I was born a hungry ghost. An angry, hungry ghost.
Disappointed beyond all hope in utero, I saw that my beloved Lily slipped away before fully incarnating, and I was left with the burden of the sister who decided to stick it out. I wanted Lily, and she left.
Collapsing with this understanding, knowing I would bear the burden of guilt and pain forever, I made do with what limited power I had.
I changed positions with my sister in the womb, moving her from a Breech birth to a head-first delivery. I went first, furious. I came into this incarnation with rajasic and purposeful energy, only to feel thwarted before I began.
In graduate school for a doctorate which I never intended to complete, one in Perinatal Psychology, I was able to attend the first seminar for a weekend where the participants were required to experience their own births. How this was facilitated remains a brilliant mystery. But it was very authentic. It was powerful.
I was born angry. I was furious to be born at the same time with a sister who would become an albatross, all the while knowing my karma was to care for her. I never really loved her. I just took care of her. I began sacrificing then and have never stopped. With the sacrifice came blame and shame from my sister, who incarnated, it seemed, to represent the dark side, the part of the shadow disowned. I saw it, but I could not seem to retrieve my own goodness, so my sister suffered. I suffered because she was not Lily. And my sister suffered because she was not me.
Chapter 3: I Have Gone Mad Trying To be Sane
We spent our childhood on a small island, Wadmalaw Island, in the low country of South Carolina.
As our lives played out on the island, we were young children left to our dreamtime.
Quite young, I found what Kabir called “the breath within the breath,” and I recognized that I had a will toward mystery, a longing, greater even than my will to live.
I was to recognize this will toward mystery as a homesickness for God.
When I realized the enormity of the self, I turned away from this luminosity and turned instead to the dubious tendencies which had to play out: addiction, grief, a need to please and be liked.
The will to live hardened my belly. Overwhelmed by the possibility of God always, God everywhere, God only and always, I peeled part of my personality away and lived in the in-between worlds of doubt and possibility.
Punky’s Hair
The old wooden structure was 200 years old. It had been a dance hall years before on this tiny island in the low country, but now it remained empty and unlocked, allowing us as children to enter and serve up the endless supply of RC Cola and peanuts for 25 cents.
Some uncomfortable but welcome feeling began stirring in me when I turned from a girl into a woman.
There were only two boys on the island, Stevie and Punky.
I wanted Stevie but knew I had no chance since my sister also had her eyes set on him.
So, I turned to Punky. A gangly, tall boy with thick lips and a few pimples, his mother had given him a bowl haircut. I convinced myself of my love for him.
He smelled like low tide. He smelled like high tide. When he walked by me, I experienced feelings I could not understand. The gulls sang out to us. Shrimp boats quieted their cacophony when they glided through the inland waterway in front of us.
The oak tree held no comfort. Mama and Daddy held no comfort. My horse showed no comfort. I was beginning the part of life which proved to me there was a God. God lived. God was dead.
I wanted Punky.
I became prolific with poetry and books, sublimating a burgeoning sexuality threatening to burst its ropes and cast me into a sea rife with beasts and gargoyles.
I wrote poetry. I won awards. My poetry saved me from recognizing the illusory nature of love too early.
Much later, I wrote a poem called
Punky’s Hair
The oyster shells will cut your feet to ribbons they told us
Daddy cut watermelon on the back porch
And Mama got Shine to sell her the sivvy beans
And we were so in love with them
our hearts split in two like the luscious melons
and the labs – Pandemonium and Mary – slept logy and fat in the
shade of the live oak
All summer our girlhood became as tender as the plough mud
with the richness of new things growing
In the mushy warmth
And we became creatures called woman before cognition
registered in our young minds
Bone gangly hilarious skin screaming with confusion
and longing for Punky and Stevie to notice
and Punky’s head smelled so good I reeled
When I went to pick up the peanut meant for the RC Cola
dropped intentionally by Punky
and I caught a good whiff
Punky’s hair smelled to me like what I knew but had forgot in the other worlds
sunshine, sweat, salt, some nastiness….
Mama used to kiss our boo-boos and admonish a trembling lip with that look of hers
Remembering…
remembering….
sifting through with smell, snorting and snuffling, like a pig with truffles, pulling up the memories
like poems in the wind
the earth a poem of its own
the plough mud my menstrual blood all the boys and men I held in my arms those nights of confusion and longing
the terrible deaths I died over and over and the babies and the blood
the secret becomings and the crucifixions
and the babies and the blood
seeing Mama finally wither at the feet of patriarchal demagoguery
and it ended there and then for all of us didn’t it?
Her heart once so filled with love and devotion now so angry and
spiteful brittle mean dry and spitting at the end
That meanness – it can happen to all of us at the end
The heart is a muscle too
It must be exercised all those chambers and hidey-holes it contains!
All those uncountable places we thought
No! No! I can’t go there! Not there!
But we sniffed this one out – this memory – that memory – that unbearable one – this unbearable one –
we sniffed and sniffed and sniffed
until we were nothing but light all the memories bending and fitting into light
nothing but light
and the light became another’s poem
another’s word
another’s wind
another’s dream
and the oyster shells cut our feet to ribbons
and we dangled shreds of flesh
like gems into the precious past
-©KM 2017