May Poet Elizabeth Schelle
Beth Schelle is a practicing garden designer in South Bend, IN, where she lives with her husband and two children. She currently spends winters writing poetry and working on a novel. This is her first publication.
To women of a certain age
When I was young
I hardly knew a girl who didn’t worship horses
Our church, the dark, redolent barn, where we
breathed the incense of their dusty coats
made offerings of sugar and apples, and
sang praise in hushed, cooing voices.
Little virgin handmaids to our chosen gods,
we didn’t consider it work
Years later, when my own daughter came down with it,
I remembered, but with age-opened eyes
Now that shiny sinuosity and twang of tendon
sets my teeth on edge with terror for my fragile acolyte
Their skin-skimmed musculature just brute strength
transmuted into ballet by dainty fetlocks,
dancing death under their hooves
But you know only the fierce longing to ride,
free, in the open fields, power and hard muscle
between soft, yielding legs
The swashbuckling terror of it
Your only hope is your control,
your willful hand reigning in its fear
The utter quiescence of the beast
Standing with unreadable eyes, while your
small hands tighten the straps, push the bit past
champing teeth.
Practice for the later
lashings which will bind your lover
You will learn to calm his rolling eye
Lie low over his back while he bucks
and smooth the sweated forelock
Man or beast, both can kill
But girls learn early the drunk feeling of triumph
When their god chooses not to strike them down
The mentor
We were forever driving.
Music turned down low so we could talk.
The car got stuffy with words
as I drove him around the rust-filled city
we both lived in, though
I crossed highways and railroad tracks and abandoned lots
to get to his aunt’s house.
Sitting with a child in the car
is the best way to talk to them, I found.
Belt them into adult-sized seats,
cage their jumping limbs.
Muffle their laughing mouths in that airless silence,
windows up, AC on.
I was trying to tell him a story: a story about him,
where he ended up happy and successful.
Like me, owner of a brand new bachelor’s degree.
A story where, like I had, he’d pull bootstraps for lack of strings.
He asked if we could go roller-skating, but
I took him on a walking tour of the college instead.
The first time I took him to my house,
we passed a red brick bank with white pillars along the way
some antebellum fever dream he thought I belonged to.
I noted his disappointment when we pulled into the drive
of my rented matchbox house with the
dog shit-stained carpet and 1970’s wallpaper.
What I felt could only be described as vindication.
He didn’t know who his father was.
I told him sometimes that was a blessing,
and about the man I’d had to surgically remove from my life,
the tumor previously known as Dad.
He may have still been listening when I said it.
I had forgotten that I wasn’t much older than him.
He told me, when I asked that adult question,
That he wanted to work in a hair salon when he grew up,
and I felt insulted on his behalf
but tried to hide it.
His dream could be slowly weeded out, I knew,
With a few well-chosen words about money and respect.
Someone had to have high expectations for him
if he wouldn’t have them for himself.
I sat up nights terrified that everything about him that dazzled,
Intelligence, eyes-wide curiosity, his smile, sly at first, then glorious
that way of looking at me with awe and affection,
would be smashed, broken against a jagged world, wasted.
If I couldn’t get him to see himself in the story I was spinning,
he would lose himself as he was now, still brimming.
That institutional promise you can be anything you want
that we pin to every child’s chest on the first day,
like a cheap poly ribbon that wears thin with age.
His was already hanging by the proverbial thread.
His auntie-mother invited me to a bbq at their house.
I sat, shy and out of place, on the steps in the trampled yard,
the green river-valley jungle of Ohio festering exuberantly.
I thought of how my car lectures often tried
to make him see how far he had to go to escape this place,
the only home he’d ever known.
So he could do better than all the people he’d ever loved.
I have one picture of him; he’s sitting on a horse at someone’s farm.
His smile is guarded and forced, his first time near such a large animal.
It was two hours driving there, and two hours back.
The moment I return to the most:
when he looked over at me in the drivers seat
and said, “Can we go skating?” and I said no.
In the hospital room
She didn’t say,
I overdosed on my pills
She said,
I need a refill now
The smirk was her face cracking open
She didn’t say,
I thought terror might soften you up
She said,
You weren’t listening to me
Not,
I am an animal stripped naked of its skin, and cold
But,
You all hate me
The things she said by not saying
filled my head with a shushing sound
Like wool in the space between electrodes
The knowing would cause a spark
A fire
In her brain, or mine?
Which of us would be hurt more by knowing?
Knowing her
Or knowing why.
This information was weaponized,
trained on me,
then shot off into the sky at the last moment
Landed harmlessly in the ocean
Plunged to unseen depths, was gone
The doctors dressed me down
Judgements were made in remarkably short time
It was very efficient how they wrapped us up
in straitjackets, faced us to the opposite walls
And left us there to shout over our shoulders
It wasn’t a given that I was there to help
Or that my love had done anyone any good, ever.
With love burned away, or shamed
What is left between she and I?
Angry, spittle-flecked words
Spit at ears that never heard
Not true
The angry spittle-flecked words
were heard
Hoarded like jewels
Fingered and polished to a blinding shine
Was it that slant light
landing on a bottle of pills
that brought us to this room?
We all were
You were an explorer
A maker and follower of treasure-maps
The world and you seeing everything for the first time
Together
You were the world
A collector of overlooked things
Forgotten things
The dark recess under the privet hedge
The foot-sized crotch of the silver maple
The inside of last year’s walnut shell
Emptied by unfathomable time
Do you remember the world then?
A circle
Endless renewal, endless discovery
Just beyond the curve
Robin’s eggs, blue
Like broken shards of sky
The crunch and tang of death
The rot and rebirth of the world
Under the privet hedge