Sarah Maclay & Holaday Mason
Holaday Mason: The book, "She," began as I was turning from 49 to 50 & so the working title was The 50/50 poems... The poems are not co-written but rather echo the many years of close resonance -- workshopping & growth in between Sarah & I in the fellowship of the poetry. The manuscript is a VERY loose call & response. Many long sections were written with no contact from & with the other writer & other parts ( such as the sequence here) happening in close proximity. For me, while poetry never comes from a conceit, the poems began to represent the experience of genderless-ness in humanity as well as the very gender specific concerns of women in the middle (presumably) life. Both the individual works & the collaboration are a deeply intuitive process depending on trust & for me, delight at the unfolding.
Sarah Maclay: In late 2007, after doing braided readings with pals since 2000, I thought it might be fun to try a braided writing. Holaday and I had been workshopping and tending one another's poems since 1996, so I asked if she'd be up for it, and we agreed on a braid of 50 each.The first fifteen or so were composed in a kind of loose dialogue; then the project spiraled out like a double helix. I've recently been looking at it as a kind of double-barreled qasida, in the sense that it does seem to track a transformation of consciousness in an associative, not-necessarily-narrative way.
The process has, indeed, been fun and sort of wacky. Since we live so close to one another, we got into the habit of sealing the poems in envelopes and sliding them through the cracks in the doors, or leaving them around, in odd places, to be found—a bit like that May Day ritual: leaving flowers, running away. The most challenging thing: not to workshop the poems, since that's been our habit, but just to let them keep co-inspiring us.
What began to happen very early was that we fell into an idiom that feels intrinsic to this particular project, and shared—even when the experiences that fall into the mix are quite different, and sometimes the tones oscillate between extravagant sensuality and a kind of despair, or blankness. We have come to think of it as "She”—and the quotation marks are as important as the pronoun.
I can't predetermine a subject for a poem—I have to discover what I'm writing about, as it appears. But very often, what I find I'm writing about in these poems has to do with a real sense of the strangeness of identity, the strangeness of gender—the oddness of that, over time, in time.
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selections from "She"
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11
She sees the obsidian. Seriously—
you can’t really be afraid of the re-arranged height, no, I mean, light, "he" said & offered lemon,
yes,
pure lemon cake before
guiding her through
the almost freezing expanded bright hallways of mirrors
to the past & into also,
the dreams of the mad—
those
glaring portraits of the velveteen desert,
a perfect moon cooling the low slung spine
of the singing lion,
his peaceful breath a storm.
He leads her hand over
the city.
She observes her hand over
the city
like a finger on a jeweled button (the city)
& in the palm of his other hand —a stolen marriage bed.
Whistling way down below
in the streets, in the canyons between buildings
(afraid of heights? You can’t see, seriously? The black crayon twirling decent of potency?)
she watches the world/no really, just a single congested street—
so small at the tip
of her boot, which is at the fantastic ledge of the building—
the people, like insects & pebbles
seemed to be all in black & every one without their genitals
& so she thinks “without the moon,
without collar bones
& without the
halo (hallow) moon."
11
Dawn blooms like a memory—
gray tree bark and fur
of deer—dun-colored camouflage
for mud and fog.
The morning veers
inward.
Silver has no currency.
Only hush.
The airport is deserted.
The ghosts of brightness vanish
into cars across a street.
An Asian man whose home I may have stayed in
many years ago
sits silently across the vacant aisle of a train,
carrying a silver shopping bag,
one piece of luggage.
Snow is memory.
City is asleep.
12
The loneliness of crowds—
as per,
or rather, just like
the suitcase,
which has wheels, so will go
easily where one must—
perhaps full of sugared seeds
perhaps
delicate berries.
12
And I imagined her lying there, alone, in the cathedral, nearly invisible, in the late light of the
afternoon, listening to the mad keys of the organist and his kind hair, strewn, streaming across
the enlivened air in a kind of mass of curl—and this is wrong—air, hair, wet hair, wet from the
playing, as she lay there, lay there before being discovered—and dismissed. She had loved the
trees—the metal trees—of Madison Park, and the metal boulder—thought them beautiful
which I only saw at night. But they were terrifying—I thought of my brother, making them, as he
could have, welding them together. Tin woods in a forest-park of fall-plucked trees, like an
omen: only metal trees—furious, arguing, held together in their mutually branching dance of
rage. Siamese trees. And, beyond them, blue light of the Empire State—and the gold, triangular
tower—shorter, closer; far behind us now, churches with names like Grace; the Chrysler with its
lights—isolated in their knife-like spire—white light flung like broken piano keys.
13
At the 23d floor pane a raven screeches,
circles, nearly cross eyed
its metallic gaze wacked & hot & so, seemingly
far above the hot
pink Gerber daisies, cut short & stuck in a squat drinking
glass on the hotel table which “she” has pulled close to view the huge
downtown panorama.
What “she” bought today
in the market
(near the lamb sellers stand at the corner of 6th Ave. & Broadway)
were these flowers & some punished strawberries,—
the ruined hidden for obvious reasons
under the beautiful, the perfect ripe ones.
We do not take our "selves" into public
“she” thinks sitting there nude under “her” too large clandestine
coat, “her” black scarf, under “her”
flapping navigators hat.
Now in the liminal cold—the park is indeed central,
each copper rooftop of the city skyline lancing the cerulean sky.
Indicative:
this the invention of subordination--
what is “mine” is “his,” is not “ours,” is not of an un-punctuated sky.
They sell real fur coats cheap & her wrists are poor with poor versions of roses
sprayed on in Sacks.
The clarified trees listen. The human:
vertical/vertigo/vain/rough/illiterate shove. The men here
are covered. Men everywhere are covered.
Trains like streams of blood go down towards the river.
13
Travel had been a kind of mourning.
But now it was over. The gray cat lay on the bed like a fur.
The fountain was full, but not falling. Her smell
was sour and brown.
All is fragmented, correctly. All.
The house looks like a set
belonging to dead people.
The era isn’t clear.
A slice of blood orange
lies on the concrete floor
like a leaf, the peel
scraped clean by teeth.
Ants come.
14
Spying? "she" asks the Black-haired Woman
who, from the bed, watches as "she," in front of a mirror full of feather butter light,
paints her mouth.
No, the Black- haired woman replies in ash oval tones… just looking.
Layers & layers of clouds sluice over 53d way below &
outside/outside of their respective naked pearly torsos—
both of which hum
as if sifting old spices had ripened behind heavy curtains.
The light at street level gleams on the glossy billboards piled & piled
& effecting the faces of strangers—
In another time we'd have been gone by now, so would not have suffered this,
one of them says & the other, then, nods.
Across from their room, on the 23'd floor-- a blood red canvas
cuts though a whole conference room floor.
All day, the men & women there.
All day, the women & men & the red wall that holds them up.
All day, she has done her fraying hair.
As if flesh were becoming mineral, shining with layers of silver —
& near their bodies, every keyhole & chair dusted.
The specific months are forgotten “she” says, insidious as money—
What dream? The Black- Haired Woman asks.
I said, "she" repeats —“Today” is not capitalized.
14
There had been the glass of Pernod, clear as urine.
“She” had nearly forgotten to pour in the water, forgotten
to make it milk and cloud.
And so, citron-yellow,
it was shared.
“She” sat at the table. His fingers were long
and he wore leather bracelets
around his neck, or around his wrists
as she,
all raspberry-orange, appeared at the table,
suddenly:
standing just to the side of the slim white linen.
(Of course, one would think one could tell them apart,
by the hair . . . )
Meanwhile, “she” bit and licked her lips to hide
the chapping, pulling from winter.
Even with the chapping
and the gesture on display,
on the landing, before they entered the room with the paintings—
that is, of course, with the Freud—
he finished his story about the sign—
the mirror had dropped
from the wall after hanging for fifteen years;
the mirror
had shattered across the floor as he sat on the couch, speaking
to his sister
(should he buy the brownstone
(clearly, yes))—
and he put a finger toward his lips
(before they entered the room)
to suggest a space, a hush—
and so it was.
And there were men “she” nearly introduced to him
in the museum shop—
men who turned their heads
and didn’t answer to their names.
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Holaday Mason is the author of Towards the Forest (New River Press 2007), Light Spilling From Its Own Cup (Inevitable Press,1999) and Interlude (Far Star Fire Press, 2001). Dissolve was 3 times a finalist in 05. Pushcart nominee, publications include, Poetry International, American Literary Review, Pool, Smartish Pace, Runes, Solo, The River Styx, The Spoon River Review, The Laurel Review. Co- editor of Echo 68, she lives in Venice, California, where she sometimes serves as artist in residence for Beyond Baroque. Holadaymason.com
Sarah Maclay's Music for the Black Room is forthcoming from U of Tampa Press. She is the author of Whore, The White Bride and three limited edition chapbooks. Her poems, reviews and essays have appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Writer's Chronicle, VerseDaily, The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 to the Present and Poetry International, where she serves as book review editor. She teaches creative writing and literature at LMU and conducts periodic workshops at Beyond Baroque and the Ruskin Art Club. She lives in Venice, California.