THE WAY TO LARISSA, A DIALOGUE

(Yakville Housewife Meets Xantippe)

 

 

Y.H.

“Let me introduce myself, an older woman,

having been Successful lucklessly enough.

I could only be a bimbo, soccer mom, or

old maid teacher, tried them all by turns, the stuff

 

and very source of separation. And as I age,

every second shopgirl tries to cheat me. Dozens

of years of days of hours consumed without a trace

but for these mean and caustic ashes, doing husband’s

 

cooking, cleaning, shopping, weeding, washing, lying,

here I lie – buried in a standard case.

A paperback analyst saw woman’s soul as dying

after needful generation of the race,

 

since by her nature she can never emulate

a Tribal Chieftan, Elder Statesman, any Public

Type of the Mature, Accomplished Figure. Great

with dreams, I find I stand like those stilted arctic

 

villages, that last by keeping the chill upholds them.

Surely, I must share the patron saint of both

the scholar and the shoolboy, pedantry and doldrums;

be good all year, pretend belief, and get the gold.

 

How I wish I were the Truthflower, turning dead

and white if harvested for a domestic table,

lost its heavenly blue. It won’t let us pretend

and savor its downfall.”

 

 

XAN:

 

            “Up from the noisome fog of my fable,

I was there in the broad hall with your high school suitor

in the days when the steady boyfriend collared his girl

by the back of the nape between his thumb and forefinger, herding

her along, her face in shadow – for you all

 

looked down.  What was the dark thought behind that down-

cast face? Perhaps the alien growing in you, taking

parts against its mind, suspected with a frown

that life is not a play nor goodness skill at acting.

 

Don’t you recall those perfect-seeming English ladies,

cycling out thrice daily for an egg, a bun,

a cutlet, irreproachable in tweeds or maybe

summer shirtwaist, de rigueur the corset, dun-

 

toned Oxfords (two-inch heels), the proper stockings, hat –

such visions of sturdy, upright posture, poised to backpedal,

acting much to their advantage, yet they had

less freedom moving through their world than these worm gatherers

 

with their flags and girlie stickers, not to mention

unwashed cowboy way out West with super hat

and duper buckle making us think of him as handsome.

Hat or flag’s low dues to pay to join a frat!

 

And better be a partial mismatch with your world

than render everything you make of self to Caesar.

To navigate at all in climes of time, to hold

some course through currents of belief and social weather,

 

is to run counter to the tidal step and gesture.

Dancing on the offbeat won’t win most awards,

but homage to convention can’t make you successful;

it can only make you more conventional.”

 

 

Y.H.:

 

“You mean – if you can’t join them, lick them? Are you mad?

The dying Rosalind Franklin’s Nobel Prize was handed

to a callow boy who judged her not so bad

if only she’d worn lipstick.  Rachel Carson’s passion

 

for the planet was impossible to pundits,

since her only children were adopted. Do

you think that lipstick or gestation undoes

gales of clever, willful malice? Is the truth

 

that even tokens are beside the point although

expedient on some occasions? But our hushing,

full defeat is easy for the wicked, so

inclined, or just indifferent.  And all our rushing

 

to and fro has no effect upon the pendulum

in the passage, slicing off even pieces of life.”

 

 

XAN:

 

“What counts is how you get there in the interim.

Daphne sacrificed her form to own her life;

 

Apollo could catch and keep and own her only as

a laurel crown. They could have what they most wanted,

not their way of wanting it. Suppose he had

a future as a poet, and she, the huntress hunted,

 

would have made a wretched mistress. Voluntary

acts, by choice or not, make character, are what

we become; the bashful, courteous murderer was very

much a killer; the respected wife-beater was

 

a brute; to build the ramp to Massada was the act

of a slave, however to be pitied. All your truly

well intended works unite the matter and

the essence, soul and substance, in one single body,

 

making you whole as if incarnate in a world

of shades upholding brazen masks. But what the next Dark

Age will make of you I cannot say.  Antio!”