The Libation of Tears, Part III: Fox Woman

Photo by Stéphane Juban on Unsplash

Act I, Scene I:

Early June, circa 2012, 11 AM. A barn in Maine. Air, chilly. A fire cracks at one end of the barn, but it’s warmth is somewhat blocked by a dais on which three men sit, esteemed poets and scholars, passing a mic back and forth as they discuss whether personal experience is a worthy subject of great poetry. An audience of about one hundred shivers and shifts restlessly in their seats.

Outside wind ruffles the surface of a lake patrolled by silent loons waiting for nightfall to loose their banshee cries on the assembled dreamers tucked into sleeping bags in bunk beds lining the edge of the water.

The dreamers sit in metal chairs and hard wooden benches beneath the dais-just a few feet above them, but it’s clearly a pedestal. Some of them long to be up on that dais, some are content to listen. One character, let’s call her JL, wants to be up there, even though she has no idea what she would say.

JL, a poet, cringes and sinks lower in her uncomfortable metal seat near the back of the assembled audience when she hears the esteemed men diss the personal experience. (She’s close to the door so she can make an easy escape.) In fact, though it’s hard to notice, shame suffuses her entire being. If you look close you can see her cheeks flush. Her lips quiver a bit. She puts her hand to to her chin to still them. Tries to look bored and annoyed, not on the brink of tears.

She hears the famous poets and scholars dismissal as derision, directed at her specifically, though there are a good hundred people in the barn. This is years before she’s heard of the negativity bias. Like all people whose core of self-identity is based on shame, she vacillates between thinking she’s either better than everyone or worse. Way worse.

Nobody realizes she feels like she’s being stabbed in the heart and questioning her very existence? Why? Because she’s perfected the non-reaction. A blank gaze. Stay silent. It’s much safer to seethe and vent after with some other malcontent who thinks they should be up on the stage.

If an angel was in the rafters, they might have heard her internal dialogue like the angels in one of JL’s favorite film, Wings of Desire. Said angel might have seen beyond her seething to the hurt child, the one who once put on plays for the grown ups in the backyard singing her little heart out, who sang solos in the school chorus without stage fright. And they might have seen JL, a freshman in high school, on stage with the chorus before an audience of hundreds, eager to sing a solo she’d auditioned for and won, open her mouth wide. Nothing comes out. She stands there while the band keeps playing. After, she told everyone she had laryngitis. They pretended to believe her, but she knew they were just letting her save face. She was a fraud and was destined to be a failure.

What happened between the years when JL danced and sang for joy, stepping right up to the mic without hesitation and belting “When You Wish Upon a Star?”

Well, could be a lot of things, but one undeniable event was puberty.

Before puberty JL ran as fast, or faster than the boys, could do lay ups on the basketball court, matched or beat them at four-square, tetherball and street hockey, and could even throw a discus just as far across the school field.

Before puberty, JL was proud of being one of the smartest kids, always raised her hand and never questioned that her favorite place was the library. After puberty, when she was labelled as “stuck up” by the cutest boy in seventh grade, her grades started to slip. By high school, her grades had dropped considerably.

It wasn’t the physical changes that affected her, not really. She still played sports, thundered down a field in a kilt brandishing a hockey stick and ran hurdles-on the girls’ teams.

It was the male gaze. The boy in seventh grade who said, “Your face is really pretty, but the rest of you sucks.” From then on the remarks and sizing-ups steamrolled. For this play, let’s just focus on the poets and professors, since in her youth JL considered both an academic and arts career.

There was the college professor who told her when she went to his office hours to seek his advice about transferring to a smaller university because she was lonely, that some students found satisfaction by socializing with their professors. There was the married poet, her advisor, who told her in a drunken stupor he was “intoxicated by her beauty,” then a few months later advised she drop out of the MFA program if she really wanted to be a poet. She could have reported him, but she had a crush on him. It was her fault, right? She dropped out.

Act I, Scene II

JL squirms in her seat as the audience hangs on every word spoken by the famous men on the dais. Of course, she thinks, writing about the self is lame. Poets should write about the culture, make statements about the human condition, not tell some story about how their heart got broken. JL’s jaw cracks with rage she can’t even acknowledge. Someone sitting to the side of the stage, down low on the ground-let’s call him Loki and describe him as androgynous, though if you had to pick you’d say male, notices the logs have started to smolder. He picks up an iron poker and jolts them awake. A spark flies over the men on the dais and lands in the gray hair of a small, elderly woman in the front row, a legend at this yearly gathering and in the wider world as well, an actual historical figure named Myra Shapiro.

The spark lands on the iron gray curls of Myra Shapiro, southern Jewish housewife you’d think had been a life-long New Yorker. Brave pioneer, who at mid-life, transplanted her whole life, including her husband Harold, to New York City so she could pursue her dream of being a writer in the city. Myra doesn’t raise her hand. Nobody calls on her. She interrupts the men on the dais.

“I disagree,” she says. “This is about the male fear of emotions. This perspective comes from the time before Sharon Olds published her poems in the ‘80s.” What JL hears: The personal narrative is a legitimate subject for poetry.

The audience shuffles and sits up straighter. One of the men on the dais brushes Myra aside with a remark that acknowledges she’s right-there’s no denying Sharon Olds’ greatness- and then says something snarky about feminism, which confuses the audience. Today we call it gaslighting, but the term was not in vogue circa 2012.

JL is breaking out in a sweat, the hard metal chair unbearable. She manages to stumble out into the sunshine (the sun’s come out!) without tripping over a bench leg and walks toward an old pine tree. Just past the barn is a patch of woods, not quite a forest—there are paths—she begins to walk down one leading the long way to the lake. The silent loons begin to swim from the center to the shore. It’s noon, but they know night is coming soon.

Back in the barn called Innisfree after a famous poem by William Butler Yeats, the audience rises. Some members mill around the foot of the dais as the pontiffs descend, others spill onto the grass in clusters to gossip or dash toward the bathrooms.

JL hears hears a voice inside her head, her own, reading a Sharon Olds poem:

First Sex

I knew little, and what I knew
I did not believe–they had lied to me
so many times, so I just took it as it
came, his naked body on the sheet,
the tiny hairs curling on his legs like
fine, gold shells, his sex
harder and harder under my palm
and yet not hard as a rock his face cocked
back as if in terror, the sweat
jumping out of his pores like sudden
trails from the tiny snails when his knees
locked with little clicks and under my
hand he gathered and shook and the actual
flood like milk came out of his body, I
saw it glow on his belly, all they had
said and more, I rubbed it into my
hands like lotion, I signed on for the duration.

—Sharon Olds

Clearly, Sharon Olds doesn’t give a fuck what the men on the podium think.

As JL gazes out to a distant island in the middle of the lake a loon passes by, ducks under and does not come up for air, at least as long as she stands there waiting, which is a long time.

Act II, Scene I

Storytime:

The Fox Woman (Aleutian)

There was a woman born on the edge of a lake so clear she thought if she looked into it she would see her true nature in its reflection.

She no longer lived there. Now she lived at the edge of a forest with her husband, an ugly man. But if you asked her if she minded his ugliness, she would have said no, and if you asked her if she minded he had only one eye, you’d get the same answer. She didn’t mind.

What she did mind was how secretive he was. That she couldn’t stand.

Everyday her husband left their cabin and wandered the forest, returning home at dusk with dinner. A thump of game on the table was all she got from him. He sat sile by the fire until he fell asleep and then the whole cycle began the next day.

Finally, she decided to to do something. She would follow him into the forest. And that’s what she did. Much to her surprise, her ugly one-eyed husband started whistling a tune as he walked the forest path. A merry tune. He even skipped and did a little dance. What was going on?

When her husband came to a clearing he stopped. Looking up at the light pouring down through the trees to touch the floor he started to sing-a beautiful song, full of the forest’s power. Crouched in the scrub, she watched, fascinated as he began to change form. What would he become?

An even uglier one-eyed man!

This was a disaster. She resolved to do something. She would no longer live with such a man. She freed herself from her marriage.

The wife backed away from the clearing and started to run. Never had she felt so free. She was happy. Out of nowhere, a hand grabbed her and threw her into a hut. The hand belonged to an ogre. She was alone in an ogre’s tent.

She knew he would come back in time and eat her. Bitter tears, she wept. She’d finally freed herself, finally knew what it was like to run free, and here she was about to be consumed by an ogre. How could this be happening?

The woman knew she was alone in the hut. She was the only one there. In the dark, a quiet voice spoke:

“Look up. Become a raven.”

She did as the voice said and saw all sorts of animal skins hanging from the tent roof. Following the voice’s advice, she stood on her toes and took down the raven feather cloak. Try as she might, she couldn’t get it on. It didn’t fit her.

This was almost worse than thinking she had no way out.

In despair, she glimpsed a red fox pelt. Standing on her toes again, she pulled it down. As soon as it touched her shoulders she knew. A perfect fit. Right away she started to snuffle. A fresh breeze. Down on her knees she got and began to dig. She dug herself right out the bottom of the ogre’s tent.

She ran and ran and she ran. Right back to the lake where she’d been born, in search of her mother and father. Finally, she was back at her lake. She bent to drink. And this is what she saw:

Not a woman wearing a fox pelt, but a fox. She had become a fox.

The moment she saw herself her father, out fishing on the lake, saw her. He paddled his kayak to shore, disembarked and walked toward the fox, a net in one hand, a salmon in the other.

He offered her the salmon and as soon as she leaped for it tried to fling the net over. All afternoon went like this, a cycle that seemed eternal, salmon, leap, hurl, dodge. It had been going on for generations with no sign of stopping.

Suddenly, for an unknown reason, the father softened and dropped his net. He tossed the salmon to the fox. She gobbled it up, and filled with fresh energy, charged toward her parents’ tent. If she could just get there this would all be sorted out.

There it was! Her childhood home. The tent of her mother and father. Weaving between villagers’ legs, she heads straight toward it in the dusk. Almost there. One last leap and she will be in and

Wham!

The tent has shifted. Instead of hurling through the door, her snout strikes the doorframe. Seeing stars, she rises back up, determined to try again. Backs up and has another go at it.

Wham!

The tent, her home, has turned once more.

Four times she tries, four times the tent twists. This home refuses her.

Dusk is past. It is almost night and she has no shelter. The villagers watch her. The fox woman aches all over. She can’t go home. Where can she go?

In a flicker as red as her fur she decides. She turns and shoots back through the villagers’ legs. Avoiding their grasping hands, she dashes out of the village. She runs past the lake where she thought she’d see her true reflection. Into the trees she runs, and up the mountains. Her paws, like flint strike sparks that rise up into the sky and become stars. The stars sing and the moon sings, songs from before this world was born, and she sings back to them. Her red tail streaks across the cold mountain nights like a comet. She runs and runs and runs, and as far as anyone, she is still running.

Act III, Scene I

Okay, so now we’ve got some play with a character named JL who’s either an oversensitive Cancer rising narcissist or a woman whose whole life was derailed by some adolescent dude’s demeaning words. In one ending to this drama, she never quite recovers from about three dozen original wounds and ends up biting the inside of her mouth at poetry readings. In another, she finds her voice and gets up and yells at the men on the podium. “You’re full of shit!” Then she goes back in time and reports her college professor and MFA advisor for sexual harassment and they get fired and she channels her anger into some mediocre poems and decides she didn’t every actually want to be a college professor.

In another ending, she falls quiet for a really long time. Long enough, as Lao Tzu once said, for the muddy water to settle. She finally gets a good look at herself.

Like the fox woman, she doesn’t quite believe what she sees. This is who she truly is? Do others see her, too?

One of them does, a man with a salmon in one hand, a net in the other-her father. Let’s go as far as to say The Father and allow him to lay claim on us all.

She’s hungry. She has to play his game. Leap at the salmon he offers, dodge his net. There’s no other choice.

But there is one, another choice. The Father makes it. He drops his net and throws the salmon to his daughter.

We don’t know why. Does it matter? Is knowing motivation necessary for forgiveness? For empathy?

I think the father had empathy for his daughter. In Lak’ech Ala K’in, say the Maya. I am another you.

Maybe he shed a tear when he saw how hungry she was. Maybe he shed another when she dashed herself against the tent door. Four times, she tried. Maybe he wept when she finally realized she couldn't go home, when she turned and ran past the lake where she’d seen herself, up the mountain past the tree-line toward the cold stars. But he let her go. He let her go. He let her go and she is running still, not away from home, or even toward it. At home, she runs.

Photo by howling red on Unsplash

Notes

To find out more about the fabulous Myra Shapiro and discover her many books click this link: Myra Shapiro.

“First Sex,” Sharon Olds, The Gold Cell, Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

I’m indebted to

Martin Shaw

, Danny Deardorff and Jay Leeming for introducing me to The Fox Woman. A written version of the story can be found in Shaw 's Wolf Milk: Chthonic Memory in the Deep Wild. An oral version of the tale told by Danny Deardorff can be found on Jay Leeming’s The Crane Bag Podcast.

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light