Elizabeth SwadosBad Time Chemicals leak, volcanoes explode. In India and Columbia shanties burn. They steam with poison. Villages turn to clay. Mexico city cracks open. The newborn callout from beneath wrecks of fallen walls. The end of those worlds are accidents. An accident means catastrophe that no one did on purpose. No one meant it. No one knows how … God’s back was turned. Oops. The reactor melts down at Chernabys and half of Europe soaks in questionable rain. Ten thousand will die. In Cameroon a volcanic lake wakes with a yawn and thousands die in acid air. It’s an accident. It’s nature. No one meant it. The earth’s whole core is out of line. But not on purpose. Can we go back, think through the past, back, trace backwards to the little acts, the purposeful choices, the facts we ignored, the risks taken, a laziness, a shortcut, a cheat, tiny insignificant adds up, careless but intentional adds up, desperate wrongheaded, but not evil adds up, evil self serving adds up, well intended misinformed adds up, historically in keeping with adds up, no other choice adds up, sinful adds up self righteous blind adds up fatigue adds up confusion adds up imperfect adds up humanity adds up— small oversight and wrongheaded reactions circle like waves knock over sets of reactions waves add up over time adds up and the accident grows in possibility just as a song or a symphony a poem or sermon a scientific discovery small incidents add up the waves grow until … or things just happen. We step on the wrong part of the trail right after a rain; it’s slippery; our knee catches us; we don’t fall over the cliff but our knee … or we are born into the family with the dark hallways, the two sickly grandmothers and the helpless parents. Our sad eyes are full of Russian harmony but also we endure unbelievable ….. or things join together intention and innocence … folded hands, wound fingers calm or waiting calm, knowing, not knowing, wondering some things are accidents in bad times. Like a shuttle shooting into a cold sky and exploding into metal tears No one asked for it. No one expected it. But everybody knew. Because it’s a bad time. Our lives seem to be easy marks. We do what we can. We protect what we can. But even bodyguards step off of curbs that aren’t there. And children play, accidentally, in the line of soldiers fire. Good Love Buddha sat by his tree cross-legged without feet. For years he beamed and watched his disciples play Hai Lai. The holy sages never expected their teacher to romp on the green. But how surprised they were when they learned he had no feet. “It comes when one reaches Satori” explained the Buddha “one learns to dance on point.” Look at the baby who is powerless. All he can be sure of is falling. So the body gives in, softens, rolls rebounds,” The Buddha began to sing in an unknown language. “Does this mean we should cut off our feet” asked the earnest well meaning disciples. Buddha laughed and tried to stand, but his knees were quickly dissolving. “Learn to accept” he smiled. “Learn the receptive.” He fell into the puddle of his loin cloth. “What can we do? How can we help you?” cried the students; “there is nothing to do” smiled the great fat belly. Marina I am like the poet Marina Tsvetarva I fall for every man I meet. Of course this takes some serious editing Tall, short, blonde, dusty, dark or crimson, I love the way a man’s arms hang at his side, I hunger for the smell of the back of his neck. Preferably he doesn’t speak; I don’t care if he’s shaven. I need The cave or muscle of his chest crushed against me. If he’s cold; he’s only, as far as I’m concerned, saving ardor. Before a greeting leaves his lips; we’ve spent a night in the snow. He’s held me through childbirth; our love child, my own birth, he’s raped me in drunken rage, black and blue I forgive him. He sends me such delicate dead pressed flowers and shells in an old book of poetry, he doesn’t sing to me except on the street in the rain when he lifts me, my full skirt, soaked, carries me, kisses me; our lips are cool and wet. He marvels at my patience I endure his nights, he smashes our glassware and shreds books; Pale feverish he chants and pulls at curtains. I hold him even when he swings at me I rock him; we know all men are children so I forgive him rub him down with (cunphor) put out the lamps hold him to me; when he asks me why I do it I say ‘hush’. I am like the poet Marina Tsvetarva I stay true to my lovers before I have them. I wait for them through the war and save my bread crusts beneath the bed. Hell When travelling across the Sahara I bedded under the widespread stars in an airforce sleeping bag. It was so quiet those smooth dunes I couldn’t remember what a sound sounded like And I loved to climb, in the pitch black, onto the top of a hill that ran like water under my feet. And in the wind I howled. I howled. Not knowing the famous poems or the wolf inside myself. I howled to have my own call fill my twenty year old oh so thin body. I howled so the sound would pour down my throat filled with lust into my small proud breasts filled with lust to my caved in belly and my hip bones bare. I howled to my hairless womanly place. A scrawny baby bird Then howled out again Howling myself out of my sexual triangle The howl curled up and landed On the sand. The sand swallowed the howl. As it has swallowed everything before and ever since. Suicide Tune Suicide went out with Sylvia Plath The wistful, pale face; the slightly dirty turtleneck is used up and Janis Jimi Jim and Cass lost their lives and last names to legend addiction, the junk of noise, they couldn’t stand the acoustic world; someone hated them and that was who they jumped off of the stage to embrace. No one, not even Boy George, can overdose without being accused of copyright infringement so even in death we have to be original. What’s a housewife from Buffalo got that Plath didn’t have? Berryman jumped off a bridge and Delmore (Jework) dressed up in a derelic’s death. Dorothy Parker drank, but my mother couldn’t compete. Her mystery novels were returned by every publisher. Her children’s book didn’t last through the rewrite. Her poetry lay in the bottom of her drawer and she never made her bed. Didn’t cook a meal. Could no longer ace a sport. Gloria Steinman you came too late. My mother, convinced that doubts were lethal, convicted herself, punishable by death. What was a housewife in Buffalo to choose, Judy Garland backslid, slurred, floated up and froze. On T.V. she sang old songs like someone humming a recording heard once or twice from another room. Put that woman on a stool. Don’t let her stand for God’s sake her legs are fat. The pills blow up her face. The alcohol distends her neck. Judy Garland, canonized. My mother hidden. Watch Liza repeat her mother’s steps. The tip of the derby, the kick of the legs, the interminable reach towards the audience. In the darkness. The terror. The audience far off. Arms out. Fingers bent upwards like a fan. Palmists say this is a sign of stubbornness. Suicides are not weak. They can belt a song. Spalding Gray in a leap could do for the Daily News what Mishima accomplished for Zen Fangsters. Leaping off bridges takes wings. And my mother. Does she rank with Virginia Woolf? Are bottles of second equal to stones in the pocket and a walk in the pond? No. Death becomes private and not a metaphor. Death becomes loss and those who can’t stop losing choose to make themselves monuments to the dead. By being dead. Suicide isn’t high style. Like most diseases, addictions, and hair do’s, it’s been handed down to the young. They wear it baggy. They wear it cheap. Look how Liza learned her mother’s steps, checked herself into a clinic to memorize her songs for Beat the clock. What are Sylvia Plath’s two children like? They live on a farm outside London with heavy cows and the Queen’s Royal poet. Does the body inherit the wish? Does a change in climate help? Jane Fonda on the floor lifting her legs pitting muscles against regret. She, like me, wants to stay in vernacular. Yet always, always like and old song from a couple rooms away there drifts a nostalgia for darkness. A giving over. A promise. Sentimental. Out of style. Not nearly as “now” as homicide … it haunts, it sings, it breathes its jazz down my back. Will I follow? Elizabeth Swados is a writer, composer and director who creates alternatives to Broadway musicals. Her work is seen in venues from Broadway itself to off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, and internationally. She is the recipient of numerous awards and nominations, including Tony nominations, Village Voice Obie awards, and a PEN citation. Her novels have been published by Picador, Farrar Strauss and Simon & Schuster, along with non-fiction by Harper Collins. She has two books of children's poetry with Scholastic. She resides in NYC and teaches at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. |