Jenne’ R. Andrews: Becoming Your Beloved

Becoming Your Beloved

Thirty five years out from your death,

out of the dense black of the kitchen window

where the trees have tightened their embrace

around one another—

.

I pound the spent lock on the old trunk,

casting into its dust-ridden depths

for the movie stills of our time together.

.

I was a little girl in your arms;

a few drinks under your belt,

you had taken me to the Albuquerque airport

to perch on the low adobe wall

beneath the planes lifting off

over our heads—

there was a Pendleton blanket,

a “car robe,” Mother said,

we together wore in nocturnal

intimacy safe enough—you, tender, you

young father.

.

A DC6 would tuck its wheels up,

lifting in a roar so close to us

we could nearly touch it—

.

I remember my elation

that I had you and you had me,

that we had ventured out

from the tightly fisted adobe

with its angry mother

to feel the pulse of the world,

a sky-full of the possibilities of being.

ii

That evening began my career

as your mascot,

as I was the long hot afternoon

we sped across the Painted Desert

in a USDA Chevy sedan and you

nearly fell asleep at the wheel—

.

“Be my look-out, honey,” you said,

pulling over into the bowl of long shadows,

where no other living thing

except an eagle riding downdrafts

could be seen with the naked eye.

.

You napped and I scanned the terrain

through the windshield; was I five

or seven?  You would remember

and tell it better than I.

.

Had your son and my brother come along?

You would confirm that yes,

he was home with Mother;

they were alone in the house,

she with her burgeoning madness,

he, wide-eyed and new in his bassinette.

.

You woke and ran your hand

through your hair, smiled at me;

I passed you the government-issue

canteen—we each took a swig

of that metallic water and drove on,

rolling into Prescott at the dying of day.

iii

Each set of frames I play

alludes to a journey with no beginning

and no end—some hallowed trek

I storied in my love for you:

foray into the Manzanos looking for dwarf mistletoe,

.

you peeing against a dead tree

in your khaki Forest Service uniform, smiling

over your shoulder;

I, balancing my small white bottom

on a fallen log—

.

But what is it that I don’t remember,

the reels missing from the telltale trunk—

as in, some sense of the Reservation cabins

where we might have stayed the night,

where I might have tucked you in:

what of the calloused hands I half-recall

journeying over my legs.

.

You wouldn’t believe

what others have suggested to me—

that you closed the door

on my innocence

and that I, ashamed, hid our transgression

from myself, like the crumpled postcard

of a Hopi ruin.

iv

But consider, you who lived for years

in a purgatory of emphysema

running out of air,

you before your illness,

with whom I climbed the stairs

to the crown of the Statue of Liberty,

.

that I remember you drunk again

and kneeling next to me, where I stood

in our living room–

Mother in the sanitarium,

hooked up to high voltage

to be rid of her own brokenness-

.

taking me to your chest,

tipping my chin up to you.

And kissing me, your tongue

tasting the salt of my lips,

.

pressing that insistent

part of you into my small mouth.

.

How you then pulled away

from your nonplussed

and haggard little girl,

your face abruptly dark

with shame.

.

From that moment on,

you were closed to me,

indifferent to my need for you,

a daughter in a cowboy hat

and hiked up jeans,

daughter who had longed

for the privileges of boyhood—

for our private and beautiful world.

.

What on earth did you gain,

beloved?  Forever more

I have worn your stolen kiss

like a butterfly-shaped bruise

over the equivocating heart that knocks

against my ribs–

burned with it like a brand.

—

copyright 2015 Jenne’ R. Andrews