JACQUELINE LYONS, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW
Into All Four Corners
Padahastasana (Foot to Hand Pose)
One day they hauled me away.
—Heartless Bastards, Hold Your Head High
How old was I anyway. Where was I from. How did one introduce herself to strangers. Part of my sense of self, held by someone else for ten years, one day stayed behind as I drove a U-Haul away. Without a second consciousness, observation fell to me alone—this was how I made coffee, this was me deciding whether to take the coffee to my desk or back to bed, have a shower now or later, eat or not eat, this was me wavering. What had it meant to live with someone, to wake up married. Which habits were mine alone and which had I grown into, trained, entwined. When did I first name February the cruelest month. What were my first words.
Begin standing with feet hip-width distance apart, hands on hips, grounding into all four corners of the feet.
I saw a tree, roots exposed, growing improbably from a hillside half crumbled away. I forgot to eat some days, lived off air. The way a separated person gazes at a far-off point you might think she daydreams, but you would be wrong. She wonders how she arrived at this moment, who if anyone will notice if she goes missing. You might ask if she has lost her balance, and yes, her stance is all periphery and no center.
What does balance look like? The Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and the tow truck driver in Wyoming who, years earlier, had pulled me out of a ditch where my truck lodged in the snow after hitting ice and sliding off the interstate. I was amazed the truck hadn’t flipped, that I wasn’t hurt. My hand shook when I signed the bill and I apologized for my wavering signature. The driver nodded, no matter, said, “You did a good job keeping all four wheels on the ground.”
Weather is a fact grounded in context. The December I was cut loose, I looked around, reached, and caught hold of winter, an unusually cold and snowy winter for Pullman, Washington. The poems I wrote were to, from, and about December, January and February, long nights and snow. Knowing high and low temperatures and details of precipitation helped me find my way from hour to hour without getting lost, the way prairie homesteaders strung a rope from house to barn, out of necessity, against the disorienting blindness of blizzards.
From this grounded position, inhale, look up, lift the chest.
Living alone meant no one to talk with at the end of the day. In evening, all fascination with form fell away and single-minded content rose up in its place—one plate of food, one glass of wine, singular bowl of ice cream, solitary hand, solo spoon.
I ask my mother what my first word was but she can’t remember. My mother can’t remember my first word. She says she will look it up in my baby book, then calls back to report that my baby book cannot be found. Amazing and kind of sad, but on the bright side I could make up my first word, like “never the less,” or “all gone.”
*
Keep the spine long, exhale, fold forward and reach the hands toward the feet.
The Peace Corps recruiter who interviewed me more than a decade earlier had asked why I thought I had the inner resources to live without electricity and running water. I said I had recently been camping, a taste of life without amenities. Had anything prepared me for the uprooting of end of marriage, had anything suggested the flavor of how it felt, after years with someone, to live alone? I had not thought about love ending until I thought about it all the time.
Once I was robbed and then my self was stolen away. In my second year of the Peace Corps, I had been up in the mountains of southern Lesotho visiting another volunteer while waiting for my door lock to be fixed—the man who robbed my house broke it—and as I traveled, there was a coup. I stayed away for a few days, tried unsuccessfully to get news, and when all seemed quiet, I travelled home, the best hitch of my life through the mountains in the open back of a pick-up truck. A Peace Corps driver was waiting at my door, told me I was being evacuated. Would I be coming back? The driver thought not. He gave me half an hour to pack a bag, say my good-byes, and then I was taken away.
What’s beautiful about being hauled away is that later you can write or sing about it with feeling. What is terrible about being stolen away from what you call home is that it is done to you. What radiates bright clear light is the sense that something must change. Pulled up, dirtied, dragged through the air, shaken, freed. Hello hands. Hello long lost feet.
Take hold of the big toe with the first two fingers and thumb of each hand. Relax the shoulders away from the ears.
I never left the country. Peace Corps interned volunteers for a week near the airport, fearing post-coup violence, and when none erupted they sent us back to our sites. I returned to find my house half-packed into boxes. My fellow teachers called the evacuation my “kidnapping,” and my students, to whom I had been teaching The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, compared my return to the scene of Tom and Huck attending their own funeral, where they weep. Tom and Huck had run away and had good adventures while the town believed them drowned. Glad to be back, I sat down and wrote a letter to the Peace Corps, asking to extend my two-year contract to three.
*
There was no return to marriage, no anticipated trouble that didn’t arrive, no misunderstood death, nor a desire to go back. I signed my name to a decree of dissolution, was given a case number, then dissolved. I did not belong to the divorce, but nor did I belong to myself. I wrote a letter in my head expressing desire to have left marriage sooner, to have fled into the nearest mountains, and to have not come back.
My stance on the earth that winter was uncertain—I stumbled, slid on ice, my feet flew out from under me. My position after learning that my baby book is missing is a sad one, though lightened by imagining I fell as a fully formed five-year-old to the earth.
When I moved out of a shared house and into an apartment alone, I needed my mother but she couldn’t come. Busy with her own divorce, she sent her cookbook instead. Needing to root and brooding instead, I looked for comforting recipes, pie or cake, found the Desserts section in her 1974 Joy of Cooking missing. With money my father sent I bought a tent and camp stove, boots, another pair of boots, outfitting myself from the ground up. The day I moved out the temperature had been seven degrees. Someone might have given me a map.
Inhale and come up halfway to gaze at the horizon, then exhale and bring chest to thighs, forehead to shins.
At the tiny Pullman city library, the volunteer at the desk where I left my keys told me people did that all the time. I had never forgotten my keys anywhere before, ever, but during the season of reaping my errors, I stood in new relation to foundation and periphery. Weighted but not well grounded, I found things missing from the bedroom, bookshelves, kitchen drawers, and from every evening. That winter I appeared, I was told, calm. Inwardly I wandered lost in an unfamiliar interior, disassembled, uncreated. I tried to replace what I had lost, bought cookbooks from the town’s one used bookstore, and a set of blue china from Lily Bee’s Thrift & Antique with pieces already missing. I tasted wine at the local winery, whose best red promised pepper, berry, balance. I unpacked a blue lamp I had bought a month earlier and stored in the closet, the first item in a collection I thought of as my divorce trousseau.
Release the toes and slide the hands beneath the feet, palms to soles, toes touching the wrist crease.
Lengthen the spine with each inhale, hollow out the belly to bring the upper body closer to the legs, deepen into the pose with each exhale.
What comforts about the weather during a difficult year is it that even the blizzards, freezing fog, hail storms and lightning strikes are fluctuations within a spectrum, and while one season’s weather may linger or be shy to enter, in the end the seasons reliably hand earth over to the next in line.
What is a relief about Dissolution of Marriage Case number 10-3 ####-# is the order it gives to your chaos, officialdom to what is felt. It pokes you in the stomach, knocks you off balance, takes you back to the ground floor.
What’s beautiful about being desolate is that the loneliness is your own, it cannot be halved, or photocopied and filed, written down and forgotten, packed into a box, dropped and broken, given away, lost. No matter how you move, your evening shadow will not touch or be touched. What’s beautiful about staring all night at your goddamn hands and feet is that you will never not recognize them again, no matter how much longing or how blurred the dim late light. What’s to love about loneliness is that everything you say is a soliloquy.
After a season of soliloquies, of hollowing out the belly, of holding on to weather, will I, do I, land on my feet.
Jacqueline Lyons on “Into All Four Corners”:
The essay “Into All Four Corners” is part of a book-length series of lyric essays that, guided by the language and imagery of yoga poses, meditate on divorce and other dissolutions.
Years ago, in the messy wake of what we euphemistically call a “life event”—in my case, the end of a long relationship—at first, in mild shock, I could not continue my daily practices of writing and yoga. One day I stepped back onto the yoga mat, had a good cry, and began writing.
I reread a manual from the yoga teacher training I had completed a few years earlier. The manual “broke down” each pose, and included detailed instructions on how to do the pose, as well as benefits and contraindications. The descriptions of the poses’ effects on the body resonated deeply. The language of breaking down in order to instruct and advance comforted. I didn’t know it then, but I needed guidance on grieving a loss. I had no interest in continuing the relationship that had ended, but I still mourned the disappearance of what had once seemed good about it, and the erasure of one possible future.
Guided by the lexicon of the yoga manual, I wrote one lyric essay, then another, and another, eventually arranging them according to the sequence of an Ashtanga Yoga practice, beginning with Downward Facing Dog pose, Adho Mukha Svanasana, and ending with Corpse pose, Savasana.
I recalled one poetry teacher’s advice to “write into the teeth of it,” and found that I could face the most emotionally painful and uncomfortable aspects of the relationship’s dissolution when I exorcised them through the language and physicality of yoga.
In the thick of emotional upheaval, I could see no resolution. Conventional narrative felt untrue. I intuitively gravitated toward the lyric essay, which accommodated the leaps, associations, and fragmentation that characterized my lived experience and my thoughts. The lyric essay’s comfort with multiple times and places meant I could explore my present crisis, and freely connect it to childhood and the natural world, to literature and art and science and stray facts, and to stories from my years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho, Southern Africa.
Other essays in this series can be read here: “At a Loss”; “Too Silver for a Seam”: “Down Into Open”
Jacqueline Lyons‘ most recent poetry collections are Adorable Airport (Barrow Street Press) and Earthquake Daily (New Michigan Press). She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, Utah Arts Council Awards in Poetry and Nonfiction, and a Nevada Arts Council Fellowship in Nonfiction. Her lyric essay collection Breakdown of Poses was named finalist for an AWP Award Series Prize in Nonfiction. She lives on the southern segment of the San Andreas Fault.