mary june brown

Encantada, 2011. Welcomeness in high-backed and saluting attendance.

The first day of a new year. The burgeoning dawn and the lunar goodbye.

I made sad and fumbling missteps as I reached out for hands to lead me through 2010. I relied erroneously and pitifully on diagrams provided to me by souls more lost than me. I pulled over again, then again, on the sides of desultory and haphazard roads, resting my forehead against the steering wheel and wondering where it was I meant to have traveled. (These things, they happened always in the rain, and sometimes even in the sun. But always, always on days it rained.)

I will want more in 2011. And I will dredge the lakes and streams for thick, green bottles, where wiser maps reside.
###

How will she be remembered? Solemn and clever? Or smart with her big books and stories, piling rusty sentences into corrugated boxes and stacking, stacking, stacking them, constructing a history as big and persuasive as she can.

Was she entertaining? Or was she tiresome with the melancholy, the going dark, the glum and repetitive hitting of the lightswitches. There! The lights are on and every flaw is presented in ivory bas-relief. Scrutinize her and feel free to give opinions, suggestions, corrections. She’ll accept them all, wholesale. Then her hand toggles the lever that shuts off all the glowing stars, and you are sunk into the pitch once again. Do you remember that? What about the blasted background sound she made, the incessant and uncomfortable drumming called insecurity.

Do not do that. Do not remember her that way, the summons of her memory bearing itself in metered time, no spangles and no frothy laughter. She’s gone swimming in a bath that is illuminated from the bottom up. The paintings are brighter, and the tastes are sweeter. Confidence took her hand and kissed her inside the soul, where it counts. This near-November, there aren’t tears and wrung-out hands, tortured poems and missives shredded through cut glass: there is only lovely loveliness, love, the thing poets for centuries have grasped and clung to. Love. Listen to that. Look at that!

Remember that.

###

She tells herself to do this: write when things aren’t right.

The bleeding at the keyboard, words fabricating a bandage. Melancholy drains from the heart, seeping out through the ends of her fingers when she pushes them against the keyboard, words forming those compresses to contain the hemorrhaging. Recording language, smithing structure, massaging verbiage, reaching in the grab-bag of a heart. (Feel the vessels and the damp heat in the heart, feel it pump and thrum: that’s pain there). Words offering self-solace and consolation from disappointments, dashed hopes, despair. Loneliness.

That’s when she writes best.

And so there are big gaps in the chronology of that thing, her life. The absence of words marking contentment. The quiet means she’s operating in the easier and gentler channels of time. Less words mean her hand is being held and there is comfort and care and joy. There is that.

She’s going to watch the clouds go sailing. She’s going to taste some wine. She’s going to take it easy. The writing suffers but the heart thrums along, now delighted.
###

He called her a hostage and there was a time that would have thrilled her soul, to the bone, marrow vibrating with enchanted hope for that particular prison.

What bells ring now. Bells of freedom, carillons that shout with relief that she has moved astride the Phantom Spectre, given the slip to his outsized shadow. Like finger puppets against a child’s bedroom wall, fangs and horns creeping ever closer, when the lamp is flicked on, the shadows fall away and all that remains is a soft and small hand, held close to the plaster. Defenseless and innocent.

In the clink. Him, the jailer. Somehow he is kind, or impervious, enough to put that big brass key well within her reach and somehow, she accepts it. Feels the weight of it in the palm of her hand. Places it in her mouth for a moment to taste it’s metallic bite against her gums, her teeth.

Well, he’s incurious and satisfied. And she won’t abide that. All. Or nothing. Place the key into it’s slot, feel it click and fit. Turn it and feel the satisfying groove, a key making love to a lock, jigsaw’d. Swing the door wide.

A hostage on the lam.

###

She’s a queen and a sovereign and she gave him an audience in front of her, where he stood, back stiff and hands at his sides, full of military bearing.

She waves a hand. He’s dismissed; he may begin his depart march. (Her body sinks back into her chair, where she rests, poised and serene, her face composed.)

He doesn’t know it, but when he leaves that room, her troop of chastisers marches in, loosed from the shadows. Clubs and sticks raised in reprimand, the purple bruises begin to bloom inside her chest, where nobody will ever see them, and where they remain sore and tender, long after his footfalls are out of her hearing.
###

September the fourth. A whole night spent writing from within the rings of fire, at the circus. A whole block of hours spent suspended from reality, the nets below disintegrating and unraveling. September the fourth is the anniversary of her spirit’s inward collapse, the reckoning and the tallying up…it is the day she lay down her masks and her costumes, the day she stopped flinging bright glitter from her hands so that those who looked at her would not look into her eyes, but out into the air all around her, where magic and color swirled.

September the fourth. The day the jesters stopped dancing, the night a Phantom Spectre cracked a whip and all the lions ceased their roaring, the entire circus coming to an abrupt stop, the trick walls and paint and electronic cannons all illuminated.
###

No hay a quien culpar.

Tonight. I stood unsteady on my feet, as though I had my fifth glass of wine in hand and searching for the sixth, but I had no wine left, and here is what I thought: I’m surprised at this, this day…that this day is here and I stand like this alone, a tree trunk sawed off and blackened out in the verdant forest. This is where I am. Unsteady on my feet, rooted and burnt, my bark felling its blackened crust all about me. But poised where I’ve never been poised.

I feel the wind upon my oaken mask, the skin underneath thin and bruised. Settled like I never was; oh, I eat it up, this day, the newness of it. Scooping it in huge bites into my mouth, into the pitted whirls in the wood. Using my fingers, no patience for utensils or spades.

Things move along. No blame and no recrimination. Some more love waiting out there for you, some more love out there for me, too.

It’s true that things move along.
###

I am working on a novel and am seeking feedback on the “voice” or “tenor” of the book. I have essentially written the same material in two different treatments and would like input. If you are interested and willing to give me about 30 minutes of your time, please contact me: maryjunebrown@hotmail.com

Thank you!

Have looked, not found

Googley, yahooie

Your name in quotes bears

Nothing, nothing.

Eleven years swim like eels

Various directions

A flash of silver there

A sprite of orange here

You’ve taken shelter somewhere

In the desert, a movie not playing

I can’t know where it’s playing

Ghosts and eels colliding
###

someone–not the love of your

Life

has you more than I have

You.

What?

What does that make me?

I’m without. No power.

No. No, not anything.

Nothing at all.

That is all.

###