Visitation on the Island of the Starter Wives

                          beginning with a line by Barbara Ras


At first all they want is watermelon
and thread, the wet pulp they spit behind them 
leaving a red trail through the sedges,
the seeds they sew into black ball gowns 
rattling behind them in a shimmering wake.

Then they clamor for more:
angostura clippings, pallets of bee balm, 
cocktail umbrellas of eelskin and fishbone. 
At any hesitation, they shake the chain link 
and shriek out like a chorus of kettles.

This, the first lesson:
You must be patient with them.
Theirs is the red call, the red eye of the loon 
that sends its grief out over the steaming cold.

Stand back from the fence, please, 
says the game warden,
and chastened chaperones 
gather schoolchildren
like collectable shells
to be loaded back on the mainland ferry.

But today, instead of leaving,
I duck the electric chain link
and follow them back over the crags 
through the dwarfed, arthritic cypresses 
to the coves below.

Here, on the packed sand 
between two cliffs,
they are building a cathedral 
of the discarded:
styrofoam gargoyles, 
scrap-metal buttresses, 
plastics of every kind
sorted by color, then texture.
When I ask if they should
use something more permanent, 
they laugh
and hand me a trowel.

They fashion stained-glass scenes 
from sheets of dried kelp
and the tumbled shards of sea glass, 
woven into a mesh of netting, 
knowing what good artists know: 
that a well-lined thing
is a thing of beauty.

In its shade, they walk the stations 
of the double-crossed,
but here in the place they’ve made 
they stand in the very middle.
No more the blank, humanizing faces 
of the press-conference apologies,
they do not brush the sand from their faces, 
or come when called.
They do not make their beds 
in the padlocked attic
of an afterthought.

And when the sky goes oil-spill dark, 
they point not to the constellations 
twinkling in their heroic fantasia
but to the glinting space capsules of frozen-faced terriers
and chimpanzees,
their fur still pressed down 
from someone’s petting hand, 
spinning around us
in grim, faithful orbit.

They don’t ask to return. 
Why would they?

What they do is walk, 
out to where the waves
come low and fast enough 
to put them on their knees. 
And they dig in their heels.

Read more from Issue 20.2.