Gothic Women

GOTHIC WOMEN

I.

      "Now it is just like all the other horses."
                   Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie,
                   Tennessee Williams

Laura, Laura,
How often have I felt like you, lugging
a limping limb
across an audience - the critical mass -
their eyes performing
surgery on a soul held together
with no more
than a streaming ribbon of dreams -
delicate
as thin threads of glass woven
by a Venetian
artisan preparing a vase too delicate
to hold
anything from this weighted world.

Laura, Laura,
What's wrong with you girl, snap out of it now
Get with it
Stand up straight, walk tall, shoulders back,
enthrall us all,
balancing that book on your head.

Perhaps
it was all in the book - Emily Post's
Etiquette
I sported atop my locks, tottering across
the looming room -
my tomb. And good at it I became,
at last.
Had the tome been Plato, the Illiad, or Ovid,
or the artful verses
of Crane, perhaps I would have taken
a different vein.
My hypothesis is it must have been
some sort of osmosis
that occurred in that walk from wall to wall,
consistently
day after day. Therefore, my dear Laura
- I'm sure you've noticed! -
I know what to say, what to do in any situation
no matter
how dreadful the occasion. I'm qualified,
my little one,
with a masque for every event in my quiver --
A cover
for every relationship -- I know what to say
to make a man think
I love him when I don't. I even know
what to do to
make him think I don't give a damn
when I would give
all that I am for just one touch of his hand
to my face.

Oh, Laura, Laura,
I've survived and I'm grateful to Miss Post.
But my innermost
hides a sacred space where weight
from her volume
did not settle -- A space unmoved by my ability
to tread through
this world's worrisome waters, a space
for dreams
and things but imagined, A space
just about the right size
to hold the fragile horn of a glass unicorn.

II.

        "…I am not in anything that I have a desire to get out of."
                       Stella Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire,
                       Tennessee Williams

What is it that causes a life
to be
what it is or to become what it must
become?
Stella was ripe for retrieval
from Belle Reve's
pedestal, but why didn't she
step down
for some sophisticated sort
rather than
Kowalski, with such a flair
for shouting
in his apish a cappella.
Any fortuneteller
on Jackson Square could tell her
she would pay
a high price for her choice.
But she flourished
in such soil, which is how Blanche
might have explained it -
"Stanley and Stella, the dirt
and the flower,"
she might have said. Like two hands
on a clock -
with no identity of their own,
they need
each other to get through the
punch-card day.

III.

        "… I'm fading now! I don't know how much
        longer I can turn the trick."
                       Blanche DuBoise in A Streetcar Named Desire,
                       Tennessee Williams

When I read Streetcar at age twenty
Blanche DuBois
was that bizarre bird lighting on top
of relatives
in one of the many "Barnum & Bailey"
marquees
of her pathetic life - just a temporary
reprieve.

When I read Streetcar now at mid life,
Blanche is a woman
of strength who wears her misplaced passions
like a badge
of honor pinned to crusading armor
that both protects
and prevents, and the trip down Desire Street
is not just another digression -
it is the LAST STATION in a cathedral
whose windows
are stained with the colors of jewels,
reflections
of possibilities past. It is the Station
of Actuality:
where they punch a hole in your ticket
when you board -
so you can NEVER, EVER use it again -
and the only hope of a safe arrival
is the kindness of some fellow stranger.