Top of the Stairs and to the Right

Leaning In--
Pin River--Kissimmee, 2008
by Maya Lin

Top of the Stairs and to the Right

A perfect teaching,

complete and stopped…

for stories persuade, cajole, tremble the language

to honey that clings to the knife.

                                           The World

                                           Jane Hirshfield

Even though it’s stationary and the threat

of it falling is all in my head, I make it

enough of a problem that I stop

whatever it is I’m doing and attend

it.  Today I had to postpone the coronation

of a dead Japanese emperor, the de-

facing of Sylvia Plath’s grave, a Chinese

emissary from jumping into the fire

or blades of sacrifice and shift everything

that lives behind my back: the flopping empty

pack, mouth opening like a terribly worn through lip

or lobe that’s lost all its support, forever

and entirely.  And there's the old pair of Birkenstocks
I keep meaning
to take to town to see to

their repair.  There's a book I’d wanted to

lend to a kid I know about a girl living in her own

dystopia who is the only one allowed

and maybe the only one in the community who can

see the color blue. So once everything is made

shipshape or mostly, the straight edges

of all these voices begin again in their falling:
off the appointment

calendar or mostly just shut up in their bound

houses of paper: paper spines, and yes, paper

bones, paper brains, paper lips, paper (hidden, mind)

pricks and paper clitorises.  I imagine a body

or two in a French sewer in the dark, someone like

Jean Valjean tucked at my elbow and that sudden

flood of light, how he squints and turns

away, arms flung over his face.  Maybe, in the dust

of the cover, he can manage a moan after

all these nearly century and a half.  It’s chilling

(if I were mad I’d go madder still) to think of all

these people in this room, and places, and

tensions and techniques, I’d needed

once to defend myself against a maniac (and I keep

those books behind the door like a loaded

shotgun, Ueshiba and his fist of peace ).  But today,
this morning, the one

who stops me is the saint
the poet evokes, but only after

the winter apple tree, or sleeping in

Plath’s bed, or the Crown Prince Sawara, and Wu

Feng the emissary who disguised himself to die

so the high mountain people would see

their own, finally, brutality.  Saint Elizabeth

of Hungary, who, (and this is her Catholic

description) “was provided with

physical beatings” by her spiritual

confessor, a Master

Conrad of Marburg.   Tell me, because I’ve

been in places where I held the chord

in my hands and flung it from my knees

up and over my head to my white bare

back, what was he trying to beat out of her?  She

was known for her roses, for her bread. 

Was she longing for her murdered mother?  Her

children she bore before she was

a vowed Franciscan nun?  Imagine!  Was provided.

Yes, I can and I do, all through these years

of trying to walk upright.  I confess: I was

hungry for most of my childhood.  If it wasn’t

food it was something else: shoes

that didn't pinch or embed my toenails.
And loose slacks and loose shirts

so the man would stop groping my crotch
and boobs.  I could’ve used an Elizabeth, and her lap

of roses.  Or maybe even knowing about her

so that it all came to purpose: those dead

emperors who stopped the famine, poets

who gaged the door jamb with tea towels,

ladies were made into saints after their skin

was lifted from the back they ‘provided’.  No

wonder, coming into this room some mornings,

I am driven, I take to straightening out

the loose things, the ashes of yesterday’s, last

week’s, incense, the scraps of paper my daughter

wrote on eight years ago, pushing her black

marker hard on the paper.  I’m hushing them all,

hushing them, shut behind those paper walls,  
the women bearing children, lying in beds, chocking

a whimper after the whipping.  You know,

she was made into a saint.  I said that already.

But what I didn’t know is that she was dug

up and scattered, her bones crushed under

the wheels of wagons on their way into the new

centuries, turning up in cities she’d never

ever heard of.  But for some, the dead do not go on.

They stay put, until they need a little push,

until they are opened, cautiously, to the light

and soothed, honey on the welts rising, warming

the unguent, the fingertips applying it.