Author: dianarenee

...a writer and poet who left the traditional Mennonite community of Lancaster, Pennsylvania and resides in Costa Rica.

blue blankets

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she wants grandchildren,
dreams of our bellies
swelling with babies –
her inexplicable daughters
safely sealed in matrimony
and we get cats
get dogs

she sees my first wrinkle
with panic
her time runs out with mine

shall I cut paper hands
for my poems?
pin the pages of stories
to dolls she can hold?
shall I name my notebooks, wrap them in
blue blankets,
bounce them on my hip and
sing them songs?

(an old poem from sometime before my nieces and nephews were born to partially absolve me,  but the questions remain.)

The Queen of Banshees

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One day I will free
this wild whoop
boiling in my belly
scream out my laughter
ride my wild elephants
to wherever they go.
Lost, laughing
I will never look back.
Painted face and
tangled hair
I will become
the Queen of Banshees.
I will be as loud as I am
and as bright.

(from Tell Me About The Telaraña, 2012)

From the Journals: Two entries about Tia Flor

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January 31, 1998
(Guanacaste, Costa Rica)

We went, on Friday night, to visit Tia Flor in El Silencio. It made my heart ache inside its cage because the blessed silence was there that once lay over the world before everybody had televisions. All was silent and crisply cool in the moonlight. Through the open-air window a star hung over the mountain and ranas and solococos sang their hymns. Tia Flor gave us coffee and fresh hot bread.

I love my pretty house with its windows and floors and I know I am living a relatively simple life compared to some people in the world, but when I stood in El Silencio I felt the same hunger for simplicity that I felt in the USA, ironically, living here.

November 15, 1999
(Washington State, USA)

I am haunted by Tia Flor. She is what stands between me and any ability to become contented with a “normal” life. She has what I do not.

I thought about her on Saturday night as we were driving out of the Tri Cities on 395 North. It was dark and the cars driving with us and toward us made up a great high-speed pulse. The night was lit up by giant bulbs surrounding shopping malls, over gas stations and on road signs. The earth in all directions: asphalt, concrete.

And here comes the unreasonably agonizing understanding that all of this is artificial. Superficial. Fake. Unnatural. Contrived. Illusory. Night isn’t yellow. Night is black. People can’t travel at 70 miles per hour. People walk. The ground isn’t hard and black. The ground is soft and has many colors. Everything that is the common agreed-upon reality of the moment is bullshit.

I cannot stand it.

Tia Flor appears to me. She is everything a “beautiful”, “successful” person is not. She is old. She is fat. She is poor. Her clothes are out of fashion and her hair smells of smoke. She wears big glasses, cheap flip-flops and her shins are full of lumps. In Tia Flor’s house, there are mice. She has a cat to catch them, to keep them out of the tortilla corn. There are spiders and spider webs connecting the rafters of the house with one bare bulb in each room.

She gave me the most delicious scandalously sweet coffee I have ever tasted that she made on her woodstove and warm bread she just baked over the coals. I sat on a sunken chair too sorry, even, to throw away and looked out her window open to the sky. The moon lit up every leaf on the mango tree and outlined their movements, like dancers, when the breeze ruffled. The rooster crowed from his perch. Frogs giggled and hooted in the quebrada. An owl said it name.

It will drive me mad. These are not pictures of affluence and poverty. They are pictures of illusion and truth. Dementia and sanity. Quebrantamientos and wholeness. It causes me pain to look out the window, to look in the window, and not see black sky, a moonlit mango, a wood stove, a pile of corn. Even now that I know of the hardships suffered by a person like Tia Flor. Even so, she has what I do not.

Ana

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I know Ana too well. We are like sisters, now. We each know when the other is lying.

Sometimes I can’t digest my lunch I the same room with her because in her silence, she is saying to me, you don’t think I know what you did and in my silence she knows I am lying. I have to go lie on the bed in front of the fan.

We’re all we have, as if we were born with the same last names, but I sometimes sit outside at night so I won’t hear her screaming at me as she quietly watches tv.

-Estás enojada conmigo?- I ask her.
-Ni quiera Dios,- she says to me. -No.-

desert poem

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does the sand under my feet
dream of the day
it was the bottom of
a shallow sea
sifting back and forth
rocked in warm currents
tickled by little
fins

the dry hills were
islands, then
fish hatched in their
rocky ribs
frogs sang and there were
birds

the wind cannot
even howl, now
nothing grows here to
give it a voice

El Arcoiris / Para mi Ahijada

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Ama como si te estuvieras ahogando
y siempre primero
a ti misma. Piérdete, y no
tengas miedo; cada día
hay un nuevo sol.
Saborea todo.
No esperes nada.
Mírate al espejo para no
olvidar.
Camina con la cabeza en alto.
Baila con el pelo suelto.
Canta a todo pulmón.
Cuenta las estrellas.
Bebe del rio.
Tírate al mar.

Porque la vida
es una
las noches
son largas
el corazón es de carne
el alma es de nubes
y tú eres
el arcoiris
hoy

Suitcases

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You are sitting there in the living room with your shoes on and your hat.
And the tv is off which is impossible.
And there are suitcases beside you.

You say you are leaving. That much I can see for myself.

You say you shouldn’t have come here in the first place.
You say I don’t love you.
You say you read that in my diary.

I don’t say anything.
Clearly, you have helped yourself to my words.

You say the driver will be here for you any minute and he is.
I say goodbye.

The first time you left me you snuck away like coward and I nearly died of grief and rage.
But you begged to come back.
Maybe I wanted to see you walk away like a man; watch you walk out the door with your shoes on and your hat.
Maybe I wanted to remember you as the back of a hat and two sets of white knuckles clutching your suitcases.

Gasp

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(a surfing poem about drowning/not-drowning)

spinning helplessly
down below
i tuck and spin faster

is this how she dies?
dashed on a rock?
her head clobbered by
the rocketing board?
a hit just right would
knock her unconscious
she would forget to
hold her last air
suck in lungs of sea and
go limp

time stops
between heartbeats

awake in this roaring
blind night, i check:
my neck is
not broken
both arms, unharmed curl
overhead
perfect legs pulled in
protect my belly
somehow
how far down
i am not yet drowned

she is a little ball of
curled girl
in a seething sea
spinning lost somewhere
waiting for what happens

she is the planted seed
which contains the
rest of her life

far above me
the board surfaces,
finds light and sky
a solid yank to my leash leg
tells me which way is
up
to a world full of air

i open and
kick through the foam
finding the top
as the gasp
explodes

Penance

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(From A Map Of The River, an unpublished short novel/prose poem)

…..

Washing clothes by hand in the pila is nothing new for me.
In Los Rios I have left behind a small white washer, but before I had it I washed in the way of our Grandmothers.
I know how to do this.
It is an important thing a woman must know.
The little girls on the block come to stare.
They have never seen a white woman wash.
They don’t suppose we know how.
They ask me “Sabe usted lavar?”
I answer them,”Sí” and still they stand in disbelief to watch.

Consuelo wet the clothes in the stone sink, sprinkled them with soap and scrubbed, deftly rolling and unrolling them against the rough surface. I watched her rinse them with scoops of fresh water from a gourd dish, then a hard wring with her muscled brown arms. She came to our house every morning to wash for Guadalupe, her four grown sons and her young boy. With her came Nanci, her five year old animal-child who grunted and screamed, scratched and stole, who learned the unintelligible speech of her mother. She is the one on whom the poor take pity because her poverty is complete.

Consuelo and her animal-daughter Nanci came to wash and I learned to understand their grunted language. The payment for Consuelo’s work were the plates of rice and beans which she and Nanci ate at midday. I watched them. They watched me. Consuelo offered to wash my clothes for small fee and I said no. She had no way of understanding my desire to learn so she thought I was stingy and mean. She watched me without pretending not to as I struggled to wash my own clothes, a clumsy imitation of her efficiency. Guadalupe’s sons watched me wash. Neighbors who stopped by watched me wash.  All of my life, people have stopped to watch me wash.  A gringa washing clothes by hand: who knew it was possible?

Later, in our rented house in Santa Cruz, before we had money to buy the small plastic washer, I washed everything by hand on Saturday mornings. Towels, bedding, the clay-encrusted work clothes of a potter went into the sink on the porch. I sweated out the penance for my sins one by one. Penance for selfishness were the shirts, penance for untruths were the stained socks to be whitened but not stretched. Penance for leaving my home and my traditions were jeans ground in the mud. Bed sheets were the penance for the iniquities of the unwed. Towels were the penance for having been born rich enough never to have hand-washed towels. When I finished, I was spent; drenched in suds and sweat, knuckles raw, wrists limp, back splitting, dizzy with exhaustion and the relief that comes only from cleaning your conscience along with your clothes.

…..

Prayer To The Mantis

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teach us, mother/sister
the moment for teeth
we are tender-skinned creatures
seduced by softness, softened
by a slow caress and close
breath

teach us, show us
when and where –
quick
before limbs are unraveled
just
below ear, left or right

(A very old poem I wrote once up on a time when I was very mad. It wasn’t supposed to be funny, but…)