back the Night. As though time is the matter. And place. Dark time. Dark streets. Whose interests do such beliefs serve. But perhaps it is better we march, better we continue to fail this quiz. Where does it usually happen. a) home b) street. When does it usually happen. a) day b) night. Delusion is necessary for mental health, claims the article my mother sends. I have lived this way all my life, my still married mother writes in the margin with exclamation points. The wife of our new vice-president has chosen her project. Preparedness for disaster. There are many tracks open women today in America. In Israel a witness testifies: It was then we found women and children burn that easily. Somewhere I think I read this still breathing and therefore in all good taste still nameless young woman was on a fast track. I hope so. I truly do hope so. Very fast. Very bright. I can see her. Flying home. Wild bare arms breaking bright ribbons free. COMMON EXPRESSION The man above me is saying something. He is saying something over and over the same thing. What. What are you saying, I am saying but he is still saying what he was saying using the sound of it to take him where he wants to go and someplace inside me closes and I feel nothing but know only this cheap chosen comfort has taken a sudden twist straight toward the worst. And all this is now is waiting for it please to stop. Escape turned reenactment out of nothing but one word of language. But I don't know that yet. I don't know that until morning when I remember when I heard that word before come over and over out of a man's mouth like that just like that. In the afternoon sounds I can not place keep coming out of me. I remember not knowing what would happen when he stopped. Life or death was all I thought was at stake. Who could have imagined this. RAY'S SENTENCE I do this all the time, he said. I ruin everything. I ruin everything. FIRST RECITAL I go to my room. I take off the dress. I hang up the dress at the end of the closet. I don't know what I do with the bra. I think I take it off. I'm pretty sure I took it off. I don't know when I collect the other things from the living room floor. I know the shoes stayed where they were for a while because I remember one day they surprised me. I saw them and I thought what are my shoes doing out here and then I remembered and I put them away. As though preparing for weather, although this is Florida where they haven't had any in years but natives say it's time again for a tropical storm to ransack this coast with voices betraying memories oblivious to lack of running water and light, I put on white cotton underpants, hand-me-down jeans of my son's, one of his oxford cloth shirts diluted navy and white vertical stripes, his navy cotton crew neck sweater that swallows me, my own white cotton socks and canvas sneakers. When my son says he always knows where to look for his clothes, I tell him I don't know how they get in here. Laundry just goes astray on you sometimes. But he is young and doesn't understand that yet. I go with the dog into my son's room where he is not sleeping because he is sleeping in his cousin's room in my sister's house. I get on the floor with the phone book. Somehow it opens to a page that lists Rape Crisis Hotline in bold type. I dial. The woman who answers tells me she isn't Rape Crisis anymore. She's another hotline. She gives me another number. I dial. A recording tells me Rape Crisis Hotline has a new number. I dial. The new number has been disconnected. I call the police. I say I don't want to report anything or anything like that but I was just wondering if you might happen to have a number for something like a rape hotline. The man gets off the phone. There is talk in the background. He gets back on the line. He gives me a number. It is the number in the phone book. I look at the clock. Everywhere in America it is still the middle of the night. I dial Wisconsin where my best friend since sixth grade in suburban Connecticut and Miss Donna's ballet class lives now a time zone away. Julie says, Hello. I say, Rape. Julie says, What. I say, Rape. Julie says, What. I spell it. Oh, Julie says, rape. No one says anything. For the real life sound of her, I ask about the weather. We talk then of winter in Beloit and how she is wearing her hair now. Still a blunt cut but a little shorter in the back. Julie won't let me go until I promise to leave the house, go to my sister's. While promising I know I am able to go nowhere and it is nowhere near dawn. MULTIPLE CHOICE Ray says he is a) vacationing from Virginia. b) from Louisiana. c) newly transferred by the Navy from California. The policewoman says most likely Ray is d) none of the above. The policewoman says most likely Ray is not Ray. INCOMPLETE EXAMINATION Until I say, no, no more, the physician specifically trained for such occasions, examines me naked late the next afternoon, inch by careful inch, slowly touching me slowly everywhere slowly. You are ovulating, he says. He has pills for that, among other things. He remarks upon raw skin, bruises. Keeps finding bruise after bruise. I can not connect bruises with what happened and I can not talk anymore. Old, I say, fall down. I can not talk anymore. I have already talked with the center director, the policewoman, the center director, the psychologist, the center director. I can not talk anymore. Could I describe the rape for him, he says. Minor, I say. Ordinary. DIFFICULT WORD Sodomy, Kate says, sodomy. That's such a difficult word. But it is such an easier word to say than to say what he said, what he said could happen, what did happen. And Kate, this is so difficult to say it takes me years to begin to try to say this part of the story. How after inhuman time, the erection begins to leave him. How I pretend not to notice. Until now, I have been trying only not to move. If I want to avoid anal sex, I have been instructed not to move. This is when he is slamming himself into me. I am even more afraid now. I am so afraid now, Kate. I am so afraid. I believe if he believes I don't know maybe he will not kill me. Now he is using his hands to shove himself into me. This part seems to last a long time. And now he is off me. He is stretched out, propped on one elbow. He looks perfectly comfortable, Kate. He looks like everything is normal here, Kate. Kate, he is going to kill me, Kate. He gestures down, You're going to have to, he says. You're going to have to. He sounds so sad saying this. Like if it were up to him, he wouldn't be saying this. He's crazy, Kate. He's really really crazy. And this will not work. He has not been a boy for a long time and he has had me down on the floor for a long time. This will not work. And when this does not work, he will kill me. I know this. I run. I run very very fast, Kate. But really Kate, I am not running. And really I am not even crawling. Really I am trying to slither myself along the way you sometimes in TV movies see soldiers under fire move. And really Kate, it is only inches that I do move. Like used dishwater, there is nothing left of me now. I am going to die, Katie. And he leans only slightly, uses only one arm to draw me to him. You're going to have to, he says, and his palm pushes my head down. SOME LUCKY GIRLS We were so lucky to get them. Nobody else appreciates them. Least of all the professionals who see this as symptom, wait for anger. But almost everybody in group agrees. And if some weeks later some of us stumble around saying I wish he'd killed me well, that's just a phase most of us live through and nobody's paying any attention anyway except the professionals who offer really good pastel drugs for both day and night. Of course Louise I guess basically she always just wanted to see hers neon flat dead but bleed bad first but I don't think she ever was really objective of course there was the matter of that vaginal tear and he did make her take that supervised bath afterward but he was so supportive, so sympathetic when she was getting all upset in the beginning as he watched her strip standing in her bedroom doorway he tried to help her through. Rape is never easy, he said. Caroline and I were crazy about our guys from the moment they left. My rapist was so nice, Caroline says. He wanted so very much to please me. What do you like, he said. I mean, he held a knife to my throat but he was so gentle. And, my rapist, he was wonderful. Well, look at me. No visible scars. He let me live. He let me keep on my dress. SPOTTING RAY The day I spot Ray lounging in the doorway of Harry's boarded-up pawn shop, my therapist leaves town for a death in the family. I drive by Harry's every day on the way to work through that sorry stretch of downtown. Around Harry's lately I nurse swallowing a washed-out and bitter orange pill, whose bottle says as needed for anxiety. It's a taste I've acquired. Harry's been up for sale for a while now, but I've never seen Ray by there before. Ray was looking pretty good in battle fatigues. The beard all still there he said he planned to shave. Why, I said, it's a good beard. Keep it. Wondering could I ever positively identify him without it. I look back, long as I dare, knowing I need to keep my eyes' custody on the road. But I want to roll my window down and wave, Hey. I want eye contact when I say, Who have you buried, Ray. Instead, I remember skipping the cemetery to go directly from Mass to my grandmother's house, charged by my sister with care of her cobalt enameled casserole, along with warming her sweet marinated chicken hors d'oeuvres, famous at family funeral parties. Trouble lighting the gas oven loses me some eyebrow, singes edges of my hair. I lose my sister's directions in the mirror above the bathroom sink, convincing myself everyone will be too distraught and who in the family has enough sight left anyway to notice. If caught, I'll say I got carried away with plucking. But even skirting the get-together's edge I can't miss what my sister has to say about her scorched enamel. Daddy's first cousin, Helen, whose hair remembers waving passion bright, doesn't let me slip past. How are you, Honey, she says. Fine, thank you, Helen, I say, And you. Helen takes me by the shoulders, looks me in the eye. No, Honey, she says. Your grandfather you loved, who loved you, is dead. Honey, you are not fine. In the doorway of the room where he left his body in his own bed, in his own sleep, we lean into one another, looking out into the kitchen. When it was linoleumed red, he stood singing there. For me. BASKETS. Even I like this. Yes. With my hands. My hands my sisters eye what is held expecting damage. This form so unlike speech in this no longer comfortable language feels natural as braiding young family hair. Form belonging only to ourselves. Requiring no explanation. Because it happened here I begin with what is here. Palm. And because of what happened to my own palm. Palm and branches of available roses. Painted paper. Paper painted by my sister with the small floral pattern of the discarded dress. Purple, white, green, blue. The last dress she helped me find. The one even I felt feminine inside. I hardly ever wear one any more. Barbara notices. Misunderstands the repetition of a few safe clothes. Always loose. Never ironed. Announces she is going to do what I do. Wear just anything she wants. I am reminded: Want has had little to do with my recent life. Nothing to do with my wardrobe. I wear what I can. Clothes as symptom not statement. I do not complete the oval. Leave the slope of shape open. Or, unfinished. But this is not just another broken object in the house. Remembrance does not basket up neatly. I assumed weaving might guide me somewhere beyond language. I believed I believed if I made this basket if I held the rape in my hands. I suppose I hoped to feel something. Actual tears. Not expecting just the usual bloodshed. Cut up hands. Unwise choice of material. I study my palms the broken life line the line that split marked proof death of the raped woman is no fantasy. The body knows more than the world. This fading line remains. Reminds me: There is an unburied woman in this house. A body is denying a woman a marked grave. The life line sometimes splits, it says in Elementary Palmistry, when there is a move to another country. I love you, Donald says. I love you, Barbara says. I say nothing. Want only to get away. I don't know the woman they talk about and they never met the woman I can almost on a good day remember being. I am reminded: A woman deserves a grave. The body needs to cry. The palm conceals nothing. The rapist who does not kill is the real murderer. PAROCHIAL AIR Prescription drugs do well here. Normal balance seems easily disturbed. Karen's neck is bothering her again and I am suffering in this city which, for all its humidity, has never had a major Star Trek convention with inflammation the physician's assistant found by hand. The things we pay to have done to us while perfectly good dresses hang on sale racks. I don't need inflammation explained. What is there to do with evidence but burn it. We all know the temperature of sin. And so these blue pills are for vaginitis and oval with patience these help me sleep when I let them. Also they keep the dreams from me leaving me with only this steaming local air to contend with in the dark. Things form in this climate, my therapist explains, unknown further north. Calm talk of fungus follows. He means to suggest I suppose this condition I am carrying on so about in extreme language may have nothing to do with the man who first dropped to his knees. Sniffed at me like an animal or a man gone mad. I just want to smell it, he said, but he lied. ENTERTAINING RAY Inventing Ray, I fail over and over. Nothing sounds right. Or true. Except hunger. Terrible hunger. Even in the womb I see him, mute mouth moving, wanting. In the middle of his time inside me, he held himself perfectly still and did not look down, but rather stared straight ahead at blank dimly lit wall. His face remaining, the way I see his face always, a face without expression. Providing no clue to what he dreams at such times. Do you bowl, he said. I said, No. I said, No. I see him now alone at night in the alley. The forced fall of pins. Line after line invariably neat and polite as nuns wearing convent posture. The involuntary sound they make going down. Ray is wearing what he always wears. Ray's clothes do what no one else wants to do. Hold him. Hold him close and keep on holding. His narrow body loosens only in moving away. I leave him there leaving. As he turns, something haunts in the way his shoulders shift, sloping toward an exit. This mask Ray wears he was not born with. Some things the womb refuses home. VOCABULARY WORDS The woman is ovulating. On the floor, she knows this. She has never seen beneath the microscope the shapes of ferns cervical secretions assume only at this time. But she imagines them. Male ferns, you know, are common as mud. She imagines only uncommon ferns. Maiden's hair. Venus hair. Heart's tongue. Cinammon. Slender cliff. Madeline. Madeline. Jennifer Anne. Ovulating, the woman dreams a story. In that first garden, where they slept they slept among ferns in weather we call spring and ferns were the meal she prepared for them the day she first conceived and the first music in the garden was the sound humming its way out of her during the conceiving, conjuring crystal spiral unfurling. On the floor, the woman has forgotten her story, her possible daughters. She has not forgotten she is ovulating. The man is stopping touching her now. The man tells the woman on the floor she has to do something for him now. But first, he offers to do something else for her. No. Threatens to do. There were no offers that night. When the man knocked the woman to the floor her mouth dried. This is what desert, death mean now to her. This night, this man is what terror means now to her. Time will expand this definition to night and men. She is learning real meanings of common words, here, this night, on the floor. On the floor, she will beg this night for water. Years later, talking alone in a closed room with a man her mouth will dry. She will not ask a man again for water. The woman on the floor believes she has a choice of what to lose. Does what he has been wanting her to do. She kisses him to keep his mouth away from her. She will continue to kiss him to keep sure of his mouth's whereabouts. She knows, reaching for his mouth, she is losing this. The woman on the floor is kissing the man who has her down on the floor. She feels nothing. She feels nothing so when she sees him coming out of her and she has felt nothing, known nothing, she goes a little maybe you'd say crazy. The woman on the floor is making noise and the woman is ovulating. On the floor, she knows this. She begs the man. She will not stop. She will not stop. She does not beg him to stop. She knows now he will not stop until he stops. She knows when he stops he will kill her but maybe he will not kill her maybe she will still be alive when he stops and she is ovulating. She begs him to let her put in her diaphragm. During this time, he has been moving her, slamming parts of her into what does not move--wall, furniture, door--pushing her along the carpet the way you push hard on a rag wiping a bad kitchen and each time the man starts to raise himself above the woman to do what a man does above a woman the woman has been trying to move underneath him, all scatter and confusion in the darkness like some blind little animal trying to maybe scramble herself maybe somehow away and trying to avoid him and she does not know if she is avoiding him because she feels nothing and the man is pressing down on her so hard so hard scraping her into place to keep her still. The man is not confused. The man is not pleased. The man is not pleased with the woman's behavior. He lets her know that. He lets her know that. He lets her know her behavior will have to improve. The man tells the woman he does not want to hurt her. He tells her what he does not want to have to do to her, what he does not want to have to make her do. He reminds the woman of what he was willing to do for her, is still willing to do. He would do that, he says, for her. The woman on the floor can not improve her behavior but she promises. She promises and the man decides to allow her the diaphragm. He stands. He looks down at her. He looks down at her. He tells her she can get up. He asks if she wants him to help her get up. She says no. She says she can get up. These words do not really come out of her mouth. What comes out of her is only a slur of sound but the man understands this language. She gets up. She is standing. She falls to the floor. A little heap. He offers to help her up. She says no. She says she can get up by herself. She tries. She tries to get up. She is almost now what you could almost call almost standing. She falls again. The man says nothing. He picks her up. He holds her standing against him. Holding her, holding her arms, he half-carries her into the bathroom her hand gestures him toward. She scans surfaces, opens cabinets. She can not find the diaphragm. She finds the diaphragm. He asks if he can help. She says no. He says he wants to help. She says no. He contents himself with holding her dress up around her waist. She gets the diaphragm in. It is over now. She knows this. He must know now what he has been doing. It is over now. She knows this. He will leave. The man pushes her back into the living room. The man tells her she has to get back down on the floor now. The woman can not believe this is happening. She believes this is happening. She believes he still must not know what he is doing. At the same time she believes he does not know what he is doing she believes he knows what he is doing and she believes he will kill her. There is a word for this simultaneous belief in incongruous notions. He makes her get down on the floor. He will keep her, there, on the floor two more hours. When he leaves he leaves her alive. When he leaves he leaves her a five dollar bill. When he leaves he leaves her in such good condition when people say did he hurt you, she can honestly say, No. He did not hurt me. I never again consult my fern lover's companion. The meaning of ovulation has been changed for me. OUTRAGEOUS BEHAVIOR Georgia eggs remain trending unchanged on mediums; the undertone was steady at best. Cleveland's donor egg clinic can not consider a married woman without her husband's permission. Little done-up Tammy Faye's reduced to shopping in a discount outlet store. My therapist is away again on vacation without me in blue hill country. A Southside woman last night fired directly into the abdomen of a still unidentified man who entered in the usual way through a window with a knife wanting to gag, blindfold her using rags. It was a large caliber gun. He died at 10:30 this morning. Police report no charges will be filed. Diana appeared in public in a skintight suit. The color was purple. The fabric was not disclosed locally. The first tropical depression of the season seems in no hurry to move. The heart of the descending heat pool grows, but lacks hunger, momentum of its own. ISLAND OF THE RAPED WOMEN There are no paved roads here and all of the goats are well-behaved. Mornings, beneath thatched shelters, we paint wide-brimmed straw hats. We paint them inside and outside. We paint very very fast. Five hats a morning. We paint very very slow. One hat a week. All of our hats are beautiful and we all look beautiful in our hats. Afternoons, we take turns: mapping baby crabs moving in and out of sand, napping, baking. We make orange and almond cake. This requires essence and rind. Whipped cream. Imagination. We make soft orange cream. This requires juice of five oranges and juice of one lemon. (Sometimes we substitute lime for the lemon. This is also good.) An enamel lined pan. Four egg yolks and four ounces of sugar. This requires careful straining, constant stirring, gentle whisking. Watching for things not to boil. Waiting for things to cool. We are good at this. We pour our soft orange cream into custard cups. We serve this with sponge cake. Before dinner, we ruffle pink sand from one another's hair. This feels wonderful and we pretend to find the results interesting. We all eat in moderation and there is no difficulty swallowing. We go to bed early. (Maybe, we even turn off lights. Maybe, we even sleep naked. Maybe.) We all sleep through the night. We wake eager from dreams filled with blue things and designs for hats. At breakfast, we make a song, chanting our litany of so much collected blue. We do not talk of going back to the world. We talk of something else sweet to try with the oranges: Sponge custard. Served with thick cream or perhaps with raspberry sauce. We paint hats. We paint hats. __________________________________________________ A-NOTE Frances Driscoll's poems have been in MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW, NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, PLOUGHSHARES, and WILLOW SPRINGS, among other places. Gillian Conoley published "Island of the Raped Women" in VOLT and nominated it for a Pushcart Prize. It won and Bill Henderson included it in PUSHCART PRIZE ANTHOLOGY XIX (1995). "Wild Ribbons" originally appeared in VOLT, too, and "Difficult Word" in 13th MOON. Black River Press did a chapbook of Driscoll's poems, TALK TO ME, in 1987. She has an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida; and, in a poem called "Subsidies," says: "Sometimes return is all anyone wants." __________________________________________________ COPYRIGHT (C) MUDLARK 1996 All rights revert to the author upon publication. 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