Dianne Bilyak

The War, Photos by Robert Doisneau

To know when your mother was born is to know when you were born. To know when the clock struck noon was to know that time dies in an abandoned castle where all floors look crooked from an opposite doorway. You were the tallest boy in the class. You wiped your tears with your teacher’s kerchief after the priest punished you for running when you should have been walking to the lavatory line. Among the girls posed side-saddle on the metal chairs between two rows of chestnut trees about to dosey doe, your hair was the shortest. In a shop window, a doll’s head, like an apparition, rests on her own head; champagne bottles in tuxedos; un chat endormi. One wall displays boys playing war. Socks pulled up below the knee. Metal, barrel hoops—foxhole slingshot. A white pigeon or a white dove? Her boots are drowning in puddles of milk. The exit from the exhibit is through a curtain holding two lovers kissing before a sculpture of a naked woman in repose. The heft and the sheath secured around my own body sets off the museum’s alarm twice. I’m always getting too close to what I’m not allowed to touch.
 
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The Buck Stops Here
  
If the deer looks back, there are children behind her. If the deer looks at you there is no one else but you and the deer. I’m crossing this island on a road called Old Milk Route near Chaos Corner. On this island we match our colours, we match the palette of ourselves to the granite and cobblestone and shingles. Exceptions are found in mid-August where some trees start to colour, the Burning Bush and the hydrangea’s blossoms, as big as cotton candy, with the hue of summer pastels still living in their branches. I recite these words into my phone; these words will soon become this poem. I do this in my poetry voice as if the universe were listening, as if I'm talking to somebody, but lately the only person I talk to is you. You, a month and a half dead. You, who fixed my house, who became a man I loved for a very short time. A man who wore his black shirt with Banksy’s Butterfly Girl Suicide iron-on, the day he turned science into magic. At my new house in my new yard, I leave all the milkweed for the Monarchs. And when they bloom and find the air and pastures and meadows and flowers, I will call them by your name. After all that time in the cocoon, after the opening and the stretching and the transformation, like you, each will be called to another world too quickly. Called to the dark, distant heat of a sunless day that is halfway through billions of years of its own life cycle. We sometimes fought about money and I can’t figure out if there is any currency, any promise, any bargain, any stone I could use as payment to start over. 
 
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Selling Our Mother’s House 
 
When I think of California, I remember my mid 30s, West Hollywood’s haze burning into sun. This was before I knew what I was or what I was becoming. The truth? Not much, and not much more. 25 years have passed since I last visited Santa Monica. Then, my spirit drifted over the cliff’s edge and created circles of refuge like a fog over the right hand of the mountains. I return to reconcile the dread and the heart’s insistence that my years of mourning require reprieve. I photograph birds of prey and birds of paradise, cacti and waving palms. I settle into the green, wooden pagoda I photographed years ago with film that had to be developed through the mail. I descend the steps to face the vast Pacific and baptize the beginning of the last third of my life in water and sand. I leave some of my pain behind, some of your death, some of the weight of the bricks called, “Goodbye.” Now, airborne, fear not sister, I return with most of you with me. But, it’s time — it’s time for spring to break me open instead of grief. This will mark the last year of picking blackberries in our mother’s yard. From their flowers, bees will make a honey so sweet, it will whet and wake the tongue of my need for forgiveness from my guilt for the wounds that took you from me. I’ll be leaving our former home before the bruised, grainy, bulbs appear—a bird’s delicate sustenance. With only one song left to sing, I sing to thee:

I’m sorry, my own sweet, beloved fruit; I’m sorry, my heart-drenched succulent --

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
 
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 Denied Access
 
I am the blood borne pathogen of a fish-eyed ferry. Crossing a sound that zips its lips. We reach an island with a train. I board and find my seat, wear a mask so no one will sit near me. I’m not sick, but the abdomen is congested—belly fat, belly flop. Ask the instructor who taught me to swim, held my back, let me sink. The water became a surface; my back became the footsteps of Peter, the apostle. Having long been betrayed, which of you will deny me? The geese form a V, fly south—down, down, down, descent and indecent. We all learn to love by being held and being let go.
 
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Baptism By Fire
 
There’s no tell-tale heart beneath her floorboards. And by that, I mean her chest. It was strong and clean until the chemo: my heart's fine, she always said, but I knew this wasn’t true. What caused or revealed the thickness in the chambers? What caused the attack? Rushed in an ambulance on I-95 South a couple of hours before midnight, where they claim the best cardiologist is. A pandemic burning through the city, no visitors allowed, my 81-years-old mother in New Haven alone. She never ate that day, that’s what bothered her most. And the guy near her room tainted the hallway with rage swearing so she couldn’t sleep, but insomnia was common. At 1 a.m. tests and images that revealed blockages, calcifications, tunnels tightened with milk’s hard extractions. They drilled just enough not to kill her—enough for blood to re-activate her heart. The heart I’d never seen. She saved her gloom only for me; her cusp of evening dark glowed like headlamps on black ice. Others, instead, witnessed the lights in her windows, the ones she taped to the sill from the boxes labeled “Christmas.” In the gloaming of her final week, she deemed this Earth suddenly good, this life suddenly worth living: “I don’t want to leave,” she said, too quietly, too late. Alone, I escorted her down death’s aisle across the constellations; I left her at the threshold of her former home. Despite all her fears, no one was waiting there to punish her, even for leaving me years ago, not that she considered that a crime, her own mother had done the same to both of us. I remember my grandmother’s red nails stirring the rocks in her afternoon bourbon—she'd dab a little on my lips— as I licked them it burned my tongue like a slap.
 
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The Nobel Prize Museum, Stockholm
 
A pair of pigeons lived in the antenna. In the name of science, we shot the pigeons to challenge The Big Bang theory against The Steady State. The Big Bang won. It was vice versus versa, it was residue of light and waves, the expansion of collateral damage. Did Neil’s Bohr fret about his body? Did he have to look at himself under a microscope and apologize for every flaw? Did he hold a mirror up to his penis and scrotum, in a circle of men, and say— “I can name the three chambers under my foreskin, I can trace the line on my testicles and call it by its Latin name.”? In Stockholm there are too many steeples steeped in fog. Even the magpie, in its coat & tails, stops looking for gilt around the graves, recognizes itself in the stone’s reflective surface and flies offstage singing I want to be loved for my mind.
 
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How We Keep What We Name
  
I am feeling sullen. If a bench were placed beside me, I’d sit on the cold ground instead and break every rule I set. For instance, I’m supposed to walk outside for two miles if it’s over 40 degrees. I’m supposed to get my steps in before dark. But instead, I plop on the couch and binge-watch videos on my phone I made about death. I could be a nomad; I could have a donkey. In fact, I do have a donkey, it followed me to the desert with a few years’ worth of surgical masks and a canteen filled with sanitizer for the pandemic that was only a mirage about death. Not everyone’s, but yours. I know it’s time to sell the donkey. But what would he do, what would he carry? Plus, I’ve named him already, I call him Melvin, and he calls me Story because I’m a big talker. He listens to every word I mutter about death while I lie on the cold desert floor. I dream that Melvin is an insomniac, and I have sleep apnea. In the dream he tells me that I was dreaming about you again, dear sister, and I told him, not that he asked, that you were sitting on the bench beside me and that is why I was sitting on the ground. That this dream is not a mirage and there is a distance where my sister and I are still in it counting the white sails on the white boats between us.
 
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Sea Glass
  
There was not much my mom and I liked to do together, but since I was very young she taught me how to hunt; how to toughen the soles of my feet to endure the pain; how to stand over a wide-spread assemblage; how to look and look and look; how to never give up; how to shade the light when it blinded everything into blending; how to weigh down my pockets with things that were once whole and clear; how to curate the fragments inside glass cylinders and stand them in the light; how the glass became light; how the beams became glass; how she protected and carried her collection, her years of genuflection and reverence, a bending toward the shore. A life’s work, the slight roughness from salt and churning; a legacy. She separated each by colour. These are passed to me. Some she found by my side. I’d often keep the bigger ones and hand her what I felt was too small. From me, she would take anything she could get.
 
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Dianne Bilyak is a Pushcart-prize nominated writer and a CT disability rights advocate. Her book of poems, Against the Turning, was published in 2011, and her work has also been featured in America Magazine, Drunken Boat, The Massachusetts Review, and The Tampa Review. In 2021, Bilyak's memoir was published by Wesleyan University Press. It was a finalist for the Gilda Award. The book is titled, Nothing Special: The Mostly True, Sometimes Funny Tales of Two Sisters. She enjoys staring into space and eating chocolate. ​