THE ELEANOR QUARTET

Eleanor Rigby Dreams of the Titanic

(A Looseknit Poem for Tape Recorder)

      I
And even when she dreams,
She rarely finds her dreaming self
Transfigured. How many nights
She dreams the lamp, the table,
And the chair, this trinity
So slightly tinged with strangeness
Or with beauty.

Sometimes she even did
Her needlepoint in dreams. Every
Day she pieced together little scraps
Of cloth and sewed in hearts and
Flowers. But in her dreams they
Were not hearts and flowers.
She once had wryly smiled
To think that she must make
Her "Comforter."

Her mother once had said
That life was one part happiness
To nine parts duty.
What good Father from the church,
From sorrow and frenzy
(What do you rhyme with Mackensie?)
Shields us half so well.

And now her Himalayan, found
Frothing blood one morning
In the tub, and now her lovely cat
Came only in her dreams,
His great blue eyes upon
The camera’s lens, not hers.

And Liberty, her jailer, glared
Monstrous from the window,
As if to mock her ‘longing
To breathe free’. The cracked wall
Was not cracked enough to crumble.

       II
And yet one night she dreamed
She left the room and stretched
The silver cord almost to breaking.
It was all like random snippets
From a life unknown.

Yet there she was, in seagreen gown
Within a little patch of newness,
Looking downward past the the
Stairs and railings fraught with moss
And barnacles. And in another patch
She saw a lovely redhead half her age,
Not a stitch to cover all her nakedness,
Save where sumptuous curls of redness
Figleafed down across her breasts,
Unless she were an Amazon.

And Eleanor could barely stand
That shameless stare, that smiling,
Longhaired man
Across the table. But she had
Found a sister.

Before the frame advanced, she
Heard the frightful bells, the shorts, the sirens,
And right before the blackout, she felt
That she had sacrificed her life
To save her sister.

And, blessedly, the iris tightened
Before the final terror and freezing.

      III
It opened on a fleeting scene. And there
She was upon the bow, her red hair blowing
In the sea, her seagreen gown
A thing of scanty woof and warp,
Less decorous than Hamlet’s scarf.
A brash and handsome man was at the helm,
But she was, for all his manliness,
Was good as dead.
No more responsive
Than a figurehead.

       IV
The final scene, she was the queen
Of wrecks and vibrant creatures.
Some, in that deep kingdom, were brothers
To the stone. Before she woke, not long
Before that day she woke no more,
She dreamed that she was safe
From all desires and their attendant fears.
Amidst the crumpled steel no torch can weld,
That little smile,
Like those so few and far between,
A virgin queen,
Eleanor became what she beheld.