Drawing Air: Breath and Craft Married
by Julie Enszer
| Poem: | Air Drawing | |
| Poet: | Gail Mazur | |
| Published in: | Ploughshares, Winter 1997/1998 |
I will celebrate ten years with my wife this year. It's an odd milestone. Certainly, I'm pleased by it. I worried for a while that I would be a two- or three-year serial monogamist. I'm not. I'm here to stay with this one woman that I love fully with adoration and desperation, with certainty and insecurity, with passion and affection.
This past year has been hard, though. Of course, if I'm honest and parse out each of the past ten years and think about the challenges that we have faced in any rolling window with a twelve-month increment, they were all hard. I'm beginning to understand why we celebrate silver and golden anniversaries. I'm beginning to understand the awe that we ascribe to couples who stay together for long periods of time.
Gail Mazur understands. She confides to us about things that would be strange in the beds of others but are, to her, familiar. We all know the jolt at the edge of sleep, when you are dreaming that you are falling and falling and falling and must wake up to save yourself, to save your life, but she knows the secrets of the bodies of this life: they must persist alone and all is precarious.
Mazur's sleepmate is a painter. She watches his right hand float in the bedroom in his sleep. It “inscribe[s] forms by instinct on the air,/arterial, calligraphic/figures.” She notes, “I'm too literal to follow.”
I must tell you this. The other night between five and six in the morning, my wife was coughing. Cough. Cough. Cough. I'd wake then sleep then wake again. Cough. Cough. Cough. It became coughing and choking and finally I woke enough to murmur, Wake up. Wake up. She did. She was dreaming that she was being strangled, that she couldn't breathe. She drank some water. We returned to sleep for a few minutes longer.
The two nights following the drowning, my beloved has woken from the stress of work. She bolts upright in the bed, walks to the bathroom, returns to the bed, and mutters to herself about work. She talks through the resolution she has dreamed for her project. I try to show some concern; I ask her if everything is fine. It is, she responds, I'm just thinking about work. Sometimes I wish she was a painter—dreaming and air drawing. She's not; she's a lawyer awake and filled with stress about contracts and clients and deliverables.
These are the mysteries that happen in the beds of married people: we read books and drop them to the floor; we watch one another momentarily as we pursue our daytime passions; we prevent each other from drowning. It ranges from the mundane to the awe-inspiring. We turn to one another—who else would we turn to?
Who else would we turn to? In bed, there is only the beloved, but when we wake, outside of that cocooned mattress for sleep, during the day, wandering around the world, we turn to other things. I turn to poetry. I read. Secretly, I know, I am trying to find the perfect poem that expresses my life. The poem that captures exactly how I feel right now in this situation, in this skin. I want to read it written by someone else to save myself from writing it. I read and I read and I read. I find poems that I love. It never saves me from writing, though.
Who else would we turn to? Gail Mazur. “Air Drawing.” She is comforted by the hand of the beloved, its nocturnal humming. It is love when the beloved leaves our book to fall to the floor. We listen to the breath, each exhalation. Then she confides a truth many marrieds know, “one of us always vigilant/watching over the unconsciousness/other.”
Who else would we turn to? I turn to poems to elucidate my rivened psyche. I am engaged by the narrative and the language that illuminates it. I read for the story; I am not an astute or exclusive aesthete. Occasionally, I am captivated by the craft. To whit, without revealing her hand, Mazur guides us through the air drawing with words like jolt, precarious, arterial, bloodied, and corpses. It is only when we return again to the beginning that we recognize such craft: the ending was foretold though perhaps we couldn't hear it. Isn't that what life is like?
Two years ago, her beloved was in the hospital. Tubes were everywhere. There was an adult crush to his heart; unlike the adolescent crushed hearts, these in adulthood have more severe consequences. I imagine Mazur sitting in the hospital, scared. She asks herself, “Does he love me?” Does he love me? Does he love me? There is a particular relief to read this from another. As though to know that I am not the only one the world suffering from such insecurity. Ten years, after all, isn't that much. Does she love me? Does she love me?
My insecurity wends closely with my jealousy. It does for Mazur, too; she asks, “if he does/how could he let that steely man/in green scrubs snake his way/nearer to his heart/than I've ever gone?”
Who else would we turn to? The first time I read this poem, there was nowhere else to turn. I had discovered an answer that I needed. How could anyone go nearer to her heart than me? Someday someone would; I would be thankful. Until then, I'm reading Gail Mazur's collected poetry in Zeppo's First Wife and celebrating this odd milestone we call a decade together.
Julie Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland.
She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women,
Room of One's Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review,
the Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Poetica and the Red Mountain Review.
For money, she runs a small
anti-nuclear non-profit organization; for love,
she quilts and sews and
embroiders and makes hand-made paper.
You can learn more
about her work at her website and her blog.