The Writing Life : Poem as Preface

I can live alone and I love to work.

--Mary Cassatt

Alli esta el detalle.

(Roughly: “There’s the rub.”)

--Cantinflas

Gentlemen, ladies. If you please--

these

are my wicked poems from when.

The girl grief decade. My wicked nun

years, so to speak. I sinned.

Not in the white woman way.

Not as Simone voyeuring the pretty

slum city on a golden arm. And no,

not wicked like the captain of the bad

boy blood, that Hollywood hood-

lum who boozed and floozed it up,

hell bent on self-destruction. Not me.

Well. Not much. Tell me,

how does a woman who.

A woman like me. Daughter of

a daddy with a hammer and

blistered feet

he’d dip into a washtub while he

ate his dinner.

A woman with no birthright

in the matter.

What does a woman inherit

that tell her how

to go?

My first felony--I took up

with poetry.

For this penalty, the rice burned.

Mother warned I’d never wife.

Wife? A woman like me

whose choice was rolling pin

or factory.

An absurd vice, this wicked wanton

writer’s life.

I chucked the life

my father’d plucked for me.

Leapt into the salamander fire.

A girl who’d never roamed

beyond her father’s rooster eye.

Winched the door with poetry

and fled.

For good. And grieved I’d gone

when I was so alone.

In my kitchen, in the thin hour,

a calendar Cassatt chanted:

Repeat after me--

I can live alone and I love to . . .

What a crock. Each week,

the ritual grief.

That decade of the knuckled

knocks.

I took the crooked route and liked

my badness.

Played at mistress.

Tattooed an ass.

Lapped up my happiness from

a glass.

It was something, at least.

I hadn’t a clue.

What does a woman

willing to invent herself

at twenty-two or twenty-nine

do? A woman with no who

nor how.

And how was I to know what was

unwise.

I wanted to be writer. I wanted

to be happy.

What’s that? At twenty.

Or twenty-nine.

Love. Baby. Husband.

The works. The big palookas of life.

Wanting and not wanting.

Take your hands off me.

I left my father’s house

before the brothers,

vagabonded the globe

like a rich white girl.

Got a flat.

I paid for it. I kept it clean.

Sometimes the silence frightened

me.

Sometimes the silence blessed me.

It would come get me.

Late at night.

Open like a window,

hungry for my life.

I wrote when I was sad.

The flat cold.

When there was no love--

new, old--

to distract me.

No six brothers

with their Fellini racket.

No mother, father,

with their wise I told you.

I tell you,

these are the pearls

from that ten-year itch,

my jewels, my colicky kids

who fussed and kept

me up the wicked nights

when all I wanted was . . .

With nothing in the texts

to tell me.

The who-I-was who would become

the who-I-am.

These poems are from

that hobbled when.

1992 by Sandra Cisneros. Reprinted by permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, N.Y.