DIAGRAM :: Marco Wilkinson

"María sólo trabaja, sólo trabaja, sólo trabaja, sólo traba–
y su trabajo es ajeno"

Madder, from Old English, mædere, "dye plant," life which stains, ruinous marvel, a lie alloyed to a truth

"No se puede tapar el sol con las manos."
"You can't hide the sun with your hands."

In the garden a tangle of whirling green stars climbs on slender stems barbed everywhere with tiny hooks over anything and everything. Anything to get higher and out of the thicket to the sun. To be the sun, to lord over the others more privileged, to be desired over those more proper to this ground: explosions of sulfur yellow flowers, bombs of jealousy, clouds of dazzling anger brocaded into the sky. Trace the maze of clawing aspiration down and it all converges to one rough bloody root. The gardener passes by and with one tug the whole empire wilts away.

They were tireless in those early days, transplants in a new field hastening to seed. During the day my aunt worked in the textile factory, one more bobbin of thread spinning its life out among the thick rubber belts speeding through the green metal machines, their heady volatile molecules vaporizing and filling the atmosphere of the cavernous shop floor. For the second shift from 3 to 11pm, my mother took her place. In the evenings my aunt knitted with clacking golden metal needles or worked her own 1970s loom, rows and rows of shiny metal toggles and the ratchet that swept from side to side, with her toddler daughter on the plush couch by the kerosene stove watching TV and fondling the clouds of soft yarns bundled in a basket. And though I would not arrive for several months, perhaps my ghost already lingered, a future memory: I, the other child, quiet and hiding in the corner behind the couch, looking through the pile of newspaper circulars at paragons of manhood tightly packaged in pure white cotton in Fruit of the Loom ads.
One afternoon in the twilight between day and night when cousins crossed paths, my mother cornered my aunt.
"I'm pregnant, and I can only have it if you take care of it."

When my mother fled her Uruguayan employers in New York for Rhode Island, she landed among cousins who had emigrated before her from Uruguay: Bibí, who agreed when confronted with either abetting an abortion or fostering a baby to take me in to her home; and Teresa, whose son Andrés was like an older brother to me and whose husband, also Andrés, was like the father I never had who treated me with disinterest at best.
Little root swept up and lodged in a crack in the ground, is it survival, spite, jealousy, or anger that speeds your determination? Reach up, climb over, wind around and overpower. Whatever her cousins achieved, my mother was resolute in matching. Living room sets, hutches, plates to fill hutches, fur coats, children.

Donald Wilkinson married this poor immigrant, factory worker and maid, for her money. He showed up at the appointed time and place, that a deal might be made and his nationality conferred upon her. The plan was that she might in turn ferry this prize across to the man who would be my real father on the back of this marriage of convenience.
Donald Wilkinson: ghost-father, certificate-father, typed shadow across my life.

Mother Mary, handmaid, bird-catcher, your body a weave of grasping stars reaching up to replace the sun with your own. Birth him, and then cut yourself down, cradle him in the scratching arms of your own martyrdom. Teach him to reach for little, that his portion is meager: a cloud of minute ochre flowers in a cave instead of one limitless sun in a limitless sky. Handmaid, maid with scalded hands, cracking hands, hands wrapped around steel wool, hands plunged into toilet bowls and sinks of greasy water and cat litter boxes, hands too busy, hands too angry, hands that cover the sun and whose shadow falls like a black bird, fingers outspread like wings, over your son. The only embrace they will ever offer.

What I remember: After school we go to a different house every day. Irene's desk piled high and messy with accounting. Bob's office of dark wood paneling and the lawyer's boxes that match. Belle's opulent apartment, sinister and vibrating with polished brass and glints of gold. Elizabeth's autumnal backyard with the shining birches and the high meadow grasses dried golden in the back, spiders building webs, ants on their way. I ask my mother repeatedly if I can help her in some way so she can be done sooner and we can go home: vacuum the den, polish the coffee table.

What I forget: The hamburgers bubbling in pools of gray fat in the pan on Shirley's stove in the middle of the day on Saturday for my lunch, in between the bathroom and vacuuming the living room. A Baskin Robbins sundae. Chicken sandwiches from Wendy's slick and greasy in their shiny silver-and-red foil wrappers.

When my mother was far along in her pregnancy, months after my father had left her amid accusations of entrapment and deception, he ran into her at the mall.
"Veo que seguís con esta locura. / I see you're going through with this craziness."
And kept walking.

"If anyone ever asks, don't ever tell them I clean houses," she said, leaving me suddenly grasping at a million petty barbed lies to rally a seven-year-old life around the lacunae of afternoons and weekends spent in secret houses, reading books curled up in strange chairs, humming in tune with the vacuum to try and shut it out. My mother was a maid.

What is the natural fruit at the end of a life spent scrambling to the sky? What little boy doesn't wonder if he might not in fact be the Second Coming?

Galium, from Greek, gala, for "milk."
Renning, for its ability to curdle milk.

That other Mother's belly grew taut like a drum and the skin cracked into shining silver webs, her breasts swelled and grew sore. Her nipples flowered into moons. Her neighbors looked away, or worse looked ahead and through, or worst looked at her with stones in their eyes.
     Even now, so close, she manages the milking, and later when she goes out of her house it is always in the hottest part of the white afternoon when others sleep. Up the flinty hill along the worn path, the straw of her sandals smashes the wild thyme down. The smell makes her dizzy on the switchbacks. Up among the scrub tangled in the branches that scratch her bare arms she finds the ladder of herb, its scratchy leaves whorling along the stems that clamber up through the shrubs. In her mother's great wooden mortar whose bowl has grown soft and furred with the use of generations, the stems and the leaves will give up their bitter green juice to the heavy-breathed pounding, the patient drop and twist of the pestle.
     Tiny sickle, no bigger than her thumb: her little friend, her only company, pulled from the swaddling of doubled-over worn linen of her robe where she's learned to keep it close. She leans forward ready to be scratched by the herb as she reaches with her left hand and swipes with her right, but before she can touch it, the herb swells and before her eyes a hundred, a thousand buds grow fat among the leaves. Catching her breath, she sits back on the sharp stones in the shade of a shrub and looks confusedly from the profusion of tiny golden-yellow flower buds to the growing stains of wetness across her chest.
     Back home before life returns to the streets of the village, she slowly pours the dark green juice from the stems she eventually collected and crushed into the pail of goat's milk from the morning. Stirring clockwise, she waits for the curdled blooms to appear.

My mother will forever remember that Mrs. Oden always had a package of Pampers waiting every week when she came to clean the small ranch house in Cranston with its Scandinavian blonde wood paneling and the living room that no one ever sat in.
I will always remember the white-vinyl padded daybed splashed with a graphic sixties flower print in the breezeway between the dining room and the garage, and the rows of little horizontal glass panes on the front and back doors that louvered open and closed to let air in or to keep it out. I played on the scratchy low-pile carpeting with a deck of cards, trying hard to keep one tilted against another just right to balance. I lay on the coolness of the vinyl with a Raggedy Andy doll for company. While my mother cleaned, Mrs. Oden with her dyed blonde hair and her quirky dentured smile and her glasses on a thin chain around her neck would take me out into the back yard where it was always sunny and splash me with a hose and spin the umbrella clothes-line like a pinwheel.

I was born on Thursday, July 1, 1976 at 5:01 pm at Kent County Hospital in Warwick, RI on Toll Gate Road, a spot off the beaten track in a green woodsy dell where a small dairy farm was still the hospital's neighbor. That afternoon as I screamed my way into the world, black and white cows with legs splashed in mud stood in the green and brown paddock in a drizzle, chewing their cud absentmindedly, unknowingly producing milk for some other baby's searching mouth.
Soft and kind childless mothers, will you pay my passage with my weight's-worth of milk in a shiny bucket, that I might pass through the threshold into this land?

Our Lady's Bedstraw, from the legend that this was the plant that formed the bedding in Christ's cradle

Why would you lay the slick purple mewling body of a newborn against those rough stems, with their back-curved spines and leaves covered in prickling hairs? This herb that ladders its way up to the sky with its million tiny barbs, each prick a step closer to heaven. She softly uncradles him, lays his head down against the wilting greenery. In an instant a profusion of golden flowers springs from the goldening stems and fragrant clouds of incense fill the air. Little boy, still uncircumcised and uncovenanted, scratched by the bed you lie down in, already reaching up for a father.

In the end his conscience, family pressure, some faint half-felt dream impinging on the borders of his mind asking to be realized: who knows why my father came back after walking away? From my wailing entrance in early July to that other Boy's celestial-trumpeted plummet into mortality in late December, how many times did my father hold me? How many times was he allowed?
She was fierce in her protectiveness, having loved a boy and lost before. By day I was kept close and each night I was laid in my aunt's arms rather than his. So how could it surprise anyone that on that other One's birthday when his Father dropped him into the scratching cradle of this world to fend for himself, my father stepped out for cigarettes and never returned, leaving this little sulphur yellow flower behind. Inconsequential thing, a weed, sick and tired of the scratches that came with it.

Unlike the biting fragrance of mint, sharpest when fresh, bedstraw, madder, sweet woodruff and their kin only come into their own when dead. They dry to gold, releasing the soft smell of fresh-mown hay so characteristic of coumarin, the compound they share in common.

What is an un-memory, thing not unknown?
olvido: wormhole of history, unit of oblivion, degree of injury
threads us all
father forget this other son
mother forget that other son
son forget or else
the whole fabric will flame

Memory: Two of my mother's "houses" were at the the Royal Crest apartments, a collection of white-plaster and exposed oak-beam Tudor-style buildings set in a green and idyllic sweep of gentle curves and sunshine, with little bridges over streams and a lake at its center. After my mother finished sweeping, mopping, polishing, sweating, cleaning up, she took me to the lake's edge with a bag of old bread (ours or the casually thrown-out loaf of one of her clients) to feed the geese that congregated there, eager to snap at the fingers of a five-year old.

Because my older cousin Andrés couldn't say "Tía Bibí" as a toddler, struggling over the sibilant syllables of his mother's sister's name in a land of curled r's and punctuated b's and d's, she became "Tí'Bibí" and my mother, his madrina (godmother), became "Ina." And so in turn, like an echo, my own voice called out "Ina" to Andrés' mother and "Tí'Bibí" to the woman who was my mother's cousin and my other mother, the one who potty-trained me in the late afternoon light of an upper room in her little house and who now wanders in the corners of my memory, a beneficent pear-shaped matronly ghost with salt-and-pepper hair and a kindly soft smile.
By the kerosene stove with a pot of water humidifying the living room I sat as she waved her hand back and forth over her mechanical loom laying down lines of color. I played with coils of elastic-weave fabric brought home from the factory where she and my mother alternately worked, rolling and unrolling them again and again for the pleasure of the texture under my fingers and the faint smell of rubber that came off them, the same smell at the factory where my mother even then was toiling among the speeding belts and blurring bobbins.

The roots of Galium verum, like the cultivated Rubia tinctorum which may be nothing more than a cultivated variety of this wild plant, yield a dye long used to create colors ranging from palest pink to deep bloody-brown. The blackish rough skin is scraped back to reveal a bright orange-red core, and this provides a number of compounds the most important of which is alizarin. Tinting is the same as tainting, the difference being the degree.

When hunting mushrooms you can't wear your green eyes. You have to switch them out for your brown eyes. Looking for the unseen just means looking for the things you do not want to see: the things that web your chosen world, that wed you to what you choose to see.
Roaming through the Catskills woods after a summer storm, we fanned out alone or in pairs or in threes, our eyes cast down among the leaf litter. Fungus connects with its waxy white web of hyphae to birches or pines or beeches. Ladders through itself birch with birch and beech with beech, making a single tree out of a forest.
Every tree is more dead than alive, every cell of wood a hollowed-out husk, a tiny splinter of bone. Each tree is a bone hung together by mycelia into one body.

Tí'Bibí and Tío Julio had left Uruguay and arrived in Rhode Island on an agricultural fellowship several years before my mother's own circuitous journey brought her there. Tío lived in a bar down the street called Borowski's. Tí'Bibí lived at home in a little two-story cape with a backyard where she pinned clothes to a line and tended her ample garden. Each in their own way was a ghost, pale white figures passing through the world. Along with suitcases, they brought with them a daughter, coffee skin and long black hair, energetic and rebellious, conspicuous counterpoint to their white skin and their pallid routines.
     Tí'Bibí used to take her daughter's black-and-white guinea pig, Señorita, out of the aquarium tank that stood on a small table by the bathroom, and place her plump little quivering body in the backyard under a tipped-over laundry basket so that Señorita could nibble on grass and get some fresh air.
     What is cast away is picked up. What blows through the air sinks into the sea. Wound that bleeds is swaddled and tended. The lost are found, one way or another, and cradled.
     Who knows why she never told her daughter that she was adopted?
     Who knows why she agreed to my mother's proposition?

Xylem flows water through its bodies, hollowed out, up to heaven on a wooden ladder. Each cell ripens to death and hollowness, collaborating in plumbing the way. In each tree, each beech, maple, oak, and birch, each pine, plane, cedar, and ash, is a cross. From soft green to stiff gold, they drink storms and drizzles and fog and unseen aquifers of water drop by sticking drop like so many stitches of a pure white winding cloth. Lift up the curtain, raise up the cross.

Tap the flesh of the desert myrrh tree with a spearing blaze across its side, and fragrant pearls of resin will well up in the gash. The hardened deep yellow milky "tears" are collected each week and the wound reinflicted.
Pine, too, cries bouquets in the close green of the woods—the trunk to the side of the path, felled last year but never milled, weeps—but gets closer to heaven once a year when its gold-green pollen in exhalations of prayer from Appalachian mountaintops sweeps hundreds of miles out over the unfathomable sea. Finally settling on the surface, the grains of gold vanish in a bubbling frenzy of millions of feeding fish mouths, knit into oily flesh disappearing behind the curtain of the swirling dark waters.

When that other Mother was herself a child, immaculate no stain of red yet or ever, before she was trusted to spin the shuttle through the shed, her own mother had her sit by her side and scrape the madder roots of their rough corked black skin to the bright flesh beneath. With her mother's eyes fixed on the fell of the loom before her, furtively at first and then with abandon she chewed on the smaller scarlet nubs of stiff flesh. She relished the bitterness.
Later she always kept a bit of red root, ready to calm the fussy teething of her own Child who seemingly carried in his reddening bones the same bitter yearning.
[In the corner another child, the other son, coils and uncoils fabric, lost in the colors, oblivious to the bitter taste dropping from the One's tongue into his own bones.]

One Friday, while my mother was cleaning the kitchen or scrubbing a toilet somewhere else in this house, Elizabeth and I sat in the silent gloom of her living room, the curtains all drawn and the lights turned off. She didn't speak or watch TV or knit or read, and so neither did I, her little aping dwarf of a witness. She explained in a hushed and patient tone that Jesus was crucified on this day and during the hours he hung on the cross we should sit in silence and mourn. And so we sat, she in her armchair and me on her pea-soup green couch in stuffy mournful repose. I treasured that quiet communion and the solemnity of commemoration. (And what did I think about my mother toiling in light-drenched kitchens and bathrooms during such a time? Didn't she know she was supposed to mourn God's dying? All through my Catholic school education my mother was always banging about when all I wanted to do was pray.)
Later that day, Elizabeth and I knelt in the shorter pews of the side aisle of her church, close to the tabernacle, and I stared into the shining white of the alcove bright as Elizabeth's white hair and the brilliance of the golden tabernacle sparkling like the thin chain that held Elizabeth's glasses, breathed in deep the heaviness of incense in the air, the piercing citrus of polish on the gleaming blonde wood of the pews. (Same as the chemical tang of Pledge impregnating my mother's bag of old T-shirt rags carted from house to house.)

Elsa, my cousin and Tí'Bibí's daughter, found a small bird in the backyard, its wing twisted the wrong way, and carried its incredibly light body to her mother. A bird cage was duly purchased, borrowed, or found, and the little bird, "Piru," blue-feathered black-feathered white-feathered, hopped on his narrow delicate scaly legs along the cage's floor, picking at shiny millet seeds, cracking open the striped shells of sunflower seeds. I was thrilled and disturbed by the softness of Piru's colors and the clicking shiny hardness of the little nails bouncing up and down in my palms, the darting beak and the passionless eyes.

One can feed small birds in their cages shreds of madder mixed in with their cracked corn, or sunflower seeds, or amaranth tiny and pearly white or onyx black, and they will easily take it up. Then when the bruise-black pimpled skin under the plumage has been slipped off and the flesh cleaved away, all kinds of wonders can be read from the reddened pencil-thin bones.
Ornithometrist, scaling with a loupe at your eye each crimson deposit, do birds like trees fly up in rings too? What auguries do you read in the ornithography of a life held fast for some hidden post-mortem purpose, to be thrown up into the air and clatter back down to earth in revelation?

Later, much later, after all the storm clouds of her life blew through her and were gone, the old Mother lived her life up in the mountains above Ephesus, quietly clicking one bead against another. She still kept one goat in the lean-to shed against her small stone hut. Indomitable, she drove her bones forward up the path past the belts of fragrant cedar and shadow that sheltered her home up to the open vistas above where the salt of the sea rose in updrafts along with the eagles that floated up from nowhere. There, in among the blooming cistus and the rheumatic knobs of olive, she finds the ladder herb in the thicket climbing with its minute barbs to heaven, and cuts it down.

My mother never had another relationship after whatever it was that gave birth to me. In her hardness she was virginal. In her capacity for self-sacrifice she was delusional, blotting out the obvious sun in the sky with her fingers and judging the work dark for the rest of us. That he was never spoken meant my father didn't exist. She might furiously climb up in a tangling net of barbs and stony silences and cover the sun, dye the ground blood-red with bitterness and weave a sturdy cage, but I was proof, light spilling through fingers, a little bird-song filtering through, that there once was another, that she was soft and yielding then.

As a child I once walked into my mother's bedroom to find the closet door open and my mother's rhythmically flexing arched foot dancing in the middle of the gloom bright white like a ghost or a bird suspended in flowing flight. I stood staring, silent, disturbed by this fluidity, unsure what to make of this odd sight.

One day the white cage swung empty in the summer breeze from the backyard tree in which it hung, the little trap door listlessly drifting. Elsa screamed. "Piru! What did you do to Piru?," she shot at her mother with venomous slits for eyes.
     Piru seemed to have escaped from a cage not shut tightly enough. Testament, apparently, to a miraculous recovery of wing and flight. Kind-eyed Tí'Bibí who took in what wasn't hers, seeing the inevitable end… what did she do? Nestle the shivering form in a shroud of green grasses? Twist the neck so much thinner than the feathers would suggest until the barely audible snap? Look the other way with the door wide open, the neighborhood cat in the distance? Too strong to stand suffering, too gentle to countenance truth. What little lies spring and diverge, arm themselves into whole worlds, and burst into flower?
      Little birds, Elsa and I hopped about in a panic, searching for Piru. Little did we each know then, we were broken-winged ourselves, each alone in our own cages so subtle the white bars faded into the summer haze.
     Little door, where could you be?

Once a year the high priest talked with God. But always first he clothed himself in the winding stitches of white smoke exhaled by the tears of myrrh in the brazier, lest he be smote down, and no matter his own confidence, the other priests always tied a rope to his ankle, so that they could drag his corpse out if the conversation didn't go well.

"Whenever anyone asks, Donald Wilkinson is your father's name." This is what I was told from kindergarten through high school whenever the formularies of education's bureaucracy required such a space be filled. This, and nothing more.
     When I was twenty-one I was lost in a sleep that lasted for three days. When I woke up I stumbled to the phone and called my mother.
     "I want to know about my father."
     "Why! He left us."
     "I want to know about my father."
     That's when, for the first time, I learned my father's true name.

Miles out from anywhere, in that liminal band of ocean long past the last sight of home sinking behind the swells and long before the murky charts prophesied purchase, the western sky glowed gold in the morning light. They licked their cracked, salt-dimpled lips as first one and then another sailor stopped his appointed chore to ponder the billowing clouds of gold on the wrong horizon, this double-dawn. After some moments where only the whining of the rigging and the slapping of the water against the ship were heard, the first flakes of bright ochre caught in their arm hairs and in their beards. Within an hour they were inside the flowing cloud of fragrant gold dust, lost.

Most of my childhood was spent in other people's houses. I made two tangling circuits that crossed and wound around each other: one into strangers' living rooms, dens, and bedrooms on a weekly basis so that I was familiar as if in relatives's houses (so familiar I thought of these people as aunts and uncles and grandparents when I was very young); the other into relatives' houses, into spare bedrooms that were never quite mine, into refrigerators whose contents I was and was not at liberty to pilfer, into family dynamics slipped in like a shadow half-seen in a corner (familiar but never family, not quite).

Lost, a little Columbus, misrecognizing the stars overhead, mistaking the golden dust floating on the horizon for the beckoning shores of heaven. Always heading just off-course, steering my boat by the dark light of a missing father's wrong name, by the terrifying light of a mother blazing with the sweat of two and three jobs and a resentment of her cousins whose tenderness captured me.

If I climbed a tree and refused
to descend,
would these hollow bones
burst into golden flowers?

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I used to work as a horticulturist at The Cloisters in NYC and we grew the close relative of madder, Rubia tinctorum, whose spine-covered leaves and stems used to tear at my hands as I wrestled it into wattle trellises. I suppose it seemed an apt metaphor for my life. These days, I find the wild, weedy version, Galium verum, underfoot everywhere I go, peeking out from under shrubs and in the ivy outside my front door, always reminding me: galaxies of stars are made of this scrambling: [link].