NOTES FROM THE UNDERSTORY
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notes from the understory (layer 26, direction one)
Then I close Judith Butler’s SENSES OF THE SUBJECT
after reading words that I remember as
“I feel only because I have been touched, I feel only on the condition
of being touched, I feel as an ‘I’ becomes a self.”
Then I feel a layer of self, which I had called my silence,
peel away.
Then beneath it is a sound-machine’s hum. A tension I’d
not understood has been made up of the same vibrations I felt
released into the air when my mother finally let me pull her
hairpins out of her long gray-black hair,
and the knotted mass fell to the pillow and down to the blankets
where she lay dying.
It had been fifteen years in which she wouldn’t brush her hair.
Now it has been decades that I’ve held the memory knotted.
notes from the understory (layer 26, direction two)
I wear three pearl buttons on my pastel sweater,
buttons I found when digging with a fork beneath the willow tree
on the wild land across the street from my childhood house.
I have had to clean away the nightmare from the dream.
Then the buttons could glisten with the resonance of listen and
the evanescence of good.
The dream is long, sinuous as red rope licorice which must be
chewed until it is soft enough to mold meaning from.
notes from the understory (layer 26 direction three)
Then I lost the name of my mother. I’d been driving for hours alone, the road was a loop spiraling farther and farther into the dark.
“It wasn’t your name, it wasn’t ever your name,” a mockingbird called, and I rolled down my window to listen,
until I believed the bird, its voice shining like a lamp in a meadow I could drive toward, and never be lost again.
Then I was driving with my husband to the airport and we were late, and it was my fault,
when a forest rose up, tree after tree before us on the road.
“It wasn’t my name,” “It was never my name,”
I suddenly remembered and I called out loud and every tree bloomed cherry blossoms.
“We don’t need to go to the airport,” said my husband.
We could live the other life we’d been frightened of, life on the dirt road in the cabin we might look for and find.
The sky will be white and blue and golden in daytime
and a cherry blossom velvet full-moon will light the night when we reach for each other, when we are for each other a lamp in the meadow.
Rusty Morrison is co-publisher of Omnidawn. Her latest book, RISK, will be published by Black Ocean in April 2024. Her five books include After Urgency (Tupelo’s Dorset Prize) and the true keeps calm biding its story (Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, DiCastagnola Award, James Laughlin Award, and N.California Book Award), and Beyond the Chainlink (Ahasahta Press) was a finalist for the NCIB Award and NCB Award). She is a recipient of a Civitella Ranieri fellowship, and a recipient of other artist retreat fellowships. She’s one of eight fellows in the inaugural year (2020), awarded by UC Berkeley Art Research Center’s Poetry & the Senses Program. She teaches and gives writing consultations.