(rage)

quotes from a brief history of yes by micheline aharonian marcom

"'you are right,' she says, 'that if i am to give you succor, i must give it you as you would like, and not as i prefer it.' and maria begins to leave the lover in some small measure before he leaves her in august, and although she lies with him on the bed, she lies also with new future lovers in her mind, she is inside the maelstrom of the not-know not-feel grey salt earth. she is revenging, she will leave her lover one day (even though it is he who leaves her) just as she left pai to die alone in lisbon, in that old city with its back to europe, its gaze pressed to the river and the atlantic."

* * *

"hello despair, she does not say (only the next day when others ask her of her holiday and she begins to weep).

hello sea, air, sky, and black cormorants.

there is nothing good today in my heart. all is lost, all forsaken. my son with his father and the horsy faced girl. me on these bluffs one-hundred-and-fifty miles from a city which is not my natal city, pai gone, my uncles aunts cousins across the atlantic in an old small inconsequential country where my old memories were made. i loved a tall, blond, blue-eyed american man; eventually he did not love me back. looks again at the sea. looks again at the sky. lies next to the bush and would like to be the bush, the sky, the sea, seaweed, and cold autumn air.

5.

and of course what she notices, what is evident, is how this affair and its demise, its rupture, his 'i am not in-love with you, mariazinha,' and i don't believe you, she tells him, so that her pride gets up, turns, and then stands taller, she recants: i believe you, i don't want to feel like this, i can't bear it -- takes he closer to the imperceptible edges of things. and she begins to feel that she could go mad, and in english it is to lose one's mind, and i want to lose mine, the portuguese girl thinks, lose it lose it, for it plagues me, it takes me down into the vile place, the place where pai berated me as a girl in the old city on the far outer western edges of a continent. the sun's light is lisbon's body; the tagus its spine. maria's gift to the blond was the manner in which she loved him -- seeing his wound, the brittle place, and holding him from across the ocean, keeping her hands pressed to his back, telling him that the heart is its own country and they its loving countrymen.

so that maria begins to take photographs of herself daily to see what she looks like, to affirm she exists, to see what grief looks like in her face, what sadness, what a portuguese woman from lisbon in america long enough to have a (mostly) american accent and to remember the sunlight of her natal city and not-remember all the language which fades each year more and more, from likeness to likeness, word to word and colloquial phrase to phrase, so that it is now awkward, a child's tongue, a kitchen language, to say simple things to mae with and for speaking to herrelatives on the phone who remained there in that place on occasion -- distant and more foreign seeming all of the time. and to think that a man, blond, blue-eyed, who she has known long enough for the earth to complete its orbit around the sun, has unleashed in her the old place. i must travel to that place now, she thinks; all of my life i have labored not to enter into that place for fear and in fear my fear became a magnet, brought me the old husband, the other lovers, and now this blond who leaving, says, i leave you at the threshold of your madness, the monster: pass over; go down; see.

another conversation:

'yes, with the lover, the blond blue-eyed, i felt constrained (as i had in my marriage) and i didn't want to admit to myself this feeling for i am always talking with myself as if to the mirror of my thoughts, and the mind talks its incessant etceteras and constraint was a feeling, not a talking, although i am talking now: as if to a tree, have i told you of the maple outside my window, we speak to one another without speaking, and the tree was terribly pruned by a gardener, a man i invented (for i never knew him), who violently pruned the maple before i purchased the house (cut the top of the tree off as if removing the head of it, took an electric saw and flat-topped the maple for an unobstructed window's view) and prunes in my mind and in my mind the invented gardener grafts my blond blue-eyed lover to pai, one inside the other, violently -- the two become one and the one always saying you are not right, no good, correct your style, your language, your ---.'

madness either destroys you at the abyss, or from there a new form is made, something else is born.

6.

she says, 'i would describe the feeling as a hollow.

'and, i love this feeling as i love love. do not confuse it with a desiccated sensation, this after-love feeling.' she is running around town and using phrases such as running around town when she is driving in her car and saying,

'i would like to kill myself.' but she knows that her son will suffer and in her suffering she thinks that this, what she calls suffering, will not end and her mind here is doing all of the talking and naming and categorizing of things and events of after-love narratives and the girl is watching the mind talking away like running around when she is driving and the dialogue is inside of dialogue tags, is realer than reality, realer than her bills which lie unpaid, and her parking tickets accumulating, debt amounts which grow taller than the maple in her garden, the tree which was pruned back to respectable neighborly viewing heights,

'i would like to die. i am lonely and i will always be lonely and how could he leave me and then leave me only so that he can find other girls and i hate him (would die for him) and he was not right for me and i didn't want my old husband who then married the horsy faced girl who is no longer my friend and i will be alone and why can't someone, why can't i find someone who can hold me at night, hold my abdomen where the pain is hollowing out the tunnels of rage (pain), unrequited love (rage), and a presence so fierce and strong a light so black that only death will allay it.'

. . .

what then illusion, what then love. what real from what the mind speaks, thinks, the mind still speaking saying: 'and he never loved me and he is selfish and cruel and he made me feel small and he abused me, a misuse, and.' where is the real of it? in the groin, in the lower intestine, in the chest cavity, concaved or round.

i am waiting for
i will kill myself
i will walk along the cliff's edge
there is no man for me now
there is only the futures of inestimable estimates
now

now there is a japanese maple pressed against the windowpane, it is still green; presses as if a girl lying on a bed in a lover's embrace: the girl embraced now not by her lover or a stranger or love, but by her own mind; her woman's unstoppable grief at the unrequited love; by the end of something which never existed, perchance.

'you are beautiful. you are strong. a good person.' henry responds to her question when she is speaking with him on the telephone.

me?