Tailoring Truth

 

Tailoring Truth

Tail to fang, I rip the ground

swelling its batting out.

 

Truth’s skin is thin,

stoop low and look again.

 

I’ve already marked

your seam with molting

 

shed, sheaved, and dead.

I’m guarding it

 

beneath my tongue’s two tines.

Squint to see

 

they point back to me,

a question curled hot

 

on sun-baked stones.

Compressed, concealed, I’m

 

an adder waiting

for dusk’s blue panel.

 

If I stretch

my pink mouth open—

 

deposit virtue in,

a thimble cold and round,

 

dull devil’s heat down.

Goodness tastes metallic

 

without sin-- like backing

stitched plain, row

 

upon row of gullible grain.

Each loop I snip’s another

 

small death, sweet pang

at the pop. Chase me.

 

I’ll trade you

a piercing prick for this:

 

suck your thumb,

draw my venom

 

to your wet, numb lips.

 

***

 

A note:

 

I wrote this poem after the 2016 election, but recently, my Twitter feed featured reports of a two-headed snake. Somebody in Virginia found the anomalous specimen—a living wishbone.

An animate flux capacitor like the one from Back to the Future.

A wriggling diagram of the female reproductive system.

Scientists said that the snake’s heads share major organs. One head is more assertive while the other eats more effectively. And so it abides with two heads, sharing a body, a journey, and a lifetime. What strange and majestic cooperation; “oh, wonder, how many goodly creatures are there here?”

The problem? They don’t share agency. They fight. Sometimes, competition results in one side basically killing the other. Thus, victory’s short-lived because necrosis ultimately sets in, and the victor rots from within, succumbing paradoxically… and, I’d imagine, painfully, too.

This is what’s known as a pyrrhic victory, the crushing kind that renders the winner an ironic loser. Victory over the symbiotic other half’s no victory at all.

News of the two-headed snake popped into my Twitter feed during the week of the Kavanaugh hearings before the United States Senate’s Judiciary Committee, and so it seemed doubleness manifested doubly. I saw a panel of mostly male elected representatives, fearful of negative optics, choose career longevity (mindful of upcoming reelection campaigns) over their actual charge and so they spoke to an American citizen through a proxy simply because both were female. Then they jettisoned the proxy and spoke to another American citizen directly, filibustering and blustering, simply because he’s male—a “good man.” I heard, “He’s a good man,” and from others, “He’s a predator.” This last bifurcation is the problem. Which is it?

My proposed and pithy answer: it is both.

We have to reckon with our doubleness. Does the dominant snake head behave badly all the time? No. It cooperates until the moment it doesn’t. It’s a partner and a predator. It’s both. We’ve been pathologically predetermined as Americans to play dual roles--both protagonist and antagonist. Liberators who enslaved, emancipators who denied suffrage, and immigrants who invoked fear of immigrants to hold our new territory, resting on a freshly erected pediment and calling it tradition. We’ve always been loath to admit it, too-- asterisking our exceptions to the rule, coaxing them to hush docilely in the margin. Thus, what looks like “goodness” is actually conditional. It’s only hegemony’s sunniest mood.

In my capacity as a student member of the appeals arm of the Disciplinary Board in college (this was in the 90s), I heard countless cases like that told by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. I heard tortured sobs, choking gall, and whispered confessions. It was always a matter of one person’s testimony against that of another. Witnesses don’t often come forward or even exist, and attacks are often upholstered in pseudo-romantic intentions gone awry, embroidered with patterned “hook up” tropes. The Board opened these seams. We looked at consent. If, at any moment, one party denied consent or was not cognizant enough to offer it clearly and verbally, the encounter was to end. If it did not, the encounter was unethical. I began to recognize a new pattern in these incidents: when humans mix patriarchal entitlement with internalized misogyny then add alcohol or drugs, chances for misconduct significantly increase; if even one of these ingredients is mitigated, the chances go down. High schools, colleges, and universities do yeoman’s work trying to educate and treat those in their communities. Prevention through education is key, and it begins with frank communication.

Last week, by contrast, the Senate Judiciary Committee contorted itself away from its actual charge. They seem to have forgotten what they do for a living. They are not professional campaigners; they’re legislators with a check to perform, in our stead, as our representatives—all of us. Why do we have to accost them in elevators to jog their memories? Kavanaugh would have been dismissed from most colleges in this country if the Senate’s hearing had been a disciplinary one on campus. Many of our representatives are woefully behind the times.

One side of the snake is cannibalizing the other.

It is not enough to shrug and attribute misconduct to high school hijinks. Even given utopian and adult circumstances, friends can breach one another’s trust. Smart people occasionally behave badly. Does this mean we hate them? Maybe not (I can’t answer for every victim), but if one abridges another’s rights, it does mean that he’s at worst, committed a crime, and, at least, disqualified himself from having certain privileges. Perhaps one of these is entrance into vaunted territory—maybe not forever, but we have a right to review one another’s credentials. I’m all for second acts, but, this country’s a big place with a lot of superior minds in it. We can’t find one whose record and behavior evidence a consistent and lofty ethic?

In the two-headed snake’s case, what if it could attack the other head and keep it a secret— foisting its Eddie Haskell-ized calendars upon us as proof? Why wouldn’t it? Even if other forest creatures who’d borne witness sung out in a veritable Greek chorus. It will slither hubristically forward, averting its eyes from the gangrenous damage that drags behind. I’m a good guy.

Sometimes women blame themselves for having been there, created the circumstance, had the drink, worn the skirt…fill in the blank. The victimized other half is chastened by repeated attacks. I just want to forget about it. Or He didn’t actually complete penetration/ejaculate/get hard before I got away so there’s no proof except his word against mine, and his friends will defend him anyway. Or He’s usually so sweet to me. Or He didn’t mean it. Or He swears he won’t do it again. Or We’ve been through so much together. We can make it work. It’s adorable treacle. It’s the stuff of love songs, of country music, of battered women support groups, of courtrooms, of funerals. It’s the stuff of an otherwise capable equal half, which shares a heart and lungs, treated to a steady diet of negative behavioral reinforcement. If you don’t know what a Skinner Box is, look it up. It explains a lot. If “learned helplessness” doesn’t appeal, watch Good Will Hunting on Netflix. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault rings true for all of us. Will’s character was a young boy victimized by an abusive foster father. Of course it was not his fault. He was dependent, beholden. Yes, but why did he choose the wrench instead of the stick or the belt? Because fuck him is the film’s answer. Why did Anita Hill continue to seek employment from Clarence Thomas? Because his behavior wasn’t going to defeat her, that’s why. Change Will Hunting to a young career woman in your mind, his abuse to sexual harassment, and see what happens to the prodigious math talent. Does she crumble or get tougher? A victim can respond by developing “immunity”-- inoculated against repeated exposure to the venom. But just because she can, should she? How will that improve our toxic culture over time?

“So we beat on, boats against the current,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” and here we are again, however many years later—you do your own calculations. Is it X years since your attack? X years since Anita Hill? X years since Clinton took predatory advantage of Monica Lewinsky? X years since the women’s movement? X years since women’s suffrage? Progress is upon us, yet again. Let’s use the votes our predecessors won for us: “we are, I am, you are/by cowardice or courage/ the one who find our way/back to this scene.” We have to dive into the wreck and look at our actual story—not the story of the story they keep telling us. (If you don’t know Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving Into The Wreck,” I recommend it to you).

Kavanaugh’s confirmation process has been a view of the female reproductive system—its initiation by cruel rite--, a trip back in time for too many women, and a diagnostic of pathological doubleness. However, the two-headed snake does not have to fight itself. The entitled side can abide with its other side. Today, it may do the right thing 10 times, but on the 11^th, it wounds. What if it’s 1 in 100 times? Is that a tolerable statistic? To whom? When is there no “goodness” left at all? This is the snake they want sitting on a rock like the caterpillar in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland— shotgunning a beer, focusing less on our collective case than his own bleary ambition? We may as well cover our own mouths. 

 

L.J. Sysko is a poet whose work has been published in Ploughshares, Best New Poets, and other online and print journals. Her chapbook BATTLEDORE was published by Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women’s Voices series in 2017.