Mom, says my little girl, how does mad
get in your body? Her voice
is so sincere, full of sock monkey
innocence, transparent as pink tutu.
She is, I marvel, so curious.
All day I’ve noticed the sand bags
I’ve hoarded to lean against my doors
in an effort to keep the mad out.
I have put up signs, No Anger Allowed,
along with dispensers of small black bags,
strategically placed along my perimeters,
so that others can clean up after their own anger.
Which they seldom do.
Though sometimes they leave behind
the small black bags, heavy and foul,
hidden in the grass for me to find later
and throw away myself.
Which I do,
grumbling beneath a pretense
of patience.
How does mad get in your body?
Through the cracks, I think, though the cracks
are smaller than I want to believe.
Eventually, the water is not held back
by sacks of sand. It seeps. It leaks. It trickles.
It pools. It touches everything.
Just as the scent escapes the dark bags.
The Greeks knew how Athena could,
in her rage, make the skies
turn black and the mountains tremble
and the flowers wilt, how she once turned
a young girl who challenged her talents
into the world’s first spider.
When I was a girl, I learned
an unwritten rule, a commandment
so powerful it need not be carved in stone:
Thou shalt not be mad.
Though today, it did not matter how many barriers
I put up, how many though shalts I did not say. I was angry
anyway, felt the dark seed sprout, then bloom its terrible putrid bloom
and then, as I watched it, wilt. And I did not need do anything
except stand by and watch, more amazed than in judgment,
watched with wonder, even.
How quickly it unfurled! How distrubingly beautiful
the misshapen flower. How quickly it flagged, it drooped, it faded to nothing.
I don’t know, I tell my daughter. How do you think it gets in?
She tells me she does not know.
I want to slash through any bags I might have left behind for her.
I want to make way for the mad to rush in, and then help her
hold the doors open so the mad might recede as swiftly as it came.
But it is not my job to do.
Open your own doors, I tell myself. Slash your own bags.
And get curious, I tell myself, very curious,
the skies above me already turning
a darker shade of gray.