We ended staying home and drinking a nice bottle of Old Vine Zinfandel. Ripe but not overwhelming. We had snacks from Whole Foods and comforted the cats when the fireworks started. Happy 2011. I look forward to seeing just what on earth is going to happen.
In the Sunday New York Times was a striking piece in their Modern Love series by Page McBee. The paper uses a remarkable graphic to illustrate what their editors think the piece is saying.
McBee writes about her relationship with Michael, her partner and soon-to-be spouse. She invested her hope for the future in the actual marriage ceremony and how marriage would be transformational. Just before their marriage they are mugged. The emotional impact of this violent act is traumatic to both of them and threatens to tear them apart. The mugger is caught and in the relief that followed for Michael and Page they began to understand something about themselves and each other they had not understood before: Michael began to understand the traumatic impact of violent events before she met Page and Page understood that her anxiety and isolation created by her violent past was more universal than she thought.
Page is not alone in her feelings and Michael, feeling it herself, begins to understand the depths of Page’s feelings. The moment of transformation wasn’t some idealized notion of life after the wedding day but rather the transformation of their mutual victimization and their shared trauma.
I see Page’s revelation as the abrupt movement from wishing for a life different from her own but an impossible idealization to realizing that her life is her own and is not unique or perverse. It is just hers.
I’m writing a plodding literal translation of a very good essay. A wonderful read. I learned something and felt connected to a person 3000 miles away and who has lived a life entirely different from my own. Now THAT is some kind of writing.
I wish for Michael and Page what Marge Piercy writes in her poem Colors passing through us…. “Every day I will give you a color, / like a new flower in a bud vase / on your desk.” What better gift to give and receive in a happy marriage.
Colors passing through us
BY MARGE PIERCY
Purple as tulips in May, mauve
into lush velvet, purple
as the stain blackberries leave
on the lips, on the hands,
the purple of ripe grapes
sunlit and warm as flesh.
Every day I will give you a color,
like a new flower in a bud vase
on your desk. Every day
I will paint you, as women
color each other with henna
on hands and on feet.
Red as henna, as cinnamon,
as coals after the fire is banked,
the cardinal in the feeder,
the roses tumbling on the arbor
their weight bending the wood
the red of the syrup I make from petals.
Orange as the perfumed fruit
hanging their globes on the glossy tree,
orange as pumpkins in the field,
orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs
who come to eat it, orange as my
cat running lithe through the high grass.
Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes,
yellow as a hill of daffodils,
yellow as dandelions by the highway,
yellow as butter and egg yolks,
yellow as a school bus stopping you,
yellow as a slicker in a downpour.
Here is my bouquet, here is a sing
song of all the things you make
me think of, here is oblique
praise for the height and depth
of you and the width too.
Here is my box of new crayons at your feet.
Green as mint jelly, green
as a frog on a lily pad twanging,
the green of cos lettuce upright
about to bolt into opulent towers,
green as Grand Chartreuse in a clear
glass, green as wine bottles.
Blue as cornflowers, delphiniums,
bachelors’ buttons. Blue as Roquefort,
blue as Saga. Blue as still water.
Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat.
Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring
azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop.
Cobalt as the midnight sky
when day has gone without a trace
and we lie in each other’s arms
eyes shut and fingers open
and all the colors of the world
pass through our bodies like strings of fire.
