Pointing to The Moon: A Biographical Epistolary Novel

POINTING TO THE MOON

a biogrophical epistolary novel

Rochelle Lynn Holt

Pointing to the Moon by Rochelle Lynn Holt

This book is written to provide information and motivation to readers. Its purpose isn’t to render any type of psychological, legal, or professional advice of any kind. The content is the sole opinion and expression of the author, and not necessarily that of the publisher.

Copyright © 2020 by Rochelle Lynn Holt

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or distributed in any form by any means, including, but not limited to, recording, photocopying, or taking screenshots of parts of the book, without prior written permission from the author or the publisher. Brief quotations for noncommercial purposes, such as book reviews, permitted by Fair Use of the U.S. Copyright Law, are allowed without written permissions, as long as such quotations do not cause damage to the book’s commercial value. For permissions, write to the publisher, whose address is stated below.

LCCN: 2018963626

ISBN: 978-1-64934-058-0 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-64934-059-7 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-1-64934-126-6 (eBook)

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PREFACE

In the days of letters, long before e-mail, a few masters stamp my memory beyond love letters: British sea-captain Jimmy Campbell; Bob Ruskin, Jr., Lenore Senior, Susan Sheppard, the late Sharon Spencer and C. H. Wells, part of whose collection was published in the seventies by Ragnarok Press. However, the one who remains indelible is Virginia Love Long, poet from Bushy Fork, North Carolina who called me her twin.

Oddly, I do not recall how we began exchanging our souls on paper, an action and activity that surmounted almost a quarter of a century. I only know that she was a superb writer who suffered my own bipolar challenge and therefore understood the peaks and valleys we shared, albeit not simultaneously.

A Woman of All Seasons, Virginia found solace in nature and reading as do I. We bolstered each other’s fragile ego and mirrored triumphs over the years: publications, readings, reviews and teaching. I had the privilege to read with her at Butner Federal Penn very early in our friendship. I collaborated with her on several unique projects, most mentioned in this bio-novel.

I remain in awe of Virginia’s down-to-earth narrative style and her romantic poets’ influence (especially Lord Byron). My first influences were also Shelley, Keats and Byron. Virginia offered me unconditional love; I hope I did the same for her. I visited her home three times, and she stopped by mine in Tarpon Springs, Florida with her older son who lives in Kissimmee.

Pointing to the Moon is tribute to my twin, a quasi bio-novel to reveal her devotion to family, friends and poetry. The sole invention is the narrative device.

Virginia’s letters are on file with the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Permission to use them in any way chosen was first given to me by the late author and, subsequently, by her sister (Sybil) in a letter dated 3-3-08.

Rochelle Lynn Holt

June 9, 2009 and October 30, 2018

I arrived in time for my sister’s memorial service at a small African American Methodist church she used to attend on most Sundays, I was told. However, I was too late to save Genia from her own private ritual.

On the first day of southern spring, my twin overdosed on an assortment of medications she’d been prescribed for various ailments, including an arrhythmic heartbeat. Apparently, she’d been drinking and downing pills the night before Mother’s Day! There were several bottles of wine, whiskey and vodka found around her bed the next morning.

Her small body was discovered at eleven o’clock by a neighbor who daily looked in on Genia, my twin, a poet, whose work fluctuated between themes of suicide and enchantment with the healing properties of nature. I’d read several of her poems years ago, but then I’d stopped receiving anything. My choice, I suspect.

I left Bushy Fork, North Carolina when I was twenty-one and never looked back, left no forwarding address and returned to the homestead only three times in thirty years: once for father’s funeral; again for mother’s, five years later; and now, for the cremation service of my twin.

Genia never strayed too far from our rural birth place and was devoted to a menagerie of wildlife all her life: deer, fox, possum, rabbits, squirrels, wolves and more. She daily fed a variety of birds, walked forest trails and even served as foster mother to a jaguar at the Carnivore Institute, an amazing attraction in central North Carolina.

Personally, I was always frightened of bees, frogs, hawks, owls and snakes. I couldn’t wait to escape the country for a more civilized existence in the city: Raleigh-Durham first and then San Francisco where I was accepted into Tanya Holm’s Dance Company that suited my penchant for everything modern unlike Genia who was fond of antiques and kept her little house undusted and cluttered, a haven for mice and spiders.

After sorting through her clothes and her papers, I’ve determined that my sister was almost famous in her region and somewhat beyond Bushy Fork. Genia had published more than a dozen volumes and chapbooks of poetry. Over her lifetime, it appears she’d given almost a thousand readings in this state and in others nearby.

The letters I discovered were written to a best friend, Sylvia DuBois, who’d relocated to several states over her lifetime in the decades she and Genia corresponded. I quickly determined that Sylvia, also a writer, incorporated poems within her fiction. Poem-Novels as she referred to them in her latest letters to my twin.

The last call on my sister’s phone was to this best friend. I’m not jealous, just curious. They both were prolific artists; whereas, I often suffered through long months of choreographer’s block which is, perhaps, similar to what any creator goes through when she can’t fashion a new project.

Maybe that’s why I’m taking the time to read thoroughly my twin’s letters. Her life appears to have been filled and rather rich, despite her refuge on the homestead. Married twice, she had two sons even though Genia’s next-door neighbor, our sister, Evelyn, raised them both separately, a span of twenty years between the boys.

At the service I didn’t even know who Genia’s sons were. Lorena introduced us. Although the young men were cordial and even shook my hand, I felt nothing, no kinship, whatsoever. The older nephew, Tom, a guitarist, has resided in central Florida for the past twenty years. The younger, Ed, short for Edgar (since Genia adored Edgar Allan Poe, from the time we were five years old) lives on the coastal side of North Carolina near the ocean. He’s a journalist.

Genia had dabbled in that too for a number of years, the newspaper, I mean, from typesetting to writing articles.

I had hoped to just give Ed all these folders, but he said he couldn’t bear to sift through anything more of his mother’s work, so I presumed he was already familiar with Genia’s poems and stories.

I suppose I could have burned the letters, something I was told that Genia did every ten years or so. Yet, I was curious to understand how twins can be so separate and apart, despite the fact that we both ended up as artists. My sister’s sons, on the other hand, though twenty years apart in age, seem rather close in spite of where they live.

Would you care to sift through the boxes? Ed asked me outright. Maybe you can let us know if there’s anything worth preserving in one of our local libraries.

That’s how I became the archaeologist of my twin’s soul and my own.

I attempted to phone Sylvia but was informed that the number had been changed to an unlisted one. I sent a short letter to the address I found in Genia’s rather well-used, almost indecipherable pink telephone directory. Perhaps, with any luck I might receive a reply while I’m here. Who’s to say?

Since I’ve taken a sabbatical from the dance company for at least a year or more, I have no place else to go although I doubt I’ll stay in Genia’s little stone house for that long. My resignation doesn’t mean I’ll be guaranteed a position with the company. Maybe there’s a part of me that’s doesn’t care. I look out at Genia’s cherished deer and I forget concerns about work.

They still come to the back porch for food as well bushy-tailed squirrels and rabbits and, of course, a number of birds. I’m only familiar with the blue jay, red male cardinal, robin and sparrow; but, I found a guidebook to same in the kitchen.

Apparently, our family home across the way remains empty. I haven’t gone to see it even though the place is only a few doors from here. Maybe I’m afraid there might be ghosts, hovering over cobwebs.

I’ve never heard Genia’s whippoorwills, but I’ve begun to listen for their songs. Fortunately, Lorena took the remaining cat that my sister had for several years. It appears she’s free to come and go in and out of both houses.

When I retrieved Genia’s earliest published chapbook from one of the many cardboard boxes in her closet, I skimmed through After the Ifaluk (CA: Thorp Spring Press ’75) and was amazed but puzzled.

The Ifaluk women were settled somewhere around Indonesia on an island, according to Genia’s Preface. They combined love songs with their dances which (as a blocked choreographer) might be more inspirational to me than to most readers.

The small book is dedicated to Kenneth, whom I learned from Lorena was the father of Edgar. The poems begin with a tribute to Genia’s lover and then feature other women in love, i.e. Juana of Tordesillas, where the poet narrates from the Queen of Spain’s point of view.

Then your guardianship springs from the sole desire

To protect me from self-harm? I am flattered, indeed.

But you would be well advised to consider

Less of my welfare and more for your own.

So I am mad, then am I? Tell me, my good man.

What is madness? To believe what one wishes?

Which of us is sane?

How odd that I should turn to this poem first! The earliest letters I’ve gathered begin in the summer of 1982 to Sylvia who read with my sister at Butner Federal Penn with a state grant of some sort that paid a stipend to both of the poets and the transportation for the former with her partner from central New Jersey.

I’m very excited, too, think you and me as a team will be

double dynamite. You write like a house afire. I envy your

even intensity—your poems sizzle on the page.

I’ve read at the Butner joint twice before, have worked closely

with various prison poets, mainly Chicano writers. (That’s

how I came by the Mariposa heart-name, it was a gift from a

guy at Soledad. He got me hooked on the Aztec Poet-Kings.

I use Mariposa to sign all my Spanish translations/Aztec cross-culturing stuff…

I had no idea that Genia knew Spanish. She must have spoken with a southern accent, something I struggled to erase for several years even though nobody is aware of a dancer’s elocution.

I haven’t determined the exact date Genia and Sylvia became pen pals, sister singers as my twin refers to her best friend. Not that it really matters. I’m not sure any of my perusing of these letters and Genia’s publications matter either, except perhaps I may discover why as twins we were so different and so distant.

No doubt, I’m to blame!

I never plan a reading in advance, other than very crudely.

I carry an armload of stuff in and choose according to the

audience response, the prevailing mood, what they seem to

need to hear…

Genia’s letters, usually on yellow legal-size paper (but also on backs of napkins or envelopes) are hand-printed with green or red ink. What I can’t figure out is why she saved everything but her letters from Sylvia. Maybe at one point before my sister’s death, she and her friend had agreed to exchange all their correspondence? Who can be certain?

Genia was a photo-typesetter in the eighties, a Compu Editwriter who worked on a mammoth computer which may explain why she chose not to have a home computer. She refers often to a mysterious jaguar in her letters. It seems to be gaining weight rapidly. Actually, I cannot imagine you a member of the manic-depressive family; you function so impressively in the fixed world of reality.

I was then aware that Genia and Sylvia shared the mental distinction classified as bipolarity. I wondered if I myself was semi-touched since there were times I too felt as though I sometimes walked on the moon. That was Sylvia’s term for being in the manic stage. However, I’d not done so in over three years.

This current dry period in my art is tinged with a sadness I’ve not been able to explain, just as in the past. It’s not exactly going west, as Genia describes, repeating Ernest Hemingway. But, these past several years have been pretty grim.

I found a poem by my twin dated 9-30-83 which reveals how close to country and redneck ways she was and how dissimilar were our cultural and ethnic interests.

A Trucker’s Prayer

Oh Lord

please

let me pull over

stop this truck

on the side of the road

and just watch

this river

forever

with the full moon

searching

falling like rain-mists

over the shining waters

burning

through the shadowed clumps

of restless kudzu

Oh Lord

let me

drink forever

from these waters

of light

At some point, Sylvia and D., her partner, whom I gathered was a woman, must have considered relocating to the Tar Heel state. Genia wrote on 15 June 82, The Chapel Hill community is a Mecca for all artists and free spirits…When you and your friend come down in August, please consider this an invitation to weekend with me and my Mom…We’ve a huge poetry community in this state—every rock you turn over, expect four or five poets to come crawling out.

Odd that Genia never mentioned Sylvia when I returned home for our mother’s funeral. Of course, I didn’t stay but a day, because I was playing the lead in a new dance I’d choreographed about the phases of the moon.

In that same letter, Genia wrote:

(As to your declarative question of what do they think

writers are, well, just fill in the blank, I guess…from

freaks, imbeciles to disruptive influences….With Earth

year staring me dead in the face I can only give my stock

reply: we are what we want, will and work ourselves to

be….all the way from butterflies and eagles and jaguars

to the Mother Moon herself.)

Slipped into that letter was a very-faded Xerox of Genia’s resume which absolutely stunned me. She’d been an active journalist for fourteen years and served as a reporter, columnist and reviewer. She was a member of the North Carolina Poetry Society; the Byron Society, etc. She’d won Honorable Mentions, first place and second place prizes for many of her poems which appeared primarily in North Carolina but also in Colorado, Florida and Virginia and even abroad in Spain.

Genia had read and given workshops at the Alcoholic Rehab Center in Butner Penitentiary and in several local high schools. She’d read with poets she deemed better than herself such as Amon Liner only a year before she sang his praise in a memorial in 1976.

She’d been poet in the schools and taught creative writing. She’d been writer-in-residence at Weymouth Center in Southern Pines where she met the famous journalist and editor of the town’s newspaper, the venerable Sam Ragan who was poet laureate of North Carolina at the time.

9-14-82

You send the nicest CARE packages! I am gloating over

my green butterfly pendant…Thank you, Paloma…I found

a jewel at a nearby book store last payday, Dreaming the

Dark, subtitled Magic, Sex & Politics by Starhawk, the

author of The Spiral Dance. You might enjoy sampling;

it’s sort of down our mutual alley.

I’ve been back on the moon a lot lately, hence the enclosed

lunar dispatches. No, I don’t know what I’m doing, other

than flying blind, as usual.

How I envied both Sylvia aka Paloma, the dove and Genia, my

twin, Mariposa, the butterfly. She was the sister I’d never been able to identify with, and it must have been my fault. I flipped pages to discover Lunar Dispatch #1

You probably should know

there is a lost child alive

inside of me, a little girl

with sunshine pale angel hair

and nervous eyes, a shy smile…

I am so afraid

I am lost

on the moon’s dark side…

Genia attempted to retain her golden blonde hair ever since our childhood. I’ve dyed my hair dark brunette, the same shade since sophomore year when I was considered both Goth and Gothic. We had that in common although she and I never discussed our fears. In fact, Genia and I never discussed anything. I was visual and tactile. She was verbal and aural or so I thought until Lorena showed me some of Genia’s paintings.

I was flabbergasted. They reminded me of Manet and Grandma Moses: impressionistic but with recognizable ponies and deer; flowers in bloom in spring although I didn’t know their names. There was even a self-portrait which eerily resembled me, except for the cheeks and hair. Genia preferred dark rouge even though she was more fair-skinned.

Turning more pages, I found The Wise Woman, with this explanation: A definition in the Nahuatl manner for Sabias Señoras Maria Sabina, Petrita Baca, Elaina Ramirez and my Grandmother, Mae Magdalene Long-Whitfield.

Genia had typed the poem in Spanish and then translated it. Was it her verse? It appeared to be, yet there was no telltale date, always her signature, so to speak.

The Wise Woman: she is a seeker, a singer, a seer.

She does things, knows how to stop the world.

She is a star-shaker, she is a sky-walker.

She roots pussy willows and wild roses,

plants and harvests. She dreams of light

even in death’s hard bed. The Wise Woman:

she is a heart teacher, a time weaver.

She comes and goes like the wind, the moon….

She tames wild things, unchains tamed minds.

The Wise Woman: she works, wakes, takes

all parts, completes, making everything whole and new again.

Maybe that’s why I was spending my days and nights reading my dead sister’s letters, drafts and final versions of poems and whatever bound publications I could locate. Perhaps I was jealous that my twin was truly a Wise Woman, and I just a Lost Soul, incapable of helping anyone, especially her, because I could never help myself.

Unlike Genia, who saw many doctors for varied conditions, some of which we shared, i.e. sinus infections and migraine headaches, I’ve never believed in physicians as healers. I suppose we also had that in common, to a certain extent; but, I choose alternative methods such as herbs, teas and vitamins.

I’ve never been a fanatic about anything although I’ve probably spent more energy devoted to dance than to my emotional, mental or physical health. Now, I realize that too is a contradiction!

I was never the reader Genia was. Neither was I enthralled with nature. She and Sylvia shared those interests. No doubt, they were both true artists, if anyone has yet to define same. Of course, I’ve known depression; but, I don’t think I’ve actually ever been suicidal as my twin.

From The Gallows Lord (NC: John F. Blair ’78), an excerpt of the Gameplan (which refers to the title of the book) is chilling.

From the day I was spawned,

A Pearl Harbor mutant, an official war baby…

We have been in league together,

The Gallows Lord and I. From the first.

It has something to do with genes,

Individual chemistry and much of hearsay…

I rarely give him a second thought now,

Other than to wonder mildly, in passing,

Just how long I can hold him off…

Folded up in the back of the book is Genia’s "Here is How

Things Are" as I wince, remembering our mother’s death.

My Mother dies slowly

like kudzu or a rose giving itself back to the winds,

petal by tattered petal….

My Mother dies like a carriage candle

blown by the rain. The guttering flame dances,

spits, sputters, leaping high, falling away….

My Mother dies

like light, as she has ever lived, slow, to the hilt,

hard, hard, hard.

There’s a lump in my throat. I always thought our mother favored Genia over me. Or, was it that I couldn’t get close to anyone, not then or even now? Maybe I am mentally ill and totally in denial. I realize when I reflect at all, that our mother surely loved us both the best way she knew how. But, in my soul, do I really believe that?

However, I do know I was the one who pushed Genia away. I pushed away Mother too, because I didn’t want to die in the tobacco fields.

I didn’t want to pick cotton and grow vegetables or live off the land. I didn’t want to have our mother’s wrinkles and rough hands. But, I should have been focusing on her heart, her soft, delicate and spiritual soul which Genia took time to experience, to know and to preserve in her poems.

As I was remembering our youth, I synchronously found a Xeroxed copy of Genia’s Falling Out of the Barn (For My Father) from Winter’s Promise in Southern Exposure Winter ‘80

The summer I turned ten was when I slipped

from the third tier in the little tobacco barn.

I fell like a hoecake, a dream, a tumbling star,

cartwheeled through the aromatic dark

heavy with the fragrance of cured bottom primings,

past the thick tier poles that flashed by

like sleeping logs or huge hungry snakes,

vision blurring, falling falling down, down,

trying to remember what you said about learning

how to fall, the right way:

"If you climb,

you’re bound to fall. You only get one chance

to learn. You can’t take time to be scared:

save your scares for later. Go limp, to keep

your bones limber. If you have to, turn,

twist until you’re falling face down.

You got to see, to be able to pick the place

where you want to land. Hit on all fours,

like a cat you shake out of the damson tree.

You don’t fall, really: you drop yourself, slow,

and land rolling once you feel dirt under your feet…."

I refused to play or work in the barn. I remember screaming and then hiding in the woods once behind the little lake almost until midnight. The moon was full, and I didn’t feel alone. I felt no remorse for the scare I caused both our parents and Genia, whom I later learned spent the entire afternoon into dusk-dark, looking for me before returning home to finish both our chores.

I was a selfish and ignorant child. Genia was writing poems, and I had nothing except my foolish escapades: hanging from thin-branched trees; tumbling over good tobacco; mucking up my shoes and clothes in the muddy lake bottom to spoil Mother’s clean kitchen floor. I really was a devil, a demon.

When I discovered CaveWoman, I wondered if Genia had composed the long poem as a portrait of me in youth. Undated, I wasn’t even sure whether she’d written the piece; for the typescript was different from the smudged type of her other poems.

The brute beast in you draws out the crude clawing bitch of me.

You screech when you call song through slavering lips,

count your spears and check my bonds, then leer.

You have no business here! This is my cave, mine!

I found it first, after wildfire drove the big cats away.

I cleared out the loathsome charred cubs myself,

swept out all the rotted leaves and spiderwebs

with dogwood branches, even dove soft reed mats

to cover the cold clay there beneath your muddy feet….

You are disgusting, vile; you pee everywhere,

Lope on all fours more often than you lurch upright.

You do not even know what fire is for: look how

you gnaw freshly-hided rabbits with your yellow eyeteeth,

lick the hot running blood from your thick lips.

You speak in spitting snarls and gruff grunting squeaks….

You have trampled

all my clay bowls, stolen all my stored foods.

Such an angry poem! And, yet, in The Sun, Issue 86, Jan. 1983, my sister’s thoughts were uplifting about Growing Older.

I think getting older is fun: good cheese, wine and women improve with age.

I think I am getting better. I am less ready to sit in judgment. I mellow, go with life’s flow.

Getting older means packing away the fables and fairytales alongside the one-and-onlies, all the Prince Charmings, the Masters I store in the attic. I do not need illusions now….

I believe getting older means being able to be as tough as whale bone and keeping a tender heart, evergreen. And, it is by our loves that we shall be known and remembered.

I’m 41 now, think I’ve finished the crawling period, am learning to walk. One day, before I die, maybe I will learn to fly out every sky I am brave enough to dream into reality. I am nobody special, just a small nameless woman who has died many times and lived to sing and laugh about it. I am no one unusual. I shan’t ripple the surface of history, literary or otherwise, and that doesn’t matter. I just try to live, dream, dare my best, to live with a butterfly’s deceptively fragile wings guiding my heart.

And, I am 65, a twin who has returned to her roots probably too late; for Genia is gone, not to mention our Mother and Father and Evie, the older sister I never took time to know. And, now Genia is gone too. Oh, I am slowly realizing how cold and callous I’ve been. If I could act so aloof towards my own blood, how must I have appeared to my peers and students?

I’m reading through Genia’s letters to salvage the past I allowed to slip through my fingers. I may probably be twenty years too late to be crawling… I suppose I’m not even here. Like a turtle I’m stuck in the middle of the road. When will I ever learn to walk?

I’ve been a dancer all my life, but my soul has been separate from my limbs. I’ve had no great major love(s); I never had children; I’ve been disassociated from family and the Tar Heel state. I cut the chord to Genia when I was six or seven and never looked back. I turned away from my parents when I was a wild and unruly teenager.

Although I’ve been successful and somewhat known in small dance circles, what do I really have to show for my life but arthritic knees, fingers, hips and a back that’s in intermittent pain?

Yet, I too pushed myself beyond personal limits and limitations. For what reason? Recognition and fame! What does that matter? I am not a happy woman. I have few friends who are reliable or trustworthy unlike Genia who seemed beloved by so many.

I intended to stay in my sister’s small brick house for only a few weeks, but as I read her letters and poems, published and unpublished, I realized that I had little desire to return to the other side of nature: the business and culture subsidized to the enth degree in the city of trolley cars renovated and brought back to San Francisco only as a means to profit for hungry tourists who crave mementoes of the past.

I departed my own idyllic homestead, because I yearned to become citified, according to my father, who entertained our family by singing songs like Twenty Froggies Went to School on his guitar or reciting poetry at any hour of the day.

The Cremation of Sam McGhee by Robert Service was his favorite. I was impatient, could never sit still through his endless stories of olden times.

And, because I left Bushy Fork almost immediately upon high school graduation, I wasn’t around for anyone’s life or death, not even my twin’s. I was also absent from the life and passing of my older sister, Evelyn, because I left no forwarding address or phone number.

Lorena, Genia’s devoted neighbor, said the other day, She was a mad artist, you know. Most of her poems are fixed on death. I guess it was only a matter of time before…

Aren’t I also mad? Insane, no doubt, to have separated myself from family! I never married and have no heirs. I was never close to any creature or human being. Not really!

After a lunch of fresh veggies dipped in yogurt, I return to my reading. A faded green book with the pencil sketch portrait of a bearded man beckons. As I open Upstream (NY: Merging Media ’85), a folded white paper falls out, a page from Heritage of Person County Vol. III in Genia’s handwriting in purple ink.

I read the bio on The Byrd Jackson Long Family, beginning with our father Byrd where I learn his feet were drawn back under and had to be cut at the time of his birth. As a result of this he had to go barefoot for years, use homemade crutches and was not able to go to school until he was about twelve. Throughout his life his feet were the weakest part of him.

Why didn’t I know this fact about our father’s past? Perhaps, I would have understood my propensity and preoccupation with dance.

Then I read the inscription in green ink to match the Upstream cover. "For Sylvia, Querida Paloma, my beloved sister, who knows me better than I myself…" I was filled with self-loathing. Who should know her twin better than any other? Me!

Dedicated to Ed, Genia’s younger son, my own nephew, I realized that the book was a memorial to his father, my twin’s second major love, perhaps her first since Tim, the deceptive, alcoholic husband, never told her he was bisexual. All this from Lorena!

Genia never married Kenneth, but she loved him more than anyone, Lorena confided one evening when she again invited me to supper at her old stone house, as casual as Genia’s and also decorated with favorite possessions, including rocks, birds’ feathers and a few of Genia’s paintings which amazed me. They were quite good in their simple portrayal of nature in this region!

Funny that both Genia’s sons are gay, isn’t it? Lorena said.

I knew nothing about my twin’s life or that of my nephews. How could I? I never answered any of Genia’s letters. I didn’t know they were, I replied, rather sheepishly.

That night I again sat up late to read several of my twin’s poems as I looked out into the darkness, remembering the pond we used to swim in, now Farm Pond:

When the first whippoorwill newly arrived

mourns his absent mate from the forest’s darkened deeps

and the abandoned waters are alive with new frogs,

something calls, calls, calls me from the waiting night.

Someone is calling, calling, calling me by name….

I latch all windows carefully and weep until dawning,

because there is someone calling, calling, calling…

someone I have known as long as time is old,

calling, calling, calling me home in the endless night.

Maybe Genia was the emotional twin, and I was her physical but distant mirror. She hated to exercise although she walked often through the fields into the forest and around the pond in our childhood years.

Lorena said Genia had started using a cane after Sylvia sent her one for her 60th birthday, a hand-carved replica of her own walking stick, made out of mahogany.

I, on the other hand, never really wanted to get my feet wet. I only got dirty to live up to my reputation as the mischievous imp while I hid behind bushes in the back yard to create movements I was certain were abstract and unrelated to what Genia sensed and portrayed visually.

The fact is I was jealous of my twin’s proficiency with words. She sensed with her limbs and touched the heart of nature: whispering aspens; laughing squirrels; singing sparrows.

As I read more letters, I learned that Sylvia DuBois literally ran an old letterpress with her husband, an Icelander, named Ragnarok. These old-fashioned printing presses may be doomed, but they still retain a grace no computer will ever know, Sylvia wrote Genia when the former was living in Birmingham, apparently, before Sylvia met D.

After a no-fault divorce, Sylvia then lived with a woman. Merging Media was their offset press, a hobby to publish Sylvia and other friends in their first ten years when they were living in central New Jersey.

Turning a few more loose pages, I find the poem, For Martin:

…I had thought life without man

would be very simple, uncluttered

and it is

and sometimes too it is sweet

with a stealing serenity…

My heart is still alive.

You bathe me in moonlight.

I am a wild rose waking slowly to the morning sun

and open for your questing hands. Swords of light

sting. Eagles cry. Hummingbirds strum…

Again, I felt jealousy. Genia had loved so many: men, women, children, family, nature and language itself. And, the same for Sylvia!

3-11-83

Dear Syl,

…You speak very tersely of yr nervous nosedive—are

you sure you’re quite all right now?...wanna laywoman

opinion of breakdowns/depressive cycles?

I think them energy discharges, like lightning—summer

lightning, showering out in aimless sheets and scattered

shards—for me, nothing is more exhausting than them

low-low-lows—the only times I really worry are when I

pull back so far I lose total contact with any and everybody—

do you ever have this trouble?

4-22-83

Syl dear,

…The past four weeks have been undiluted hell…I thank

the gods for making me a strong country woman, tough

as whale bone…otherwise the stress and turmoil of the

past month would have shattered totally what remains of

my heart.

Genia went on, referring to Ken’s imprisonment in a county jail with three other inmates…’a human zoo.’ I’m not sure why he was there, but she added, He may not live long enough to get to Springfield…

In the same letter, she wrote, I worry for you, Syl….we are so much alike: reflections of one another, (who) step in sooo many of the same bear traps…

As I paused, I noticed a napkin in a folder of Genia’s correspondence labeled The Eighties. As I read Cuddled or Coddled, I somehow felt the poem was written by Sylvia because of the rhyme.

Do writers write only when they are sad;

broken into pieces like puzzle;

bothered, conflicted, full of angst?

Or, are they rebellious when muzzled;

told to march in order with ranks

until they protest, because they see red?

Do they fictionalize as prank,

or bare soul because of woman or lad?

Must they always be cuddled, coddled?

Some authors create in tune with a fad,

sometimes take royalties to bank,

not most poets engaged in riddle.

Artists are immune to critics not thanks

like singers who depend on fiddle.

But, do wordsmiths forge meaning out of bad?

Are synapses in their brain tangled

with memories of childhood—mom, dad?

Are they loners or part of gang?

What’s written out of joy makes experts mad.

Unlike Byron or Browning, few wrestle

with relics of ships that have sunk.

Then I sorted through several newspaper clippings regarding the reason for Ken’s imprisonment. Apparently, he was a murder suspect, but the evidence was rather flimsy. On May 8 1983, Genia finally answered her friend’s letters.

…I have not written simply because I have not

had the heart, as Kenneth was found guilty and

sentenced to six years, in addition to the 30 months

federal time. And it could have gone as high as

50 years, state time….

I had not thought anything connected with men

could sting me, after watching my Father’s dying,

until the court/inquisition ritual, with Ken…it

was ungodly.

In this batch of handwritten correspondence, Genia included an untitled poem for her prince behind bars. The last stanza startled me.

Oh you, redneck rowdy, rough and ready

briarpatch brother to Walt Whitman,

drinking cronie/asshole buddy with Cousin Ed Poe,

fair-haired child, darling boy of the South,

monk, prince & king of Cobbs Creeks in one,

from every tree stump and log cabin rooftop

still intact in town and country, I proclaim,

shouting testify how

good old boys make the best men,

and you are: the best, first and last.

And God, am I glad.

I thought again of how different we were. I’d gone out with several guys, but they were either dancers or moneyed sponsors of dance groups. They were effeminate or preppy, certainly nothing like Ken. How could Genia be impressed with a redneck?

In that summer’s batch of letters between Genia and Sylvia, my twin referred to a Poetry Placemat her twin was working on. Genia’s contribution was Lord Byron’s Lovesong which I found radically different from her other poems.

I go forth in beauty.

I go forth in beauty.

The moon is full.

My heart is whole.

I walk in beauty

where ever I go.

But, maybe it’s not paradoxical for anyone to experience positive and negative moods. Nonetheless, Genia seemed more slanted towards the downward slopes. Then her Bed Suite in Thirteen Movements…for Monk appeared after a letter dated April 6 1984, not to Sylvia but to her partner, D.

As a yellow bronchial-asthmatic, you have my

every wish for speediest recovery—lack of lung

capacity is serious stuff.

I wondered if Genia’s long three page poem was for Ken or another prisoner or possibly some other lover.

#5

the gods’ final truth is

loving terrifies me now

love is always eating me alive

embedding shining fangs

in my reeling, recoiling heart –

are there any clean kills

in the tangled jungles

of life?...

#13

….I do not know how to bridge

this heavy distance sprawled between us

like hard drought’s lifeless waste….

I can see you everywhere

another sun stone neat rows of sunflowers

unbudding clear as morning

bright and shining

like the waiting moon.

6-20-83

I finally deduced with Lorena’s help that the poem was indeed for Edgar’s father, Genia’s major love, Kenneth.

As I read a poem dated Sept. 22, 1983, I had the first insight into my twin’s other life as a 9 to 5 worker. Resignation for Wally is typed on white tissue-thin paper with this preface:

written while brooding upon an atrocious work

situation and listening to Johnny Paycheck’s

Take this Job and Shove It after re-cycling

Thirteen Ways to Look at a Blackbird by

Wallace Stevens.

I quit

because I am sick and tired

of being sick and tired,

tired of living off Extra-Strength Tylenols

(unfortunately, sans cyanide),

tired of being treated

subhuman, like another office furnishing,

a chair or an auxiliary

of that inhuman monstrosity of electric wires

and program boards I operate,

like another machine

without spirit or dreams.

I quit

because you are killing me

slowly day by day

I quit because this job

is unorganized chaos, a zoo,

instant insanity nobody crawls

or is carted off sane nobody

leaves alive and well….

I quit

because I hate all you represent:

sons of patriarchal misrule, blind bigotry,

even my first ex-husband: he was selfish,

cruel and foul-mouthed, too.

I did not live with him infesting my life

like some malignant tumor at home

and I will not live with you either…

I have survived

four dead babies, one divorce,

seven newspapers, legions of lovers,

the repeated loss of all I cherish,

hold dear. I have survived Azteca wizards

and blood-thirsty Tiger-Knights,

crazy Cuban captains, back wards

in the best and worst of madhouses,

my lunatic family, heaven and hell,

living’s nastiest curves

and I will survive you

as well

laughing singing

all the way home.

By end of November in l983, Genia was informing Sylvia of

Marshall/The Wild Man (who) asked me if I wanted a diamond from my Santa Claus…I’m still in shock, but he’s the only man I have met first as a friend.

Feb. 14 ’84, Genia announced to Sylvia "1—The Wild Man & me done it Sun., at a marrying place/mill in Dillon, SC….5—Can you send a brief letter to the Parole commission chairman, recommending that Ken’s state sentence be commuted because of 1) his advanced age (65 now), 2) his deteriorating physical health; 3) fact of no prior criminal record, and 4) just on general compassion grounds….my eternal gratitude is yours.

Apparently, Genia wanted a more-formal celebration of her marriage to the Wild Man. In her letter dated 1-24-84, she informed Sylvia that she’d written a reference for her to be Writer-in-Residence at Weymouth where she herself had finished a manuscript.

She asked Sylvia to preside over a Bushy Fork version of the Aztec ‘Tying of the Knot’ ritual—a lot of purloined D. H. Lawrence, some of (her) garbled Nahuatl translations.

Again, I was astounded to learn that my sister was considered a superb and rare translator of Nahuatl in the literary world. I am enclosing a rough draft of the Quetzalcoatl troths, plus one of Marshall’s new poems….All the cats are besotted with him, just like me.

I searched for the wedding ritual that my twin had referenced but only found a segment.

Genia: This man is my rain from heaven.

Marshall: This woman is all the earth to me….

Sylvia: Remember the marriage is the meeting-ground, and the meeting-ground is the star. If there is no star, no meeting-ground, no true coming together of the man with the woman, into a wholeness, there is no marriage.

Genia was quite descriptive regarding the tying of the knot, joining the garments and the destinies of the man and the woman. I was impressed and a bit envious, even though I knew my sister and Marshall had not stayed married more than a year, if that. I’d found a photo of the two of them at the pond. On the backside was their severance date.

My twin mystified me. She was eccentric and eclectic, apparently the same as Sylvia Forest, the dove who’d changed her surname after my sister did, from Cutter to Love Long.

In that same late January letter, Genia praised Sylvia’s Dialogue… although I’ve found no copy of the book.

I find it nothing short of miraculous how it commences in

two-part harmony and progresses to the unfolding of a

singular unity. The clean lyrics haunt….I think it will

eventually be recognized as invaluable for other women

artists struggling still under the delusions of isolation and alienation….What you and Adele Kenny have woven strikes

me as unique as if Anais Nin and Simone de Beauvoir had

arrived at the same pact of total honesty….

Do you think I would be capable of sustaining 50% of a

similar project with you…If so, I ache to try.

The Squaw Winter group of poems is shaping up; I’ll

get it in ms. form before dumping it on you for the intro.

There was a reference to stocking up on a safe supply of grass/Indian tobacco when Sylvia visited North Carolina. I, on the other hand, have never tried marijuana even though I’ve had many opportunities while living in San Francisco. I wondered if I might not have alleviated some of my own depressions over the years if only I’d experimented with the magic weed, as Genia referred to Mary Jane.

To learn that my sister "had a dreadful Black Dog (what Amon Liner and I call depression) bout after leaving the Advertiser" surprised me. I have got to stay the hell a way from newspapers and print shops. I don’t have those enormous reserves of raw energy to fall back on since the catnap/broken sleep pattern of taking care of Mom at night began.

Again, I felt guilty and uneasy, even queasy in my stomach for the grave and numerous mistakes of youth and beyond when I should have known better.

Why hadn’t Genia informed me about her need for aid regarding our mother? Of course, how could any one have contacted me? I didn’t leave a phone number or an address. I was truly selfish, dedicated to the false god of Fame, even more than Fortune.

Genia then asked Sylvia to send Kenneth a birthday card and enclosed his prison address. My sister said that he’d blessed her upcoming nuptials. Bizarre! Here, I’d thought that my twin was leading a dull life on the homestead. But, actually, she was living which is more than I can say for myself.

There was a letter dated Feb. 21, 1984 about the Dillon, S. C. ceremony that noted in detail the place and what Genia wore.

…my blue butterfly Capezio boots, for luck;

a pink A-line Anne Margaret suit and a cabled

white shell top my cousin Sandra sent me for

Christmas. I chain-smoked, walked the parking

lot, tinkered with the lace streamers on my borrowed

bouquet of silk roses and blue cornflowers and a

white orchid; fingered my jade Toci pendant.

Waiting to be married is a lot like waiting in the

dentist chair. Time warps, lurches and stops in staggers….Marrying is coming home after a mean

out-of-state run or a long hard journey in prison

or cruel exile. All you can do is praise god for

being there, surrounded by armies of water oaks

and trees of heaven budding in winter’s filibrating heart.

My sister must have known about her bad heart twenty years before her demise. Was she taking pills for that long? I didn’t even know she’d had bypass surgery. I made a note to ask Lorena more questions. Suddenly, I felt as though I should be in prison for abandoning my family and my twin, the other side of my soul.

Maybe that’s the reason I have to sift through these boxes of letters and poems. To find myself, to realize what I chose to forsake my whole life!

I looked in vain in Genia’s library, scattered throughout the home; but, I couldn’t locate a copy of Letters of Human Nature on which she and Sylvia had collaborated. All I found was a single page by Genia dated Feb. 9, 1984.

#1

Querida Paloma

Even as we dreamed of spring, the snows came, all silently, in

gusty flurries and smatters of blinding purity. I have learned

to adopt each season for my own. Come winter, I hug the hearth, bundle in lumberjack socks and lineman boots, thermal layer upon layer, my winter cocoon. The cold bites bone deep: I emulate the example of our one Mother, Earth. I turn inward, sleep in snatches, condensed catnaps, keep the tea kettle teeming on the stove, fill my Mother’s house with the fragrance of hibiscus, spearmint and passion flower.

This I know: we are never too old to live, to love, to dare to be

our full free selves. Life is strange: how conflicts have a way

of resolving themselves, with or without our help. (It is a fact

of science and history that we humans are social animals, that we flourish and thrive best in pairs, light welded to dark, yin seeking yang. To be human is to live with the anguish of being a fraction, incomplete)…yet this is not bad. (Were we each and all sufficient, fulfilled, there would be no universe, no doves and butterflies searching out every sky, no bears exploring new forests, no frog caroling alongside every creekbank.)

The entry ends with We were sent to sing forever, which we are, and that is enough. Time will judge us: our songs will hold the final tribunal, (not our lovers, not our families, not our friends.) And yes, you are a Southern star, too…

Despite Genia’s devotion to love and the lover, she was just as devoted to her work, dedicated to her art in a way I never could imagine she’d be. In comparison, I had misplaced my values. I lived like a hermit in a beautiful big city and choreographed absurdly abstract dances in seclusion, not out of the experience of every day existence.

How odd that I feel closer to my twin now that she’s gone than when she was alive. And, if only I’d reached out to her, years ago, perhaps we could have been best friends. Hatred for my ignorance overcomes me. I can no longer read my twin’s wisdom. Instead, I decide to walk to the pond, to pretend that I am the lover of nature Genia was, and, no doubt, Sylvia, whom she always referred to as her twin.

I also have an equally overpowering impulse to drive into town to get my dark hair colored blond. But, I resist this foolish desire. If I feel the same way in a week, I tell myself, then I’ll act.

That night I picked up Genia’s Squaw Winter (KS: The Kindred Spirit ’87). I almost bit my lip in astonishment.

She had dedicated the book to our mother. And, Sylvia had written the Preface.

Squaw Winter is a time when there is deep snow, but the ground is not frozen underneath…This volume, which harkens back to Aztec lamentations and love songs, echoing prayers and requests of more modern Native American tribes, is rich in the imagery and mystical symbolism of both nature and the moon….

There is a deep chanting magic in Squaw Winter that leads us to the painful piercing side of human belief that is vulnerable and therefore prone to myriad disappointments coupled with risks. But, the illuminations that result from such total embracing of life penetrate our own minds and urge us to alter or transform personal focus to experience these broader, more encompassing visions.

These poems unfold from a direct contact with earth, fire, wind, water: animals and trees; the sun and the moon; man and woman; and each of us ever and always alone with the knowledge and meaning evolved from exploring emotions, the most central and changing of which is Love.

Sylvia’s Preface was dated November 15, 1985, two years before the publication of the book. For some reason, I remembered my mentor in dance theatre who once said, An artist can never catch up to herself. She’s always creating. What’s new is never known to any one unless it’s presented immediately after creation which frequently isn’t possible. Odd, how we can remember certain things completely and forget large, important people in our lives.

That always bothered me. The fact that my dance compositions often remained unseen! Either a producer backed out, or a whole show had to be redesigned because the backers weren’t satisfied. At first, when I began reading Genia’s books, I was somewhat disdainful that small presses had published her, not commercial ones.

Now, I’m beginning to think Genia had the right idea. She didn’t sit around and wait for the big presses. She solicited the small and/or private ones, including Merging Media and then Rose Shell Press, an offset offshoot, which took the place of the Ragnarok letterpress Sylvia ran with her first husband.

I’ve even found some check stubs, indicating that both women produced themselves together: a term Sylvia Forrest invented for self-publication. In another letter, Genia responds, quoting Sylvia, ’Barbra Streisand can produce her own film as well as other movie stars. Why can’t writers produce themselves?’ Bravo! I feel the same way!

I returned to Squaw Winter and the title poem for Kenneth.

A woman’s heart in winter

Is a vacant field

Overgrown with dried witchweed

And dead brambles

Where