I Had It Coming
I maneuvered through
autograph seekers
to shake the hand of
the “superior writer,”
to introduce myself
as a member of her tribe.
As reward for my insincerity
I was gifted a long minute
of lofty indifference and
perfectly crafted belittling
questions, my fumbling
answers met with a smile
of clearly drawn contempt.
I should have snuck off
into the night.
But no.
As punishment for my insincerity
the bad feeling came back
at breakfast. There it was
as I corrected my slouch
at the too high dining-room
table. My best ballerina posture
only making me feel
more in need of a bib.
Pigeon
It took me a long time to admit to myself that my mom was not a good cook. Her daily fare was hampered by a fondness for short-cut or “magic” recipes which promised to produce spectacular results with little effort, evidenced by the number of dishes such as “Impossible Pie” or “Miracle Tuna” in her recipe collection. She was bored to death by the daily culinary duties and viewed hours in the kitchen as oppressive.
But there were vivid exceptions. They always took the form of elaborate cooking projects more akin to the sensual pleasures of artmaking than the drudgery of domestic service. It was as if a sort of non-utilitarian “food for food’s sake” compulsion would suddenly overtake her. These projects inevitably had a cultural education angle that necessitated enlisting me, my brothers, and any neighborhood kids that happened to be hanging around.
In the fall of 1973, it was croissants. She had fallen in love with the flakey French breakfast bread the previous summer while camping in France. Every morning a freshly stocked boulangerie cart would visit the campsites. My mom would hand me a few francs and send me off with a well-rehearsed phrase, “cinq croissants, s’il vous plait.” I was nine and already quite aware of my love for warm, fresh, bready foods and anything with a high fat content. When we returned to the States, Pillsbury crescent rolls, which was what was available at the Safeway supermarket, had their weird kind of processed-food charm, but tasted nothing like the real thing. So of a weekend my mom decided that we would tackle our craving by learning to make croissants from scratch.
The green linoleum surface of the table in the breakfast-room was cleared of its piles of bills and phone books to provide a large, flat surface. Here, with flour, rolling pin, and a sort of loose assembly-line of tasks for us kids involving flour supply and the delivery of moist towels to keep the pastry from drying out, my mom demonstrated and supervised the delicate labor of rolling out what felt like infinite layers of thin dough and sweet butter. Squares of dough were rolled into little ziggurat mounds. The ends were crabbed inward then placed on a sheet pan and into the oven they went. What emerged was crispy, chestnut-brown croissants with soft, warm, airy insides. Each bite conjured a memory of those dewy mornings in frosty French campgrounds, weak showers metered by coin-operated water heaters, plastic sandals, days touring Loire Chateaux . . .
And then there was the summer we canned endless jars of apricot preserves. How did this come about? The apricot tree in the backyard of our Albatross Street home produced fruit every year, and never before had my mother felt the need to harvest it. Safeway’s shelves were lined with Smuckers, and we had adequate means. But suddenly it was an important lesson. “Putting up” preserves allowed the texture of my mother’s 1930s depression-era West Texas farm childhood to striate and deepen the smoothness of our 1970s prepackaged San Diego upbringing. This was crucial domestic history.
I remember, during this project—which seemed to go on for weeks and weeks—the feel of the word “pectin.” Though I didn’t quite understand what it meant, I associated it with another common and vaguely mysterious word from childhood: “penicillin.” I remember the white waxy discs we set on top of the jam jars before screwing on the golden lids. The lids had two parts so they wouldn’t get stuck: the central disc and the rim. But most of all I remember standing on a step stool at the height of the lowest smooth branches of our apricot tree picking the fruit I could reach, my pigeon perched beside me.
My pigeon was so well and happy it was difficult to believe that she had ever been in mortal peril. But she had. Downed, one wing dragging, I had discovered her flailing on the rough pebbly concrete of Robinson Mews—the little alleyway behind our house. A gray vulnerability by the back gate. I kneeled down beside her in my purple Sears’ Toughskin™ jeans. When she did not startle or move I knew she was wounded. I scooped her up and brought her into the house. After a ritual hydrogen peroxide rub down, from the worry I had touched something diseased, my mother accepted my decision to rescue the pigeon. Though her rural childhood might have inured her to creature suffering, to hear her tell of it the opposite was true. Any notion I had of a life where kittens were casually drowned and decapitated chickens ran amok, I owed to her stories of her El Paso childhood. Together we did triage on the bird and determined that she had a broken wing.
“The Rock Pigeon (also known as the Rock Dove) is the common pigeon seen in almost every urban area across the continent,” I read in Birds of Virginia, surprised that a specialized regional guide would even bother to include pigeons. But I’m glad that it has, because I also learn for the first time, some forty-four years after I saved one sickly specimen of this often-maligned bird, that pigeons were “introduced from Europe, where they inhabited rocky cliffs.” Modern cities are perfect for them. Who among urban dwellers has not waded through scores of pigeons in city parks? Many appear disabled, this one with a club foot, that one with missing tail feathers, another one-eyed. The pink, fleshy legs always the most vulnerable. Despite our attempts to discourage pigeons from settling, they do not seem to fear us, cooing and courting in the public square. Whenever I see that cross-hatch of thin metal spikes outside a hotel window in Manhattan, or on a roof top, my skin tightens. I imagine pigeon impact and cringe. Do they learn to recognize these dangers and avoid them? The damaged feet say no. I’ve heard people call them “flying rats,” associating them with vermin and pestilence, but they are no worse vectors than ourselves. Perhaps we humans have transferred our own worries about the healthfulness of urban environments onto these concrete-and-metal colored birds from the Family Columbidae. A pigeon, it turns out, is really just a jaded and adaptable dove.
My mom helped me find my pigeon a temporary sick bed: a shoebox lined with a scrap of old dish towel. I provided water, and a few crumbs of bread. My mother helped me to set the wing with a tongue depressor and gauze. The pigeon was small and seemed, to my ten-year-old eyes, grateful. I brought the box in the bedroom I shared with my brother Fred. I have no memory of how I kept the cats, who may have been at the origin of the bird’s injury, away. Rooms in our house were rarely closed, but I must have arranged for a measure of caution because my pigeon remained safe. Over the weeks of nursing her I grew fond of her gentle company, her little grey head, her reddish eyes. For the first few weeks she showed no desire to leave her shoebox, but by the time we were picking apricots, something had changed.
She began to rise and puff up her chest, as if she were trying to tell me that she was getting ready for flight. Though the gauze had been off for a week or so, she still held her wing close to her side. My mother’s apricot jam project provided a perfect opportunity for a supervised reintroduction to the outdoors. I carried my pigeon’s box out to the apricot tree, climbed up the step stool, and tilted the box toward a low branch. She hesitated. “It’s okay,” I said. “You can do it.” I tipped the box slightly and she slid down and onto the branch. “You need some fresh air,” I scolded her in that bossy tone children use when parenting toys and pets. When I stepped back down to the ground, my pigeon was above me looking down. She stood still on the branch and seemed nervous to be without the safety of her temporary little room. The July weather was warm and pleasant. I picked up the colander and climbed back on the step stool. We stood shoulder to shoulder, my pigeon and I, as I picked all the fuzzy oval apricots within my reach.
At the end of the day my quiet companion willingly returned to her shoebox. And so it went for several days as the apricot project progressed. When there was no more fruit to harvest I still made a practice of taking my pigeon out for a branch sit. In the kitchen, heaps of apricots were being skinned and sugared, boiled and cooled, an infantry of canning jars gradually filled and sealed.
A few days after the canning was completed my mother made fresh white bread from scratch. It had the slightly sweet taste of Carnation instant milk and smelled strongly of yeast. She spread the still warm slices with butter followed by a smear of the apricot preserves we had all made together. I walked out to the backyard in my bare feet holding a thick slice in my hand. My pigeon was sitting on the apricot tree just where I had left her. My eye followed a lizard scurrying into the grass. There was a sudden sensation of upward motion and like a shameless thought my pigeon was gone.
My Human Soul
My mother will soon be dead. I know this, and I do not. So fierce is she that I have come to think of her as a distinct species, exempt from our common share in morbidity. Or perhaps this is merely a wish. It is February 1989. In an unprecedented détente, I am not speaking to this all-powerful creature from whom, it is said, I issued. During one of my daily visits to check on the needs of her cancer-ridden body she, quite out of character, and without warning or provocation, had burst into a rage and begun to berate me. I turned my back on her and left. Then I bloomed with a sickly guilt. . . . I dread that she will cast me away, for I fall, I mis-take, I fail in her mission.
A few weeks later S., in our new nightly poem-reading ritual, chooses Robert Duncan’s “My Mother Would Be a Falconress.” I lie on our bed during his recitation, paralyzed by self-reproach. The strange hypnotic cadence, the Medieval mood, the high poetic tone, the alluring use of the strange conditional “would be,” the mysterious word “gerfalcon,” the controlling, yet caring falconress riding with her “gay falcon” on her wrist: all of it gets to me. But it is the shame of recognition that undoes me: She uses a barb that brings me to cower. It does not matter as I listen that I know nothing of falconry: For she has muffled my dreams in the hood she has made me, / sewn round with bells, jangling when I move.
“Throughout history powerful women have practiced falconry—from Russian tsarinas and English queens to Bavarian noblewomen,” I read in an article on falconry in the October 2018 issue of National Geographic. I am now 54 years old. My mother has been dead for almost thirty years. At long last I learn that gyrfalcons (not “gerfalcon” as it is spelled in the poem) are the largest of the falcon species and “highly intelligent.” They were “introduced to European falconers by Norse merchants and became Iceland’s most precious export during the Middle Ages.” The article includes a beautiful painting of a Medieval noble woman with an artic gyr sitting on her gloved wrist. She is blonde and pale, childlike and caring. Her head is bent toward the bird, her lips poised as if she’s cooing. Looking closely I can see that her gloved hand holds not only the bird but a golden cord wrapped like a lasso. This is the “creance”: “a long fine line or cord attached to a hawk’s leash, by which she is restrained from flying away when being trained” (OED). The name of this restraint, ironically, is an archaic word meaning “belief” or “trust.” Guilt is the “creance” of possessive motherlove.
I also recently learned, from T. H. White’s story of obsession, The Goshawk, about “Hawk Furniture”—all of the accoutrements that aid the falconer in controlling the falcon. A “bewit” is a short leather cord used to attach a bell to a falcon’s leg. The bell serves to locate a bird in the field. A “jess” is a shorter creance, it restrains the falcon when it “bates,” that is, bolts in an attempt to fly away. The hood, a medieval Arabic innovation, is a decorative cap used to blindfold birds-of-prey—known for their visual acuity—in order to keep them calm. After the “creance,” it is the hood that interests me most.
In The Goshawk, T. H. White’s nightly war-of-wills with his newly acquired, still wild, bird mirrors that of a sleep-deprived first-time mother shattered by the frightening fits of a newborn. One minute he feels affection, the next exasperation, speaking kindly to “Gos,” but all the while thinking “you bloody little sod.” At my birth my mother—like the chicks I would later hold in my palm at the San Diego Children’s Zoo—had been covered in a yellowish fuzz. Jaundice caused by Hepatitis. It was for this reason that I had not been taken to the breast. But there was also the annoying fact that I was female. “It had never occurred to me that I’d have a girl,” my tomboy mother liked to say, as if she were still sorting out how the mix up came about.
In the preface to my first book of poems I would write: “Where literature is found has less to do with its force than who we are when we find it.” When my ears took in Duncan’s “My Mother Would Be a Falconress” for the first time I was a young woman who one minute was longing to fly far, far beyond the curb of my mother’s will, and the very next wishing that my mother and I would never be parted: Yet it would have been beautiful, if she would have carried me,/always, in a little hood with the bells ringing,/at her wrist, and her riding to the great falcon hunt, and me / flying up to the curb of my heart from her heart. . . .
I was these things and the poem knew it. It knew that I could love, fear, and even—though I could hardly admit it—hate my mother. It knew the power of psychological captivity. It knew what it was like to feel disoriented in an emotional labyrinth through which the only thread that can guide you out is held by the hand that entrapped you.
Not remotely strong enough to break from my mother’s creance, I had, unconsciously, found one of my species to help me by falling in love with S. That my first steps toward an adult relationship might put my dream of being “carried . . . always” by my mother in serious jeopardy never occurred. I had forgotten a central, though never explicitly articulated, rule of my training: She draws a limit to my flight./ Never beyond my sight, she says. My mother’s jealousy was always couched as concern: “I only wish,” she said to me a few weeks after we’d ended our détente, “considering you now have conflicting loyalties, that I didn’t have to burden you with my illness. . . .”
I heard and I read “My Mother Would Be a Falconress” as a poem, paying no heed to “A Lammas Tiding,” the prose piece that precedes it in Duncan’s 1968 volume Bending the Bow and serves to explain its genesis. Had I done so, I would have learned that, in falconry, hoods are not, in fact, “sewn round with little bells,” a detail which had always struck me as particularly cruel but which I took on faith as accurate. I had long been disquieted by the fact that things may enter our ears against our will. As a girl, even the noise from my heartbeat, as it bounced off my pillow, frightened me. Would it never stop? . . . where I dream in my little hood with many bells / jangling when I’d turn my head.
To me those bells sewn round the hood were an allegory for the superego’s complicity with the mother’s voice, jangling with every move of the head. The poem speaks of a hooded silence that leads to sleep, but it has been my experience that, even in sleep, the bells keep ringing. They peal through the portal of dreams. That is why, I tell myself, my dreamlife often seems wholly ignorant of the waking fact that my mother is dead.
The poem also knows that death is not the end of it:
My mother would be a falconress,
and even now, years after this,when the wounds I left her had surely heald,
and the woman is dead,
her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart
were broken, it is stilld
I would be a falcon and go free.
I tread her wrist and wear the hood,
talking to myself, and would draw blood.
This denouement follows a climax in which, in his attempt to reach the nesting ground of the other falcons, the bird/child in the poem defies the falconress/mother by flying high, high in the air. In mythic fashion he looks west to the dying sun, where, he says poignantly: it seemd my human soul went down in flames. The human soul goes down so that the bird soul may soar.
But what would it mean for a poet’s avian soul to be cast in the form of a falcon rather than a songbird? Turned to killing, driven by the hunt. And what would happen if a songbird were kept and trained by a falconress who wished she were a raptor? How will the bird fail in her mission, though she desires what her trainer desires? When will she let me bring down the little birds, / pierced from their flight with their necks broken, / their heads like flowers limp from the stem?
To my young mind the “little birds” that the trained falcon must bring back to the falconress stood for every bit of life I sought outside of my mother’s purview. Each tidbit brought back and placed before her, in compensation for the life she’d sacrificed to my training, that she might enhance her limited existence vicariously through my own: as if I were her own / pride, as if her pride / knew no limits, as if her mind / sought in me flight beyond the horizon.
My mother’s favorite “little birds,” I learned one day at the age of twenty, were poems. She had wanted to be a writer, a fiction writer. I would be a writer, a poet. Each poem I brought back perfectly was praised: She rewards me with meat for my dinner. What, I wondered, would become of these little bird poems once the falconress’s fierce eyes are closed for good?
Which leads me to ask once again: must a woman die for a poet to be born? I was twenty-five years old and had been writing poetry since the age of twenty when my mother’s cancer finally claimed her life. I thought I was a poet, and in some ways I was. But grief for this woman changed me. And in the wake of her death all of the poems—those perfect little birds—became as limp as broken flowers, mere juvenilia. Had I been freed, or had I finally entered into what would become my “appalling destiny”? I was miserable and knew not who I was without my mother’s commands. When death took her from me my human soul went down in flames. Now I was all bird, and had nothing left to do but sing.
