The mourning pool

Hannah has a new cedar spa pool and it’s a long way, not

by kilometres but by the wending arms of growing up,

between the mouldy borderline-poverty of her marshmallow-pink

Aro Valley house and her house here, in Karori, the fairy lights

up the path, a perennial border, the renaissance

clouds upon the roof of her own private boudoir.

She and Justin sat only yesterday in their

new tub and said can you believe …?.

Their nearly grown children, long of limb and hair,

as shapes in the house below, reclining,

cooking, gaming. And it’s not like a we made it can you believe it

but more like a who even are we?

Morgan is here this evening, too.

She is going through another phase of wanting to

cut off her limbs. It used to be a leg, and now it is

both arms. I want to help her and I encourage her to

counselling but I also love her for taking issue

with her body. One, because it seems thoroughly like something a

conflicted Welsh goddess would want to do after saving

a village from a dragon, and two,

because it seems a reasonable thing, to want

to thrash the heavy meat of oneself when nothing

else is lawfully thrashable.

Last time we met was a shrieking. Hannah made us medicinal

liquors, witch-like in her alchemical tinkering, offering us

the amber of honied Irish something, a chest clearing orange mystery

glimmering through ice cubes. We yelled with laughter, accused one another of

loveliness and tumbled upon the carpet with our legs lined up to see

whose thighs were the most luxuriously large.

But tonight is different.

The tannins are leaking out from the new

cedar panels and the water is black enough to hide an injured

Kraken. The moon babies itself up into a lolly-sweet sky and

pulls Venus by a string along with it. And like all the ancient ladies

before us, we look up through the arms of the cherry blossom (which are

actually insidious weeds) and tell tales of people hurt and dying, despairing,

those we don’t know who ache and who have lost so much. We try to imagine

their grief and for a while we live in that strange land of another person’s

sadness, and then we recount our own.

Our heartbreaks. The lives of mothers, fathers and uncles. The

longed-for but unrequited love of the living. The long-gone cats of

the past. Our lonely, younger selves. A baby. 

But we cackle too, at the efforts of those who fight so hard

against plainness, because we are ancient ladies in both the best and

the worst kinds of ways, we are hags in the mourning pool and that requires

a harsh, leather-edged kind of levity. It’s a thing of survival you see.

Against the increasing odds of sadness. The systematic pattern of

loss and against the ever blackening water

that rises up and around us.

Sugar Magnolia Wilson is a person from the Far North and Wellington. She is a public servant, a sometimes poet, and momager to King Delphi and baby laureate Walt Wilson.

She is a founding editor of Sweet Mammalian and this poem describes the original editorial trio with Hannah and Morgan, who willed this upstart journal into being a decade ago.