Ruth (may I be so personal as to use your name?
For years and for a fictional purpose, I called you
Rachel, though no one labored for your hand).
You were the elusive one, the one always leaving
As I entered the room, your “bye” a kind of bullet
To the chest, as if you could love God and not people.
Bye, a one-word way of saying everything you felt.
What was it to spend your life that way, your signature
Expression a smirk and every word with a razor attached?
What was it to live life as a blister? Was it not lonely?Every year I get a better grasp of who you were.
I want you to know that, SRO death woman.
I want you to know. I have no big attachment to you,
You who were age twelve when I entered the world.
(Was it true you had to be kept from me as an infant?
I’m told you did things, that you had a torturing intent.)Something about your teenage life astonishes me still.
That sea of books, piled like breaking waves,
The floor of your room had become. How did you live
With such disorder? Was it simply your state of mind?Other memories too: your long, thick braid
And the stack of texts cradled against your chest
As you mounted the stairs. You held those books
As if they were your life, the only things
With access to your heart.One day your room fell empty. Vassar College
Took you in. Imagine that, a sister out in the world,
Beyond the reach of the fire breathers at the downtown
Church. The tunnel where I played a pathway to you,
Somewhere to the north, the freights rumbling through
Conveying me along the river and past the thick stretches
Of trees into that privileged world of light you had entered.
Ruth, you were a beacon. You had escaped the Pentecostal
Admonitions against life, the flames of hell burning hotter
Than gasoline. You would have nothing to do with the gnashing
Of teeth. You would not be slain by the word worldly
From the mouths of your accusers, the ones who slapped
the gilt-edged pages of their Bibles as they fulminated.
You knew they were indulging in the sad rituals
Of superstition-saddled children. I had heard your
Worldliness from childhood and thrilled to it.
All my life I have loved the sound of women singing,
As you sang “Hard-Hearted Hannah” and
“I’m Going to Wash That Man Right out of My Hair”
And all the Broadway show tunes you sought to master.Saying, “And what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A skin diver,” my fumbling answer came. “Aren’t all men
Skin divers?” you replied, shaming me with your smirking truth.The living room you said that in. Linoleum in place of a carpet.
A bed made into a sofa. Lemon cake, moist and tart, from
Party Cake. Birthdays recorded in black and white.What happened, Ruth? What ailed you, as Mother used to say?
What caused you, home from college in your freshman year,
To push her backward into the Christmas tree as she rushed
To greet you at the door? Broken ornaments, crushed gifts,
Father streaking to the scene with raised hand as an annihilating
Instrument and you fleeing out the door before he could
Wreak vengeance on your pale flesh. Were you seeking
To punish her for the crime of letting you go?
(Would it please you to know I cried that evening,
And pledged to be as good for Mother as you were bad?)
And why did you leave college only days before your
Graduation? Was it your debilitating pride that took you
Away, your failure to graduate with honors, the men who
Didn’t want you while claiming others for their 1950s own?You were seen crying in the lobby in this period,
There in Mother’s arms.
The floodgates had opened on your terrible pain.
A man had shown an interest and then had left you.
For that moment you allowed her close,
Allowed human contact and human touch to be established.
You were within the fold, if only temporarily.Then you were gone again. You adopted a new pose.
The braid replaced with a provocative duck’s ass.
Your hennaed hair seemed to grow fins sharp
To the touch. Hair to express your mocking stance.
Dark sunglasses, I can see you but you can’t see me,
A kind of facial armor. Weaponized, you wrapped
Yourself in a purple full-length coat, a staple
Of your dress in summer heat as well as winter cold.Whatever, you were alone,
On the street,
In that room,
In your life.You got jobs and left jobs. I heard the name CBS
And my heart lifted. I saw you connected to the glories
Of television and the world. I was proud of you, Ruth.
You provided hope. But then you quit. Someone said
It was your boss and the torment it brought to be near him.
Lesser jobs followed, about which you did not speak.You lived your life in hotels for transients. You ate
Standing up at hot dog stands. Five-minute meals in
Midtown amid strangers with unclean hands running
Paper napkins across their greasy mouths. You broke
The seal on bottle and drank in your room. The world
Perplexed you. It had no place for your pain. When you
Had drunk enough it turned you toward home. You flew
Into the apartment shrieking at Mother only to collapse in her arms.
Your ritual act of the night, and when you needed something more,
You ran drunk and naked down Broadway shouting your love
For John F. Kennedy only to pass out between parked cars.Bellevue. Manhattan State. Rockland State. Institutions such as
These, with their numbing drugs and trespassing staffs,
Became your home away from home. Then Father died. His passing
Shot a bolt through you. It entered at your feet and lodged in your brain.
The liquor had no choice but to flee. No one explored the psychic mystery.
It was just there. The sunglasses flew off, as did the coat, and your hair
Returned to its sandy color. Now in your mid-twenties, you were without
A means of support. Mother took you in, gave you back your room.
The sea of books gone now. Only the one book. The good book,
The wandering tribes, the stiff-necked people. The rocks and desolation
of mystical history. You were there with the Canaanites and the Hittites
And the Ishmaelites. Ezekiel bound you to his truth
And then it was the fulminating prophets before you broke free
Into the Jesus terrain of the Gospels. But really, it was your childhood
You were seeking to reclaim as you hit thirty and thirty-five
And appeared on the streets in shapeless dresses from the Goodwill bag
And gunboat sneakers sizes too large for your blistered feet.
Your face scrubbed clean of war paint. You had let go
Of the world by then, not needing to ask if it had let go of you,
And became a fixture at the Chock Full O’ Nuts across from
Columbia at One Hundred Sixteenth and Broadway. You sat there
In the early afternoon having your first food of the day.
Do you remember, you with your powdered doughnuts
And a mug of heavenly coffee? It was a place for you to share
With people beyond your single room, though by then you had found
The space within you where you had to dwell. There was
Your great reality. On Sundays you returned to the Pentecostal
Tabernacle from which in your youth you had fled. The pastor
At the pulpit slapping his open Bible and launching his torrent
Of disappearing words. The church falling down around him
And the diminished congregation of diverse colors and tongues.
When Mother was well enough, she came with you. Otherwise,
You sat alone. Your nights were spoken for. You had the job
Of scanning the dark sky for signs of Jesus. You wanted to be
Ready when he came. You knew he had eyes only for you.
Politics and literature and all such interests had fallen away. God as
The extreme purgative, the relentless application of Him to your life.Ruth, we have traveled this terrain before: the emergency room
Appearances and complaints to the interns that rat poison was burning
A hole in your stomach. And there were the taps in Mother’s apartment
You turned on but never off, the journeys out onto the window ledge,
Believing you had heard your Lord, calling, calling, in the rushing wind
Over Manhattan. When the authorities came and took you away
For another hospital stay, Mother held your college mug
And spoke of your fine mind and all your promise and wondered
Where it was she had gone wrong. “All day as a child she would
Follow me around from room to room, Stand behind me without
So much as a word. What was I to do?” Toward the end the way
You had of placing your hands around her neck in a not so friendly
Fashion, Mother saying, “I cannot have this. I cannot have this at all.”Ruth, you died soon after Mother died, though you died when she
Passed on. Your absence from her burial did not concern me greatly.
Had I given my consent for you to take the pills that left you comatose
On the floor of your plain room? Did I know that without her you were done?
In the ambulance, my indifference to the paramedics trying to work their
Medical magic and bring you back, you who had chosen life in death
To death in life. You went, Ruth, you went. You flew past the IVs
And the scanners. You took your leave from Ward Six and Dr. Alberstrom
And his white-garbed flock of protégés. You laughed at holding on when
All you wanted was to let go. You got to say your final bye so loud and clear.Let’s say you’re in a room and I am with you. Let’s say the feeling
Is we’ve closed the door and now are sitting for a while.
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