Sherry Abaldo

​Illuminated
 
Like they said in art history, it isn’t the object we see, it’s the light. Impressionism and calotypes. Try to paint the pitcher using only orange, blue, white. Somehow all the hours in dark rooms staring at slides taking notes on stacks of index cards led me to you. Up close everything is geometry: giraffe spots, turtle shell segments, the pattern of mud as it dries ‘til it cracks, the intersection of soap bubbles. Your skin is as intimate to me as the skin of an orange. And as mysterious. Your skin distant as the skin of the sea. You with your ridges, rills, dimples, reaches, legions of pores. How did you ever land in my bed? We chased light as long as we could. Touched as the jet lifted off. Long gleam of beach, lace wavs spun away like the ground under a carnival ride. Breathless. Shine of a seed. You asked what those leaf things children stick on their noses are called. I said helicopters. Winged seeds. You noted the freakish drive of all things to reproduce. On Maui the divemaster zipped my breasts into neoprene. My favorite thing was watching you come out of the water. I could pick you out of a crowd. Hibiscus petals under my burned feet. Thorns hidden in sand. My eyes poured so full of light I had to close them.
 
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This poem was first published in Rattle.
 
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Big Island
 
I was going to tell your family you died happy, the documentary filmmaker says. I slog up the coarse beach at Mahukona, tugging at my orange one-piece with black squiggles, high-cut thighs. He had written Pack plenty of bathing suits. 

No documentary ever gets made, but we crew swim all the time, like clockwork. Coffee and papaya breakfast, swim. Tamari-drizzled cottage cheese on avocado lunch, swim. Beer cheers to the sunset, swim. I learn kahunas and kupunas (elders), aumakuas (family gods), how to body surf – not bad for a haole. 

One afternoon, a bale of green sea turtles. I swim next to the largest, the granddaddy, the king – not touching him coated as I am in Dr. Bronner’s castile soap and sunscreen, but I gaze into his wizened ancient eye which stares right into me. Enchantment.

Turtles head for cooler deeper water, out to sea. I follow. Sun sinks. Wind lifts. Suddenly I notice the entire bale has disappeared, shore nowhere in sight, fellow swimmers in a bar by now. I am alone in the Pacific. All I have to do is turn around, swim in the opposite direction. Against salty 4’ waves. I dream the turtle’s eye (in his realm now, not mine), alternating strokes – overhand crawl, back, breast, side stroke. Are those roadside ironwoods ahead, or clouds?

Finally, sand. My toes dig in with relish, clasping earth like hands. The filmmaker waits in the dark, jeep high beams on, relieved smile, same old coral shorts. Only later that night, in the warm burnt sugar and night blooming jasmine scented air, in somebody’s hot tub drinking flowery wine, I realize what a risk I took: almost turned forever haole – without breath. I tremble in the water, hide it. Full moon bluely lights my browned skin, asking if my mistake was innocent.
 
**

Thursday’s Fantod
 
Something happened out there. They always place the blame on drunken fishermen. Say be careful on 131, as if everybody isn’t flying doing 80 even the flatlanders, even the cops, even the salty pillars of society, even the moms in gold or silver minivans with umbrella insurance and diamonds the size of starfish in their soft white ears. Say watch out. Men howl at the moon down there. God knows what else. It’s a wonder anybody ever comes back at all, night like tonight. Undulant, hot, lightning rips black sky like claw marks. Neap tide. Heat lightning. Thunder bound and gagged. You remember things like New Orleans jazz at 3 a.m., voodoo, sazerac, how you had to lay a rose on Marie Laveau’s grave and later wished you hadn’t. Why are crypts creepier than mounds? You think of things like the veins near Cain’s carotid. How did God give him his mark? Brand? Bruise? Blemish? You ask a lot of questions, guy holding the fat yellow ferry rope says. Where you from? What you doing on the island? Painting? I don’t see no canvas. Smile only uses half his mouth. Incident on the peninsula. Eternal return. Crease of light dents horizon. Heat rises from the ground. Around the peeling clapboard corner of the ticket office coffee shop, you expect a three-headed dog.
 
**
 
This was first published in Northern New England Review and Deep Water, Maine Sunday Telegram.
 
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My 85-year-old Mother Sells the Family Cabin to an LLC
 
No place could have been that great, that juicy holy place that was the cabin, all golden sun, all lavender shadows. Hidden from the water, hidden from the road. The dirt road also hidden, its mouth concealed by lips of wild brambles and forsythia, in late summer bulging rose hips. The old crone who once lived in the dilapidated henhouse. The henhouse bones a gatekeeper, rose tarpaper siding half blown off like stunted blushing wings. The no place place. Cabin smell of the pine trees she was born from, black tapers in my grandmother’s lead crystal candelabra, my soft powdery perfume. 

The family of racoons, blue heron, great grey owl, the loons with their haunting love and loss calls. I went into labor there, staring out at green leaves. Read Lady Chatterley’s Lover again after many years in a big brown plastic chair with a cupholder, drinking chilled chardonnay in the sun. I howled at the moon there. Stepped naked into rain and snow storms. Swam north through waxen pond lilies to the loon’s nest in the next town. Lily pad tendrils tangled my legs. Liquid layers of temperature, warm on top, shivery bottom. I cavorted. Floated boats. Dreamt of more cavorting. Always more. 

Always the liminal dream space of the shore, the lapping water, water line of ashes and untrimmed rosa rugosa. Storm broke fireplace of cement blocks. My husband would come home and we would make love, before and after supper, sometimes beans and rice or avocado toast or artichokes dipped in garlic butter with filet mignon if we had money. Sleepy love as the old inevitable sun rose over the road then field sloping down golden and slowly to butter our bodies through the wide bare dormer windows. Our loft he built with his big hands. Outside the silty water, waiting, smelling of river bottom. 
 
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Woman in a Window from the Night Train Rome to Paris
 
 
Urban sylph, nymph, siren in her rectangle of light, cell honey-hived, swaying for the train that silver slivers through the ancient ruined night, alabaster skin in sepia silk slip – I imagine Alencon lace along her decollete – dark as new moon ocean hair in waves over her shoulders.
 
finally seeing Europe
at 32 after all that art history
frisson
 
Us in dust, paint specks after working on a milky Santorini villa, out of money ‘til we reach Boulevard Haussmann, no American-hot showers since Brindisi ferry. On the train we down crackers with Nutella, sleep on one couchette. Pretty male French steward gifts us a sleeps-six compartment all to ourselves.
 
who am I
to deserve such delight?
at home anywhere but
 
Decades later, lantern slide kaleidoscopes avalanche my mind, that woman in a window: alone, a beige man in a back room, another woman? What music does she dance to – Vivaldi La Primavera, Piaf, jazz, song of her own journey – silence? The last time she made love? Champagne angel, Bernini face, ivory apartment tower, imagined landscape of her faded lace.
 
no choice in
what memories
stay with you
 
**
 
This Isn’t One of Those Nature Poems
 
where Oliver- or Whitman-like I gape and yawp in awe and oneness. I saw God all right, all awesome summer light, Old Testament vengeance, dominion. In Maine my daughter wanted to pluck warm eggs from under chickens before taking off for Wellesley, so of course her father indulged her, prepaid for a dozen birds from the Agway down the road. I picked them up in my white SUV: all that remained, 13 meat birds, ugly teenagers the clerk said. I did not find them ugly, bird resuscitator all my life (hummingbird stuck in cabin, sparrow fallen from  garage rafter on my mother’s teased head whom I named Snickelfritz). 
 
She named the smallest Pebbles. When that one died, off its food, the next smallest became Pebbles. Darwinian, she said. Don’t get too attached, Ma. The largest she called Colonel Sanders. Dappled days grew slowly longer then suddenly shorter. Chickens moseyed in pea gravel, flame day lilies. I fed, watered, wrangled them while she dated, lifeguarded, went to concerts until 1 a.m. Near the end, a dozen heavy breasted white birds waddled after me around the yard, up the steps. I had to shut the door to keep them from tea and poetry inside the cabin. It was not a ceremonial death like she had witnessed when her nouveau hippie uncle slit the throat of a chicken who’d stopped laying with a butcher knife, kids gathered round, some kind of prayer not said in church. That was a bad death, she’d reported. Ancient soul. 
 
She and boyfriend took her chickens nonchalantly to the butcher, loaded them into doomsday car, while I madwoman wept in the doorway. I’d given the victims watermelons for their last meal, not supposed to, they soiled the vehicle. I felt like God and hated it. Did the chickens know their fate? Smell death in a hosed down cement room? Know the last moment they saw sun? I could not bring myself to cook a single one. Pointless deaths. My fault. Eve’s fault. Why did God put the forbidden tree in Eden in the first place? Controlling parent. And I’m the one supposed to make meanings out of things. You anthropomorphize, care too much, my daughter scolded, flipping her dark river of hair.
 
**

Moonflower
 
 
Weighed down by my breasts, my womb, a woman I wait watch worry from the shore, uncertain of the earth beneath my feet, unmoored as my ancestors on widows’ walks, lined eyes ablaze, a reach over tidy towns, wives in black and white obediently burning for their men. A soothsayer with no need of news, only my small pile of green stones and a moon snail shell from Cape Cod, only moonflower in watery moonlight the color of ouzo on ice, umbilicus like a pumpkin vine, only blue forget me nots, white violets, August grass so riotously green it bleeds and reeks when cut. Bad luck to have a woman on a boat. I burn but defiantly like the witches I sprang from, inside all hot white lantern. You can smell apocalypse on me. You would swear I wear long grey skirts with wet hems, dragging forests in my wake. Why did you leave me? The wife’s cry. What was it about her, the sea, her wild incandescent core? We want what we cannot possess. Limitlessness. Ecstasy on others’ graves like Mary with Percy Shelley, shooting stars, wind-shredded peonies, 3 a.m. song of the great grey owl. I am just like you, I confess. I too would sink under that bright water, miles down, nipples frozen to thimbles. I too scuba dive. I too love Romance, guilty of hanging too long too deep for one hit of the bends. Nitrogen narcosis. Night of purple quick. Unanswerable longing. Only alive within a fingertip of death. They call me crazed and crazy, but O! The forbidden flowerings and fruits that I alone have witnessed, felt! The panoply. The edge. The sea, the sea, eternally taking, eternally coming clean.
 
**

Marry Me
 
again, my eternal lover, my best friend! Let’s do it in Sedona’s red cathedral rocks, not the Methodist church in the green shadows of the fresh-to-salt St. George, that staid and verdant valley where my ancestors lie buried. Let’s do it by ourselves, for ourselves, and no one else. This time I won’t refuse to say obey. No white dress. We can both wear shorts. I won’t just have jetted in from work on some documentary, stuck overnight at the O’Hare Hilton where I dance with a robot as strangers drink and smile, bar tab on their company, Lake Michigan wind in the air filling my head with all the places I could go. Alone. Let us be barefoot. A few sags and wrinkles later, not the shiny-as-glass hair and faces we had then: unproven. Truth: I didn’t know what I was getting into. Did not know what I was made of. Selfish to take you, keep you. You said I never left my post. I swear I will never leave you alone again, now. No more apples, no more snakes. I have cut myself on so many edges. Licked my wounds to soul-healed. Scars kintsugi, all gold light – I am finally a character I’d like to write. Late for the Sky instead of Pachelbel’s Canon in D as we trudge together down a long high aisle of ruddy dirt. Come with me. Rut with me. Still believe we are immortal. Let me talk you into mixing both our ashes in one urn, have the kids release our bones in the Aegean off Santorini. I promise I will obey. This time. Now that you have stopped wanting me to. 
 
**

Young with My Husband in the Soufriere Hills
 
Arrival in the middle of the night
 
Volcano heart like many islands. Vulcan god of fire and forge. Long flight LA to Miami to San Juan, then puddle jumper, then long bumpy cab ride in streetlight-less Montserrat dark. Boss’s villa. Brought along two USC friends. Husband and I take the master suite. Long cock roaches in sheets. He says I can’t sleep here. I say I’ll crush any bugs when I roll over on them. 
 
Close to Venezuela
 
Wake to a circle of windows, 360 ocean views, Alp Cliff. I hate/love the pretension of houses with names. British colony. In town, head dude’s racing green Jaguar displayed on a greener lawn. Maid mad at us for bashing coconuts on the pool deck to make coconut chips, stain of the fruit’s womb like wiped blood. Crime scene. Our coconut chips come out tasteless. Stains still there if the villa still is. Volcano erupts a few years after we leave, covering everything in feet of ash.
 
Almost died at sea again
 
We visit a secluded beach via tin boat, when a storm comes. Thorns under sheltering trees, stinging red ants, ruined 35 mm Canon. On the hasty return lightning fizzes, hits the Caribbean all around us. I break the last of my mother’s commandments: stay off the water in an electrical storm. Our Charon in sunglasses in pounding rain tells us he is Danny from Walk of Life by Dire Straits. They and the Rolling Stones recorded here, at Air Studios. Like my home state, Maine, locals can’t afford to live by the ocean.
 
Moment of rare and unexpected grace
 
Hiking the Soufriere Hills, it smells hellish like sulfur, yellows our Ex Officio clothes, you can put a fingernail into the chalk chartreuse cliff face. Under the waterfall, sudden tug on my long straight wet hair: a beaming small Black boy holds onto my ponytail, simply holds it and smiles, as if it might be something beautiful as a cat’s tail. His mother telling him No stop let go of the woman’s hair. Me smiling back at him which is to say It’s okay hold on all you want isn’t hair weird.

**

Back Wall, Molokini
 
Within the atoll’s arms, a Maui postcard: crowd of boats, noise, tourists in bright clothes, pineapple and Oreos, sea bluer than sky, sheltered from weather. Back of the atoll is another country: wind, whitecaps, black-troughed waves, 300’ straight drop of rock wall. Colder darker faster water, blue grey to briny forest green to darkness. Advanced divers only. Divemaster Alain, just back from Alaska with the Cousteau group, tells us Remember your training. Keep track of your buoyancy. This is a drift dive. Your depth can vary 60’ without you even noticing, which of course can be fatal. Someone tells a story of a woman who died here because she panicked, twirled down 300’ like a doll in neoprene, when all she had to do was release her weight belt. Due to the current, the boat drops us off at one side of the atoll, will retrieve us on the other. Engine can’t stop running, or the boat will be carried away. Live entry: your right hand on the right shoulder of the person in front of you. Dive… dive… dive! Swim clear, avoid the prop. My first dive since babies have passed through my body. Ocean fast, relentless, 60’ down, 70’. The convex atoll face, its drop astonish. Plan was explore a ledge where sharks hang out. Instead, our team plastered like pinned butterflies against a solid sheet of water. Marvel movie. Not so much fear as power of the ocean. I would genuflect, incline my head at least, if I could move. We manage to unpeel ourselves from the transparent glue trap. Head count. No one missing. Ultimate affair, I surrender my flesh to the sea’s mouth, all theory and technique born anew as instinct. Cooled, coated in salt, moved by tides inside, I get what I came for: brush with the infinite. After, don’t get any higher than a barstool. Husband and I load up on carbs (hot buttered macaroni), eat and giggle in the shower. In the fancy marble bathtub our gear soaks in fresh water.
 
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Sherry Abaldo lives with her husband Mario in Las Vegas, NV and rural Maine where she grew up. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, ONE ART (Top 10 Read, July 2024), The Ekphrastic Review, Rattle, Down East Magazine, and on The History Channel and PBS among other outlets. Her poems are forthcoming in Eunoia Review and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Southern California film school. She is a PADI certified advanced SCUBA diver and has a boating license from the Penobscot Bay (Maine) Sail and Power Squadron. Her website is sherryabaldo.com.