My mother used to water our back garden Wearing nothing but her Mormon underwear And she bought the sheer silky kind Not the thick cotton. What goes on in the temple Is not secret, it’s sacred say the Mormons and I Believe them. An apostate child for twenty years And I have never looked up the endowment Ceremony online. But I know all about the underwear From my mom’s summer gardening habits and From when I had to gather them up and put them In a plastic reusable grocery bag for her friend To dispose of in a sacred way after she died.
I saw her temple clothes too when I went with her Church ladies to dress her body before she Met the fire. The people who had retrieved her body From the board and care left her in her gown And half open diaper. When we opened the bag her Mouth was open like she was begging for my help. I tried to focus on her peeling bare feet Only on her feet but my eyes kept reaching for her In her face and my ears for the silent scream.
I had to leave the room and let her faith friends Finish. This was not their first body. Not by a long shot. All near my mom’s age themselves I wondered if They wondered who would be gowning them Or if their mortuary would collect them in a more Dignified way. For their sakes, I hoped so.
They are clever. I wondered how exactly you Get a floor length temple dress on a dead body. The trick Is you cut it up the back and down the seams Of the sleeves. You lay the dress on and tuck it around. Mormon beehive ingenuity and industriousness Is something I have always admired.
And the courage. Those women’s courage.
When they were finished they called me back Into the room, pulled the cover from her face And said, “Isn’t she pretty?” She was wearing Her veil, white dress, green apron. Blessedly They had closed her terrified mouth.
She was pretty.
Light in her hair Hose in her hand Watering the red hibiscus In her silky sacred garments Watching a hummingbird Wings nearly invisible Dart in and out of the spray.
We were meant to dance I think This is how the, “Push me. Push me.” love rounds Into something more like sway With the long ache and “Hold me up Hold me up.”
-M. Ashley
This poem is about ten years old. One of my all-time favorites.
His senses perk to the smell of green grass in a fertile garden, the light of a broad path made plain, a promising crack in the wall, and the laughter of better women echoing.
The one beside him mercifully slips his fingers.
The one beside him mercifully speaks.
Leave me a kiss for my collection, here in the tender crook of my arm, and remember me sometimes that I was your Darling in the dead and lonely place.
We put up with a certain level of Gross from our lovers and Farting on each other in bed and Giggling about it and Don’t you dare Dutch oven me Again… Chester! Can be as intimate as The world’s sweetest Sulfur kiss.
I have wanderlust and I have agoraphobia. I have the life of the party and I have extreme shyness. I have beauty and I have ugliness. I have back-breaking kindness and pitiful hate. I have a tongue for healing and a tongue for tearing apart. I have the darkness of smirking devils and the light of smug angels with halos bolted to their goddamn exalted heads.
I am a lover of the sun but a creature of the dark. I am built for it, physically, but I will pain myself with the sun in the morning on purpose because it’s good for me and I have an unholy love affair with it. My eyes reject it. My skin rejects it. But oh, my stupid heart.
I have gone for days before without saying a thing. I was training in high school and early college to be an opera singer. A bitch of a teacher in those college years once told me, “I think you think you sound better than you actually do.” Later that night, I crumpled on the floor in the music room and cried in front of the mirror. I walked home in the rain on narrow streets where the cars couldn’t help but splash mud up over my shoulders. I got quieter that day. The canary I held in my heart singing died in the mine, hung stiff, upside down on her perch, her feathers black with coal dust.
I can be happy. I can, out of the blue, say, “Weee!” when we turn the car sharply. I can take a friend’s hand and run in a random direction in the middle of a walk, and whisper, “That’s not us. Let’s go!” I can curl up in my bed in the heat, sweat in my blankets until they become stiff with it, blame my friends for abandoning me when I haven’t called them in weeks.
I’m always ending on a bad foot when I’ve got two good feet to dance on, when I’m alone. When I’m alone, I’m a freakin’ rockstar, baby. And sometimes, when the moon is right, with you.
Like that time in Ojai when we watched the sunset from the overlook in the park all full of blooming cacti and bird of paradise and new agers taking themselves way too seriously. And you joked I was one of them knowing out of my bare brain the moon was waxing near full in watery cancer. And I did a little dance for you in the parking lot—the dance of the groovy water moon while the sun set and the park was closing and god spit great gobs of splashy spit on us from above and you smiled and smiled and smiled.
M. N. Ashley 