Finding Annie (from 2015)

  

What does it take for a woman’s body to become her own?

A week before my 46th birthday,

I came a whisper’s distance from finding out,

from getting my first tattoo:

a tear on my left cheekbone,

another on my lower right cheek.

Two spots of aquamarine,

salt on blood, ink on skin,

signifying an entire lost world of feeling,

denied to women, denied to men.

 

On your face? my friend’s text read.

On your face?! erupted another,

in her body-wise ways.

ON YOUR FACE? shouted yet another,

stunned, seeing a gang-mark in the tears.

Murdered someone, have you? She teased.

Receiving someone, I tendered.

 

Long after I thought the discernment was over,

the discernment began,

welcoming a new force in my body

Adolescent Annie, driving my bodycar

without a license,

hands clenched at the wheel.

She wanted to be found,

Willing to mark my body with

permanent tears if necessary.

 

Because…

 

First, this body belonged to my mother,

whose lifework was to mother.

When I tried to grow up, leave home, she said

“How could you do this to me? You are dead to me.”

All chaste energies then belonged to my father.

“Faith has no feeling,” he said,

feeling his faith deeply in mine.

Then it belonged to my husband,

an ex-attorney finding his feeling life

connected to the church I had once served,

which he now calls his own.

 

My body has been this bridge to cross

for men and the women who love them

a safe emotional, erotic home

for the Seeking to find the Sacred.

 

Is it ever too late for a woman to learn

her own body is valued, beautiful

just as she is, holy created, holy enfleshed?

That she is not made “to be of good use?”

(thank you, Marge Piercy)

 

I felt a difference, began to receive

my own body as mine when mirrored

in the faces of women who loved me.

My face somehow mixed with their faces,

Seeing for the first time their shock, their sadness,

at permanent tears, etched in skin in blood.

I never want to mark their faces with tears.

What urged me to mark my own?

 

I'm glad Annie arose in her wordless way,

claiming this body as her own

as I am willing to enter into its mysteries,

receive its beauty and value,

know at the deepest core of who I am:

Our flesh is sacred, sparked with the Divine

through and through.

 

I think it takes a mark of welcomed need,

a gentle touch of women’s care, fierceness

finding a home in the heart, through the soul,

held in the faces and spaces of women.

No tattoos are necessary here

for the bodyheart to open, need and allow.

 

Annie is finally home, fully licensed,

slowly accepting that we don’t need a tattoo.