don't call me rosie!

why are we always flowers? my love is like a red red rose. no she's not. a rose is a rose, and she is a person. she will not wilt within a week. she will not lose her color, turn brown, and dry out. and you know that if she does, max factor will have the solution she's looking for.

but since she is actually a living human, why should she? why is it so important to keep the appearances: colors, glows, silken-like qualities of youth? because why are women here but to reproduce.

no, i don't believe that, even if it's true. it's just that the older i get, the more a biological determinist i seem to get. to not be living your life as a woman whose main goal is to family and reproduce, is to consciously depart from your genes.

and face social retribution when you do. though defining one's self should be everyone's own private prerogative, it simply is not. each individual is a part of a larger social animal, and it is that animal's job to mind the bits and pieces. anyone who might question, or cause another to question, is a "Bad Influence." (maybe even mentally ill)

why must jennifer lopez be seen in a different outfit every week when she judges american idol? even i feel that pressure, even if i'm just going to the store. is it true, as i tell myself, that i just can't stand repetition, or something else, something much darker and inbred?

and we are not allowed to do anything that marks us as uninterested in reproducing. how often will you see an ad on tv telling you that you look beautiful in white hair, why change it? and in fact, where does it say that you needn't be beautiful?

i admit it, i'm
the odd one out. asperger's gives one distance. if you don't "get" the rules, you are more likely to notice their forms. but that does not invalidate my questions. is there a future role for women in which to be called a red, red rose would be an insult?

at one point,
will we be free enough to live without expectations? or are the expectations a necessity if our species is to survive? like sand through an hourglass, an individual life passes along its genes and then moves on. anyone who wants to stop it can must pay the price. and all this goes on beyond our ken and beyond our reach.


until someone reaches out to pluck that flower.

do you see yourself here?

SLOWLY: a plainsong from an older woman to a younger woman

am I not....olden olden olden
it is unwanted.

wanting,..wanting
am I not....broken
stolen....common

am I not crinkled cranky poison
am I not glinty-eyed and frozen

am I not....aged
shaky....glazing
am I not....hazy
guarded....craven

am I not....only
stingy....little
am I not....simple
brittle....spitting

was I not....over
over....ridden?

it is a long story
will you be proud to be my version?

it is unwritten.

writing,..writing
am I not....ancient
raging....patient

am I not....able
charming....stable
was I not....building
forming....braving

was I not....ruling
guiding....naming
was I not....brazen
crazy....chosen

even the stones would do my bidding?

it is a long story
am I not proud to be your version?

it is unspoken.

speaking, speaking
am I not....elder
berry
brandy

are you not wine before you find me
in your own beaker?

Judy Grahn

“Slowly: a plainsong from an older woman to a younger woman” from love belongs to those who do the feeling: New & Selected Poems (1966-2006). Copyright © 2008 by Judy Grahn.

when i was a young feminist judy grahn was at every poetry reading reading her common woman poems (see some here). i once painted the text of one onto my kitchen wall.

que sera sera

One more fact remains to be considered in its bearing upon this question [of whether the feminist movement is good or evil]. It is this, paradoxical as it may appear, that the strongest faculties of women are such as, if exercised without social or political restraint, will most surely estrange them, if not from the feelings, from the habits and associa- tions of the traditional female life.

Women are intelligent; they are not creative. Whether in their home or beyond it, their successes can only be achieved through the contact with other minds; the impulse to mental action must always come to them from without, or at least the form in which the impulse will be clothed.

That men possess the productiveness which is called genius, and women do not, is the one immutable distinction that is bound up with the intellectual idea of sex. We know that women have seldom, perhaps never, been great artists or great com- posers, and that the number of female writers who can be called great is very small as compared with the number of those who make, or have made, literature the business of their life.

We know also that they may, as far as mental qualification is concerned, make good lawyers, doctors, and financiers. Their new ambitions will instinctively turn towards these more purely intellectual and also more militant forms of activity; and therefore towards a life which, however it may lack manliness, will still, as far as it goes, be masculine.

Genius is a patent of individuality; a title to the performance of every function not barred by pre-existing duty to which it may lead the way. If women, as a race, possessed genius, their present opportunities would suffice to them ; if not, they might justly demand others.

We might have an art, a science, a legislation, which would be truly feminine — a feminine activity which might safely compete with that of man, because it would be, in the full sense of the word, supplementary to it.

But this is supposing a universe other than our own. Women, as they are now created, can be individual only in the limited existence to which circumstances have consigned them.

Within that existence they may still be greatly improved; beyond it — this is a commonplace truth, but none the less needing to be repeated — they will not be improved women; they will only be inferior men.

from The Future of English Women,
by Mrs. A. Sutherland Orr, 1878

why are there flowers?

i was in the large waiting room shared by two teams of doctors and a testing lab, reading in a ten year old issue of natural history magazine an article entitled 'why are there flowers?'; the answer, which the magazine clearly thought would shock its readers, was quite obviously sex.

as it is, perhaps, for us humans as well. is it any wonder that we all, men and women alike, admire being, and/or seeing, the flowers? and when the hormones are flooding, we women often feel it of ourselves too: the lightness of purpose and the dance of life.

but most of us women know, or learn sooner or later, that that's not it; gender falls away in the face of substance. we are all quite more, men and women again alike, than the pursuit of the sum of our parts. (i remember suddenly realizing, at the age of three, that all the songs on the radio were love songs. how absurd! i thought.)

that's why when i come across an image of a woman who is not being portrayed for her loveliness first and foremost, it catches my attention. images of women who are thinking of something, who are complex, who have more knowledge than they are expected to have, sadly, often fall into the categories of dejection or exhaustion. but wait -- is there a glimmer more?

Each cell has a life. There is enough here to please a nation. It is enough that the populace own these goods. Any person, any commonwealth would say of it, “It is good this year that we may plant again and think forward to a harvest. A blight had been forecast and has been cast out.”

Many women are singing together of this: one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine, one is at the aquarium tending a seal, one is dull at the wheel of her Ford, one is at the toll gate collecting, one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona, one is straddling a cello in Russia,

one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt, one is painting her bedroom walls moon color, one is dying but remembering a breakfast, one is stretching on her mat in Thailand, one is wiping the ass of her child, one is staring out the window of a train

in the middle of Wyoming and one is anywhere and some are everywhere and all seem to be singing, although some can not sing a note.

Anne Sexton from “In Celebration of My Uterus” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). Copyright © 1981

A Work Of Artifice

The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.

Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.

With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.

Marge Piercy

copyright 1966 marge piercy all rights reserved

an old woman

how luminous the young girls are.

TO A POOR
OLD WOMAN

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand










They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her













You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand





Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her

William Carlos Williams

From Collected Poems: 1939-1962, Volume II by William Carlos Williams, published by New Directions Publishing Corp. © 1962 by William Carlos Williams.

how few of us there are in song and story.

a diamond in pearls

her survival was in the recreation of herself; her success was in the recreation of fashion. in the recreation of her life, on, appropriately, lifetime tv, we are shown a lot of truths, a good number of fictifi- cations, and some of the most beautiful players on the screen today.

prettified, possibly, but somehow, the woman is caught. one can view photographs of the original and see that the leap has not been too great.

the costumes are inter- esting, and also appear to be rather accurate. one wonders, now, what the audrey tautou chanel will be like.

we see a woman with a series of affairs, but we are not told they lasted as long as they did, or that they sometimes occurred simultaneously. literally.

we understand easily now how narrow the line between 'courtesan' and 'friends with benefits' might be.

even shirley maclaine, headliner if minor character, disappears in turning into the stoop-shouldered coco, which she pulls off wonderfully.

perusing the real woman's life, as seen through the eyes of the biographers of her lifetime best friend and bitterest enemy, misia sert, we see her as a diamond: beautiful, unique, and hard.

the film does not hide this.

nor does it hide the aston- ishing changes chanel made in the ways women allowed themselves to appear in the world,
hair, fashion; the way we move.

the film points no fingers. what would you have done with this life? i suppose that theme is common to lifetime tv movies; this time they've really out- done themselves.

a private space disclosed

BEAUTY AND SADNESS

He drew hundreds of women
in studies unfolding

like flowers from a fan.

Teahouse waitresses, actresses,
geishas, courtesans and maids.

They arranged themselves
before this quick, nimble man
whose invisible presence
one feels in these prints
is as delicate
as the skinlike paper
he used to transfer
and retain their fleeting loveliness.

Crouching like cats,
they purred amid the layers of kimono
swirling around them
as though they were bathing
in a mountain pool with irises
growing in the silken sunlit water.

Or poised like porcelain vases,
slender, erect and tall; their heavy
brocaded hair was piled high
with sandalwood combs and blossom sprigs
poking out like antennae.
They resembled beautiful iridescent insects,
creatures from a floating world.

Utamaro absorbed these women of Edo
in their moments of melancholy
as well as of beauty.

He captured the wisp of shadows,
the half- draped body
emerging from a bath; whatever
skin was exposed
was powdered white as snow.

A private space disclosed.
Portraying another girl
catching a glimpse of her own vulnerable
face in the mirror, he transposed
the trembling plum lips
like a drop of blood
soaking up the white expanse of paper.

At times, indifferent to his inconsolable
eye, the women drifted
through the soft gray feathered light,
maintaining stillness, the moments in between.

Like the dusty ash-winged moths
that cling to the screens in summer
and that the Japanese venerate
as ancestors reincarnated;
Utamaro graced these women with immortality
in the thousand sheaves of prints
fluttering into the reverent hands of keepers:
the dwarfed and bespectacled painter
holding up to a square of sunlight
what he had carried home beneath his coat
one afternoon in winter.

Cathy Song
from Picture Bride by Cathy Song.
Copyright © 1983 by Yale University Press.

if you have ever wished to make a round-the-world tour in the pursuit of museum exhibitions about kimono, this is the summer of your dreams:

Ohio, Melbourne, Ontario, Philadelphia, Maine, Oregon, Tokyo, & Wisconsin! (okay, okay. i know some of them have just passed and some are in the fall but give me a break.)

and to respond to cathy song's poem, i too question who was happy, who was sad. as does this movie:

for the true tales of a wearer of kimono, see this blog.