(2) hue

 

(2) hue

Old English híew, híw

 n. 1    b. concrete. An apparition, a phantasm. Obsolete.

    2. External appearance of the face and skin, complexion.

                                    OED

This is the story of a small strict obedience,

human blood.

And how it rivered into all its bloods.

Small stream, really, in the midst of all the other ones.

                                                Jorie Graham

                                                  At the Cabaret Now

She paints wounds on her face, great un

-plumbable landscapes of raw or coming-to-

new palates of healing reds and purples

and blues all the hues you'd see in a grievous

sore if you'd let yourself see grievous sores. Her

upper and lower lip have kissed and kissed 

and kissed to a burn, or burns, some layers 

a scorching kind of burn, some layers a wind, some

(and here I can see she's leaned deep 

to her need) teeth--hers and his and the bit

put in as though on a deeply freezing morning.  

And for those of you who know horses, you warm

the metal between your face and hands, 

you bring it to, don't you, your own cheek

so that the mare's wet tongue and lips don't stick 

and don't thrust and nip for her own head and direction

to be all skin pulled off in the slip.  I'm learning

not to parent with my own pulled back bridles, 

and friend I'm here to tell you how hard that is when

there's eyes bulging beneath lids blood-shut 

above the aqueous dream, how the only thing

to keep me sane on my guard-rail edge of a deep

end was to see them not as they were in my own

mother's head but as as some exotic warm water

sea fish, a three hundred pound goliath grouper 

some guy named Ernest tamed with his own

time and line and filleted straight away from the

pumping lungs and the blood was somehow it was

different because it seemed to me they were each

making an exchange that the fish had waited

all these pressured years to be brought to, a kind

 

of Cabaret by Hemingway.  Maybe.  Maybe

not.  But my daughter is not my mother.  I thought

as I watched the on-call trauma nurse talk

to the doctor and say quite plainly because 

my mother was in a coma, how in all her years

this was the worst victim of a domestic

beating she'd ever seen and she looked at me

with what?  pity?  sympathy?  that somehow I'd

too abandoned her, and faithlessly?  Maybe a great

many of anythings accusations I couldn't then

and still can't today read but somehow believe

at least the last of them even while I was deep

between divorces and second marriages.  Do I

need to read anything of it today, how does it

relate to this girl I've who's raised who's painting 

her face and making it look like the lady who raised me?

The men who stole my mother are probably dead

now.  Or maybe they are still living, and one

of them is shifting from room to room in a house

down the street, passing my father sometimes

in the bank.  In the grocery.  They nod politely.

Shoot the shit.  Who knows?  Or even suspects?

Because my father wasn't home when they broke 

her jaw and rib and wrist bones for the dope 

they'd hoped to roll her over for, though it was so low 

a dose they'd done her the way you can only see 

it in the movies.  And so.

Back to those two grouper eyes.  Back to

that hook ripped lip.  Back to the tubes she breathed

through, back to a lonely room in Idaho and a shot-

gun wound.  Gunmetal blues.  I'm telling you,

it's hard to live through hues (the OED has five

different definitions).  Think: color.  Think: Clamour.

Think: calabash.  Think: fashion.  Or think: Cornish

canneries.  A whole plethora of nouns and palates

of transitive or intransitive actions.  Today maybe 

my growing up daughter is none of these or between

one of each - it begins with being pleased to meet

and see yourself, a discrete tongue between the teeth

and somehow pretty is skin deep, somehow she sees

and needs to see herself on the inside bleeding: a spleen

two sets of knees and suddenly she's a fourteen year old 

haunting a grown-up lady and me having none

of it but having no choice but to take it and take

it silently and while taking it, after I look away, 

because we're trained to look away from pain, for face 

value.