Chanting the Feminine Down (excerpt)

Colette didn’t know which end was up, not because she was looking through the looking glass, though that view might be an accurate description of her life, high heels and all, but because she awoke with Yeats on her brain, her mother in her heart and a hole in her belly. She recalled her father saying little to his wife, as he did not really remonstrate in the words of some Hallmark card, but touched her on the sleeve and looked her in the eye as if he meant it. He was Irish, and God often controlled his Jesus, Mary, Joseph tongue, but his wife ruled his heart, even when she grew round and shorter and that old apron with hints of lemon, tarragon and noticeably thyme suggested she came from another place and time; and her ankles swelled, and she had to wear those large, wide-strapped black shoes to make her way to church and the store. He did not flinch when she wore the long, black dresses that almost touched the floor, suggesting every day’s a funeral and the darkness resided within.

Colette worried that her looking glass was leading her away from high heels into that dreaded, dead-end, tin-tack alley the academics at her St. Anselm’s in the Bronx called Thematic Something or Other, meaning theology, semantics, or some big idea found in some high-brow research journal no one read or cared about. Was she becoming a Fellow and one of them? She laughed, and then she resisted.

Along with thoughts of her father and mother came the poet Yeats, who might have been the only Irish poet who understood women, especially older women, though she would be forgiven if she found at times in his lyrical thump signs of an unrepentant priest.

Colette could almost hear her father recite to his wife the poem, “When You Are Old.” She could imagine him speaking to his wife in the language of Yeats: “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face.” Colette thought this was one of the most beautiful lines she had ever read and kept the poet by her bed and at the worry end of the looking glass. “How many loved your moments of sad grace,” she asked herself. Colette was holding on to her poetry for dear life.

Colette felt Yeats’s beautiful, lyrical language falling by the wayside as she walked toward Professor Gleason’s office where she would provide an update on her Trent project.

For more information, go to https://www.amazon.com/Chanting-Feminine-Down-Psychological-Historical/dp/197905990X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1513521709&sr=1-1&keywords=chanting+the+feminine+down