The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane

"Cracked"

“Cracked” “One imaginary letter to me from my partially cracked poetess at Amherst.” —Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Anna Higginson i I was a whole, a cypher, a white knot until that blow divided me. Like the doubled rag-doll I’ve no feet. My dress is my address; I can’t get out. My polar heads (white Eva up, or, up black Pip) Topsy topside, Moebius egg, inseparably twinned. I write on paper like my skin this Friday print, Elaine reversed in mirror glass, Crusoe alert boatkeeping for the Visitor who never comes. The blow that forced my being split me from my wholeness, fell on the clear waters of the air. I am a meadow, enclosed, walled in, shut door. The Poetry of M. Travis Lane / 63 ii Daffy with weakness my black self holds the secret of my strength. Pip’s tambourine shivers against the gaping cracks of those white nights. What music creeps across the sands, those blocks of ice, that tumulus of coral? Running to freedom Eliza crossed, but dropped me, daisy, in the sea. I sank, lead plummet, pendulum. Pip was my heart. His music was pure firefly with no fathoming, but coward in the graveyard, whistled, leaped— He heard the sailors shouting far away. The black waves buoyed his body. His mind drowned. This body has no legs to leap. The coffin that upholds me drifts secured in a closed pasture. Sea is my white wedding dress. Oh carry me, lost bird, to my drowned Ararat, my Captain’s fabrication, his whole cloth! 64 / The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand iii A storm sometimes in the outer world beats at the shutters. The twin stirs, shuddering cygnet; signature, who sings like a fly trapped in this room. You who live in the processes, what can you know, unfractioned, unreflecting, nailed to the unlettered literal— a pebble in the gizzard of the Lord? The sea had jeeringly kept me up. I could not drown but led by lazy music fell ashore. I looked, you looked, he looked — No one was there. The Poetry of M. Travis Lane / 65 iv I climb the ladder to my room drawing my writing after me like a long rope. Each day, among the rattles of the birds, the mad girl’s cry from over the pond, another real world shuts its door. I had my finger on the thread; it snapped. It wrapped around my neck. They pulled an unsigned tablet from the sea— (bloodstains on a white handkerchief, brown as the sherry the visitor leaves— is leaving…) Didn’t Pip sing those summer nights? Dancing, as if his feet cut glass, lighting the whiteness of the sea with tinsel exhalations. Heart of a daisy. Such innocence. In what forge was my firefly forged, my cowardice? Captain, You told me,“Stay.” I rust. This hand, which held His, watched his troops die with Him, a black victory. Among those marble senators my voice creaks like a dory. Deserting Him I made a desert where my twin who goes before me where I go, yet tags my heels. 66 / The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand v In Eden there’s safe rowing but not here. Cracked head, cracked heart. Jack in the corner, my father, crow, pulled out my heart, a ruby plum, and spun it toward the tropics, whipped my cord. And didn’t I spin and spin and spin, and didn’t I ramble? White letters, shrouds of summer, a white flag this hand will nail its message down. Each day the smells of home: baked bread, sweet ginger, honeycomb— the heartless, joyous, juvenile eternities, bee-lovely, waft me toward what shores, what tropic luxe, what paradise? I could not stop. I had gone souther than the pole toward Arcturus. Beyond earth’s magnet apron strings white clouds flapped like dishrags. Shall I leap? Abandoning my Father’s house, out through the walls and the barn’s back door— A swimmer, dying a thousand times, Dives down, at last, to the miracles. The Poetry of M. Travis Lane / 67 ...