sitting on the steps, leaving on a bike, at 10

There is a plausible reason why
women (may) tend to believe it is
they who are rejected.
The apparatuses of ideologies
repeatedly soak them so.
But long ago, before all these

we were ten and I said something
that had hurt you and I was sorry
and you wouldn't accept it,
refusing the popsicle offering
already starting to melt in my hand.
Sitting on the steps that summer

I learned who will always be
fearful; and suddenly fearful 
of my own discovery, I 

threw away the offering in anger.
The popsicle's sweetness 
melting away, its bone to the sun.

Was it my first desperation then?
The first grand show 
to the largest audience of one

whose magnificence I discovered
and feared. And she?
She wouldn't even look at me.

So at ten, I took my bike and
learned to leave in pompous glory.

what a wo/man does

What a woman does, it seems, is keep   But who am I to talk about woman?
all windows and doors, holes, slits,   When there is truly no difference.
fissures and cracks, gaps, spaces,     No lines of be-ing. 

open. That is no sin.                  Isn't everyone not and is     
The sense of whole-ness.               The same?

A continuous flow of wind & water,
fire and memory. There is no sin.      An endless lecture on construction,
Only a means to control people, his-   Suspicion and disbelief...

story, ideology...                     Also, indefatigable hope
I have stopped believing               In all its sarcasm and irony.

six hundred lifetimes ago. Not enough  
knows how we receive distorted forms   I am tempted to ask her
after translations: Freud's            Straightforward.

"die Seele" which meant "the soul"     But here, now, much caution
became "mind" in the pages rendered    Almost not unlike young again.

into what seems an undying treatise.
It is difficult to trust               Is it her rejection?
the nuances after a long time.         There is truly no difference.














                                     
                   

the teddy bear and the doll

Simone de Beauvoir might as well have corrected 
Freud, showing him without raising her voice, 
how the lack is not the girl's, but the boy's.

Freud had glorified the boy's little thing which
Simone describes as wart, in other words,
insignificant. She says

everyone begins protected and pees sitting down, 
until the boy 
is weaned again and is told

"Stand up, you are a man."
"Stand up, be a man."

And so the pain is converted, becomes aversion.
The want, into compensation. 
And then both of them meet, Freud and Simone,

on the same road noting the girl with her doll
and the boy with his penis and his animal toy,
the teddy. Notice

it is Freud, as nearly all men, who is trapped
in his family name; it is Simone who has her own.
As nearly all women, able to move fluidly

one house into another, belonging truly to
no one but herself. Her own name she keeps
no matter the changing family names.

It is all, really, a matter of perspective.

Whenever I see a woman, I know how small I am
against the mystery of worlds, the layers
she knows of life and living and loving, depths

I can never be, trapped on the shallows.
How I compensate, like everyone else.

born not a woman

Should I be born again, I do not want
To be a woman.
She is capacity of the world and in it.
The weight of the sky
In her eyes

Even when she laughs and she smiles at you
Like you have given her the world,
You'd know you didn't, couldn't.
How she can carry 

Worlds and give birth to them, allowing
To take parts of herself she can
Not ever grow back.
Beside her what is a man

But an illusion of grandeur. Safely
Ignorant in this way, his sound deep 
Like a log hollow
Allowing him through all seasons

To stay afloat, surviving better
Ever on the surface, lacking depth.

drowning with woman

Counterculture communes in the 60s and 70s
attempted to distill love
through music, herbs, and freedom in forest
idyllic edens or as thought to be.

My own short experience told me 
youth has a way of imagining 
as does any spring beginnings.
To have a time of easy belief in hope

has its own good, if only to make the later years
bearable with dream-like memories. 

There is always something beautiful
about the long ago we have lived or survived.
Thus, that smile when we are
alone one morning with second cup of coffee

and remembering. Times, there, of love
also of beauty we had not recognised
while it looked us on the face. Gentle gust.
Perched on our palms like easy wind.  

How time flies. 

The hours we wasted arguing and hating
each other as much as ourselves for 
nonetheless loving both self and other. 
No counterculture communes truly survived.

There is no way to distill love.

built for the boulders

My mother once said men are stronger than women
only "from the waist up."  She meant the shoulders.

She added women are stronger than men "waist down". 
"To bear children."  And meant the legs.

Or perhaps she meant something else entirely
I did not understand.

Maybe men bear what men can and must.
And women are able to keep a stable ground

in spite of what moves:  changes, seasons, quakes.

Atlas can shrug.
Woman keep her ground.

This is all a matter of conjecture.  Of course.
Not at all unlike Hugo's.

I think about the many women I know.  
Steadfast, how they hold the center:

mother, sister, friends.  And she
who smiles at me when I tell her:

This is the street where that restaurant is.
And even though am not sure, she holds my hand

in the humid, windless night and says, "Let's go."

a lesser man

I.
the first time i met d* i almost run out of wind, that kind
when you are caught between exhaling and inhaling
so strong the point of shock.  i thought i saw my mother.

a most curious case and i had to remind myself
i was seeing another.  even though there really
was less mistaking in that smile.  
also, those eyes.  the oval face.

of course, mother is older.  with more wear.  a difference
in contexts and years.  although i could not help thinking
seeing d* i am seeing my mother in times much happier.

a lucky man who won her.  although 
i could not say the same for her.


II.
one of my fears is becoming my father.  i look 
at the mirror and see more and more his face.  
some day i am going to write the whole of it.
but not now.  not yet.


III.
there are a moments of most clarity.  
when i see her and wonder
what she sees in this man--
raised to be stubborn, built as 
less.  who meets her halfway 
only under light of day.

what does it take to be a woman.
a man will never know.
he who is always
lesser beside her.

ways to see

1.  i met A* in a poetry reading, she has two sons, both of them with autism, and she writes poetry.  on her page, she posts Mary Oliver and photos of her sons.  recently she tells about doing a little grocery with the boys, and posts another photo of them playing with water at their front yard.  

2.  in a documentary about children with autism, i thought about their parents and the strength of unconditional love.  maybe reasons had been asked, but expectedly no direct answers were given.  still, the carry on.

3.  a student wrote on her paper that faith is learning the imperfections and still believing in it.  i wrote nothing on the margins.

4.  when i was growing up, about eight or nine, there was a boy who was about four or five years my senior.  he was always in bed and his large frame always carried around by the small woman who was his mother.  i always wondered why he wouldn't just move himself, always wondered why his mother was always so kind.  it took many years before i understood the kindness of a big heart.  and love was not even yet mentioned.

5.  in many torn countries, there remains being a mother.  when they tell stories about carrying and giving birth and raising children in extreme conditions, it is unimaginable.  the strength of a human heart.  

6.  in the early of mornings, when flying flocks can still be seen on the sky and the new sunlight is soft, some young mothers in the neighborhood can be seen carrying their babies for sun, for vitamin D, i am reminded my own paucity. 

this world as a fold

teach me how to fold origami, fold this paper
piece the way slender fingers do

they are graceful as a woman's,
as precise

as her heart the way it holds the brim of a world
into a cup of her hand.

to make sense of the world,

some resort to words and the trouble (and pains) of definitions: this is
what is, and therefore, that is not.  in other words, this is

the drawing of lines.  the making of differences,  the pointing
of marked territories, otherwise known as concepts.  

or boundaries.  whichever is deemed closest  to or farthest from
the perceived real ("real", of course, being a construct

which no one says, unless...)  Simone says
"One is not born---

but becomes one" which sums the efforts of many who trouble 
(and pain) with definitions:  what we think we know

we may not really know.






*the full text by Simone de Beauvoir is "One is not born a woman, but becomes one."