EPIC Poem: RIPTIDE REEL, by Kate Gross

I.

Cary Grant
your mother
Cary Grant in his PJs and bathrobe
eating a sandwich and drinking a glass of whole milk in the kitchen, saying

You’ll never be a first class human being or a first class woman until you’ve learned to have some regard for human frailty.

What a guy.

Unlike some men I knew
whose faces float by me in the shower.
A quick soap-jab knocks their beards backwards
but they’re always there when I’m driven
to cleanse and redeem.

On a North Carolina beach in the 80s
you were smashed by a wave in your mother’s arms.
Both of you turned underwater,
spinning like rags in a quick wash cycle.
When you came out of it she was crying.
You might’ve been too, but children will do that.
If you’d been lucky enough to have a daughter,
you’d understand your mother’s tears
but as she was the reason you were too scared to try
your womb is ice
not ocean.

Your mother was an ocean.
Your mother was an Irish Rose with a side of whisky.
Your mother was a ham sandwich at 3am
pressed and toasted.
Your greedy mouth scorched so often you forgot what taste was.

You can hunger for pressed truth and still be scared of it.
You can want pretending and honesty at the same time.
You can look in the mirror through your affirmations
and still see her staring back at you.

You can’t even cry or rage or grieve right
because now you are watching yourself from the outside
and imagining Glenn Close crying and grieving her friend
Alex, who was played by Kevin Costner only the bit of him they didn’t cut
was his corpse in the coffin
while the Stones played
and all the headlights of the cars switched on.
You know you’re a fraud
because you are always imagining yourself as someone else.

II.

The constant argument that a certain flavor
of McDonald’s milkshake is best

you never tried the shamrock, ew

And remembering your best friend’s text to you
after telling you she was pregnant
a shamrock shake screenshot
and ‘time to get fat!’ underneath.

This from a girl who weighed the same as you
but you never looked as good as
how ashamed you were of that
how ashamed you were when you lived with your best friend’s mom
when you were too sad to live at home and they asked you to leave
the blonde who was not your mother and the father who never had your courage.
How the shame of being the ‘different’ family never left you.

But back to the shamrock.
You’re a purist,
‘You’re a pacifist! —’,

There’s Kevin again, but he’s alive throughout this movie, the one about dreams

You’re a movie snob.
You’re coach seating.
You trudge your makeshift woman’s bones to the back of life
sink into a seat of ordinary
pretend it’s comfortable
resume the work of trying to make sinner and saint
living inside the house of your spirit
shake on it.

Peace be with you. And also with you,

kinda

As a child, your favorite thing in your grandmother’s house
was a set of soft old books with duct-taped binding
about a clever girl named Polly and everyone used slang.
Aces and a little bit of alright when things were good.
Rotten luck when they weren’t.
Pax when they got into a scuffle they realized they couldn’t win.
Scuffles in your house growing up meant
dodging thrown plates and puppies
and escaping into a word on the page
as it was when you first saw it

Pax!, she cried out

Polly was clever and practical and everyone loved her.
Your mother was crazy and you studied how to be like Polly.
Polly laughed a lot and always did the right thing.
A basketball captain. A horse driver.
Keeper of a cool head she often shook silly thoughts out of

Polly gave herself a little shake

Your mother’s silly thoughts banded with violent insurgents
forming an army stronger than any expert
or best friend or crying kid or heartbroken husband.
There’d be rioting and shrieking and the sound of sirens
and then it would be over and the streets would fall silent.
You’d tiptoe up and down, skirting past your boarded-up heart
trying not to inhale the smog of penitence hung thick.
“That’s it folks, party’s over,’ the policeman would say
waving you back to your rooms:
Four tiny, brokenhearted guests straggling home in the early morning
Nightgown hems spilled milk.
Sighs notes on a xylophone.

When she’d finally been sent away after years of bloodshed
you looked around for the others
but each had fled to her own safe island.
The Fatherly policeman kept unsteady pax:
Learned how to cook, packed your lunch.
He too, would be gone soon, making a moonshiny island of you

but we haven’t gotten to that part of the movie yet

When she left the tension wire wrapped around your body gave way
fear flowed from shoulders to shins
past the kneecaps

those things that belonged on the ‘low cushions’ you just googled the name of

in your grandmother’s church on Morningside Avenue

they’re called ‘hassocks’

that you always rested your feet on
because you knew even at twelve
that no one and especially not your grandmother
deserved any kind of reverence.

Blessed be the Christians who put Love into practice,
Blessed be those who love the nutjob sister back to health.
Screw the rest.
Your mother’s family, for example.
Zombies wearing Christian masks

you do realize this means you are part-zombie

The test of true Christianity is simple and smooth like porcelain.
Finishing a cup of tea at your grandmother’s house
you saw through tiny green clovers
a constellation of hairline cracks when you gulped that last sugar sip

And get this — they’re called ‘crazing’

You prefer kintsugi slivers running through sturdy ceramic pieces
putting the pain right out there so it glows.

You can always tell a false Christian by the way they respond to need.
You hate them. You are them.
You are her. You are you.
Zombies flood the churches.
Sinners are saints are sinners.
There’s no reason for anything.

And now she’s been gone and it’s time for Depression? Dementia?
Divorce!
If that was a Jeopardy question you’d know how to answer

What is divorce, Alex

but it’s real and here
and you are cursed and split:
half of you a hypocrite zombie
the other half a sliver of her

your ocean, your kintsugi

The timelines are matching up and you are livid with the world
because the work of your life has brought you right back to her
again and always and forever,

Amen.

In this place of no reason
her horrifying legacy holds you by the shoulders
and nothing not your birth or her death
has set you free from its grip:
a dance, a reel, a riptide you cannot shout or fight your way out of.
In the sea of her and you, there is no shoreline.
In the film, mother and daughter on a loop.
In the dance, we only do step 8:
Keep circling round and shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.

And when you sat in the drizzle on your front steps last year
hoping for a miracle of the Lt. Dan variety

you said you were a movie snob, were you lying?

you waited for the deluge to cry so people driving by
would think you just had a face full of rain.
You waited for a sign and saw through the window of the house across the way
those white capital letters against that royal blue
the puzzled, searching face of one contestant
and you knew your mom and grandmother were close by
always so mean about the cringe moments following that first commercial break.

Not all of us can be smart and funny

Your grandmother was neither:
an uptight Catholic bitch made of prayers and withholdings and and appearances
sitting safe and warm in her kitchen,
(denial draped over her shoulders like the ugliest cassock)
chatting with your aunt while her daughter

smarter and funnier than nine of her put together

died upstairs in a pool of urine and boozy sweat.

III.

Lt. Dan had a ship where he could act out his redemption
but you were only ever a passenger on board
someone else’s.
You never have a place to scream
You need to roar but can’t
partly because you’re scared of jails and institutions
partly because you’re scared of yourself.

You last roared with your best friend in the Ithaca hills
when you were twenty and wise
before you turned forty and realized you knew nothing.
Before you realized that there is no quota on what life can take from you
That mortgages and marriages make no difference.
That in the end and in the moment, only you can carry your life.

Will you scramble or float?

You can float with the current until it weakens
but you only know how to fight.
That’s how you came into this world:
fighting and shouting because what should’ve been an arrival was an escape.
You’d fled her from the start,
verdant womb-turned-wasteland
triggering an exodus neither of you were expected to survive

It’s true you made the journey
got here in one piece
so exhausted from your pre-world life
that no amount of rest could ready you for this one.
As a child you often wished you could sleep forever.
The first one to come inside on a snow day, the first one in from the dock in summer.
Faceplanting into plates of spaghetti or peas
you’d wish to crawl under a sea of blankets
go back from whence you came like the tide:
A normal one with measured ins and outs
like how everyone else breathed.

In four, hold four, out four, hold four

Box breathing works different than drinking.

To flow in and out is the way but against is all you know.
Fights break out everywhere:
the shower, the kitchen, the crosswalk, your head.
Fuck you, Cary Grant. So perfect.
But wisdom says

cease fighting

And so maybe just for today, surrender.
Release.

The fiddles stop, the lights come up in the darkened dance hall.
The rote horror of the 150 bpm whirl stills and you emerge into silence.
It’s over.

You take the steps up and away from the water’s edge.
You curl up in a blanket of sun, closing your eyes.
Water salts your skin.

The strong sand holds you.