Cave-Girl by Mary Elizabeth Parker

 

“[The world of CAVE-GIRL is] a foreign land…intimately connected with the body, and with physical and sensual feelings [where] the only salvation lies in the body, or in deep instincts often connected with the physical—that those sensations and memories reach—are—the core of our beings. But we age, and the world changes our circumstances and understanding—blunts…the strength and vibrancy of our sensual lives when we were young [so that] there is really no lasting transcendence, only memories…of fragments of feelings, sensations.”

–Kathleen Hayes

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]The gritty poems in Cave-Girl chronicle an anguished life spent against “ bodies jockeying for buttock space on cement benches, blood- / cramped knees itching to swing, rattling jazz flung in her face, caught in this tiny stewing / room which can’t dissipate the force of flesh.”  Mary Parker’s poems are fresh, vivid and intoxicating.
~ Leah Maines, author of Beyond the River, winner of the Kentucky Writers’ Coalition Chapbook Competition (KWC Press), Poet-in-Residence of Northern Kentucky University, 2000

“Cave-Girl lives, daily, in the light…but a rich, shadow self craves the dark.”

“The poems draw the reader into the world of characters who, salvaging what they can from thefts of every kind, record loving what is lost and how the mind, the sense above all, can create solace of what’s left.”

–Eve Shelnutt, author of *Air and Salt*; *The Confidence Woman*; and *The Girl, Painted*

 

“These [are] odd, beautiful poems by Mary Elizabeth Parker, many story-telling, more with the logic of dreams or fairy tales…”

–Robert Watson, author of *The Pendulum* and *Night Blooming Cactus.*

They said the above about my collection The Sex Girl, but like many a poet, I’m still working the same themes.

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

 

 

Selections from Cave-Girl

 

Cave-Girl watches war on TV
and knows it’s no way to coax myth from caves,
sucking air with concussive blasts
when dark is trying to beg for
its life which must be teased up slow
as mud germinating eyeless
white arthropods, as mud germinating
cicadas rising from deep to crisp their wings
on thimble hillocks of dirt: she smells it
and craves caves. Perverse, now, how she
doggedly celebrates sun, positions herself at plate glass
to absorb maximum heat, ruffs up her collars
like the necks of daffodils to trap it,
constrained by the sheen of surface
things to acknowledge them, cart their banging
aluminum noise everywhere on her back…

 

Girl broken, but she knows what’s tentative is not necessarily weak—sometimes it’s just unstable—gathered like a warm egg and watched for whatever tries to chip and shoulder its way out. Like living in a cave with a black cat: both of them hunting, both of them chasing whatever wraps dark in a darker shroud. She waits for the cracks to be sealed by a fingertip, maybe God’s. When the cat de-camps, she gathers her plate, her fork, and her black bandana (for forays to rob homes around her) and moves further back in the cave. At the mouth, crows dive for pyracanthus, fire-thorn their focus. Will what she never speaks fall back to her heart like sperm back to a man’s vas deferens? She doesn’t believe a god lives in her; believes only in the girl she was, murmuring off-key Running Bear and Little White Dove and love and women strong as Paul Bunyan. Waits for a wafer the shape of the cave mouth to enter her. When this is done (will it be done?) she’ll stumble out, off-gait as a horse plunging toward water, back to the city of millions, furious as bees.

 

Bomba Que Bomba, Havana
on TV. It’s hard, she sees, anywhere,
to wrestle a definition of ‘girl’
that doesn’t start with ‘pretty’
or conversely, with the tougher-
than-steel tasks a womb can do,

 

or with a weird mix:
In this Latin parade for the Virgin,
en train to the porcelain Lady
who birthed the greatest boy yet,
quick-steps a proud young woman
frilled, wobbly with organza wings
frail as a butterfly’s, but potent

 

as any pupa
that might unchrysalize,
in skin-tight sequinned red bodice
and mincing on red spike heels—
be anybody’s guest to separate out
Sexy/Virgin/Mama.

 

Or to reconcile, at the marimbas,
‘bomba que bomba’ girls
who just like to shake it—the camera
laps like a dog at the undulant navel
of a ‘bomb’ girl in black Capris, a ‘bomb’ girl in pink—
jumps off them, whirls for a sneak attack
at bomba men ‘bombing’ their men’s hips, their sex,
braying, watching, battering their drums;

the noise goes on and on,
descarga total, total discharge—
the camera falls on a gleaming
jazz angel in white Spandex,
leotard kissed to every raled part
down to her dark bare toes, her whole self

 

leaping exultant, extended, extended,
flashing her white teeth, subsiding white
for a sigh of a moment, curling down
onto a big drum head and up again,
sinews coruscating white,
white as a streaming cat, white as milk,
discharging, rippling in flight
through the crumbling streets of Havana—
if she wants for anything,
it’s a moment’s answering
palm down one thigh, yet
as she ripples white silk
through the line of musicians,
not one palm dares reach out.

 

Here, other sisters
can hardly lift their bodies
to walk across a room,
both motive and impulse
ground to a halt
so that this swamp
of what’s ‘woman’
in which they stick
holds them like aspic
until an unlikely blast
of slow methane gasses

 

might slap everything off
the carefully-laid table
where they’ve always known
which side to place the knives on,
and the forks, and know
that when the food begins
telekinetically to slam itself
crazy against the walls
that they, being women,
will, through a trick not of nature,
be charged to clean up the mess.

 

Gene Tierney of Leave Her to Heaven,
and the actress who starred
in the remake,
were wicked women who
drowned the helpless,
kept their own eyes lasered

 

on the main chance—
who they could seduce.
Of course, this razor
focus was wrong,
and their acts
turned on them like knives,
twisted them
to stasis, self-sepsis—

 

Yet they used what they had,
good clothes, good breasts
and a mind
that rattled keen,
like a worm
in a Mexican jumping bean,
trying to stop
the involuntary twitch
as various small heats
were applied—

 

heat like the slow hot press of
domestic feminine detail,
the third iron foot of the
kitchen trivet
(and what strength left,
beneath that,
to even try bomba
or motherhood?)
deemed by men
and some diffuse weary women
to pin down woman’s
nature:

 

woman—virginal, sexy, and
calmly trained
to be competent
at myriad small things
(as if calm and competence were
her highest good)
by the pressure of word or gesture
that doesn’t quite touch
the woman beneath it,

 

that molecule some call ‘woman’
light as the approach
of one atom to another
in a cyclotron
that does not, of course,
fission—

 

Here, this season,
women wear spidery mums
on the plastic toes
of their sandals,
pale pink and yellow
limp, shredded explosions—

 

like a timid code.
So, let it come,
let it blow wide open
to a table where big meat is dinner,
ladies eat with their fists,
the table is bloody,
and all bets are off,
where a woman does not
clean up anything—
just takes the leavings
and paints all the walls
with things without bodies,
heads with horns.

 

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]