MARY WHITE

for William Lindsay White

"They thought death was worth it,

but I have a self to recover, a queen.

Is she dead, is she sleeping?"

—Sylvia Plath, Ariel

                  Triple Goddess

Returning triumphantly from Wellesley to the College of Emporia, Mary White soon became the terror of staid departmental meetings.

She was a triple threat — poetess, priestess and prairie goddess. "It's that smart‑ alecky daughter of William Allen White again, that awful uppity triple goddess of the prairie," they’d say.

"She's come back to Emporia to haunt us, riding fast up Commercial Street, toward the Sunken Garden in that sleek black Cadillac hearse of hers again.”

                   Mary White

She resembled our grandfather, Dr. Allen White, more than she did her father. She was five foot three and didn't like it. She wanted to be taller than me her brother, that's the chip on her shoulder.

She swayed like Dr. White, bending not at her hips but with her back. The, physical habits, the ironic humor, the bitchy Kansas ischievousness — the editor of The Emporia Gazette didn't understand it.

Such an odd spiritual resemblance — between grandfather and young tomboy granddaughter. Vivid, sad, generally eerie coincidences — they puzzled my aging Republican plutocrat father.

Little things that Mary said and did were hooks in his memory, reminding him subconsciously of his own father. But Mary White is now the editor of the Emporia Gazette.

                   Editor Mary White

Young Mary White lies nude on her baroque couch upholstered in red velvet. How fashionable monde the red couch with its prim bric‑a‑brac there in her sandstone‑red mansion's green‑tessellated boudoir.

An intricate wilderness of lesbian Rousseauesque green surrounds the young woman — monstrous lilies, heart‑shaped ferns, huge catalpa leaves. She has luminous eyes that glow through the yellow, silk screens of moonlight.

Her flat stomach is iconic against the leaves and gold lilies flattened to paper behind her. Opals and other frills decorate the dark eyes of her mille­fleurs tapestries. Snakes, snake charmers and beryl tigers make their padded way past the decadent couch, they all marvel at the many shades of green. Sad moon‑lilies nod their heads around the red couch in a sea of prairie green.

Young Mary White poses there, feeding her eyes with real redness, the true redness of Red Rock. On her couch, under the moon, in the center of all that Kansas green and lilies. She loves it, she can have it. I prefer back East with my cigars and dry martinis and Harvard drinking friends.

 

                  The Rival

When Mary White smiled, she resembled the moon. One’s first, impression — something beautiful but annihilating. Both her and the moon, such great prairie femmes fatales, her beautiful O‑mouth, so short‑fused in bed.

Making Emporia a mausoleum of the Kansas night — ghostly, haunting, gothic. She turned everything into pale Peter Pan white moonlight, and those long stony silences of hers there inside the tombstone shadows of Red Rock. That’s where she preferred to live after William Allen White was gone. When she got bored, she and her girlfriends played Bridge long into the night.

I preferred Pinochle, being her jaded, aging Jack of Diamonds fag brother, to her beautiful, forever young Queen of Spades. Spiteful rivals, but not really. Not like Bridge or Poker —­ more like Mystic Pinochle.

                   Gazette Riddle

Mary White's the riddle of the Emporia Gazette, ever since her senior year at Emporia High, she’s been the high‑ school yearbook homecoming queen in eternal pantheonic drag. A prairie goddess driving fast in her sleek, fast hearse, speeding down busy Commercial Street toward campus. Red fruit between her hot ivory legs, her thin athletic waist. She's the magical loaf of bread that's suppose to feed all the small town midwest multitudes, she's the newly‑minted tons of slippery catfish, meant to feed the hungry mouths of the spectral midwest bumpkins. She's the Editor of the Emporia Gazette now, a Kansas tomboy goddess. She's the prairie priestess of their imagination, they feel her in their subconscious in the here and now. Once you board her train, there's no getting off.

                  A Ticket Home

The bees are all women, lovely midwest lesbians with their busy royal lady. They hold hands in weekly  séances, their humming a cradle of warmth and tears. Miss Kram and Miss Hillerman the eternal lovers, they visit the ladies gathered for communion with the dead there in calm cool Red Rocks. They knew me long before I knew myself. They welcome me back to their palace of Ancient Bee‑Words and Lost Knowledge. Miss Eastman, Miss Rice, Miss Howard, Miss Langley and Miss Rowe — they're all dreaming there together in the Royal Bed. Dreaming during the long winter, dreaming of pale gladioli in the Kansas spring. They've sent me an urgent message, and a ticket back home.

                   Homecoming

The Santa Fe train is killing time, time is a Silver Streak. The tall white grain elevators of Emporia are next, gilded on their fat haunches in the hot midwest sunset. Tons of gold are embalmed in the ancient, silent towers, temple granaries of golden Kansas wheat. "How's this, how's this?" I say, jumping off the tallest one, bashing my brains out on the Santa Fe tracks far down below. Like Plato's afterbirth, I'm eaten up by starving rats and mice. Their round eyes so busy, blank, silent. No grimaces at the sight of my poor counterfeit smile. My ogling eyeball hanging over the edge of an oily railroad rail — bloodshot, still staring at this midwest terminus of things. My mind suddenly a suitcase thrown open for all to see. A rumpled suit, a pocket of loose change. A ticket to nowhere, a broken mirror. No arms anymore to brush aside the buzzing flies. They think they're a net of eternity, but they're roped into the end just like me. That’s the way I feel every time I come back to Emporia.

                   The Bee Meeting

Who are these people at the train station to meet me? They're the Emporians — the Minister, the Real Estate Czar, the Radio Announcer, the Agents for the Queen Bee. I'm nude, why didn't anyone tell me to wear clothes? I'm as light as cottonwood silk floating over the Santa Fe Railroad Station. Who's the real estate person, is it the one in blue with a big bow tie? He knows where the beehives are, honey runs from his nose. His voice is changing, he's a buzzing drone again. They lead me through fields of wheat, fanning open the sacred way with winnowing fans and magic wands. The little golden grains will someday be edible, like me? They lead me through a grove of elm trees, thick with the smell of cicadas in heat. We meet the surgeon of bees, shiny in his gloves, suit and green helmet. Is it the banker, the grocer, the postman, anybody I know? The mind of the hive is geometric, rooted in a town that hurts me. I've run away forever, only to return here once again. Even an outsider like me hardly counts in the local beehive of things…

This little Kansas town is searching for new queen bees, the old one is getting bored. A curtain of wax separates me from the other brides, the town folk have called us back for a meeting of bees. I'm gullible as a sunflower in August, bending my head down beneath the flaming Kansas sun. I'm the magician's errant son, hiding in secret chambers of Harvard barrooms. They've sealed us in snug brood cells, etherized like tiny Jewish children.

                   Arrival of the Bee Box

Whose long white boxes are those in Peter Pan Park, in the cottonwood grove, shaped like coffins built for gone midgets? I'm a queen bee baby, humming inside a blitz of wings and sweet tears. It's dark inside Mary’s ancient lesbian mansion, there are no windows left anymore. Long African fingers swarm over my nude body — black, busy, sexually exciting.

It's dark in here, they sing me soothing lullabies of love. It's unintelligible yet reassuring, this midwest town of curious, stoic Emporians. The town is a box of bankrupt businessmen, angrily clambering for money. They turn to me in desperation, they blame Mary White for all their ills. I tell them that although the situation is grim, it’s only temporary. They're in moonlight robes and funeral veils, the Athens of the Midwest days are numbered. We count out slowly the cicada‑inspired evenings that remain — going, going, going, gone.

                   Stings

I have a self to recover — I’m just a Drone not a Queen Bee. Is Mary dead, is she sleeping? Where has she been all these years, hiding in some beehive mausoleum? Her wings are old Emporia Gazette clippings, she's flying high over the Broadview Hotel. The town is her vast midwest territory, a House of Edgar Lee Masters Wax.

Beekeepers with wrists of meadow larks tend to the old honeycombs overflowing with oozing gold. Honey enamels the wormy mahogany, the queen bee is as old as a fossil. I stand before her, I'm so very nude and speechless. Honey‑drug running like snot from her nose, inside her vast cherry cabinet of silence. Around her industrious Isis virgins scurry, lost in their eternal first‑person present‑tense buzzings. The world is a big continuous honey‑machine, molding its fragrant lips to my eyes. I'm Mary’s old slipper, instead of a new hat. Why has she called me here, to her vast wax museum — Red Rocks a lovely complicated citadel of soft, erotic stings.

                   The Swarm

See? These are the chess people I'm playing with — pretty figurines of ivory and rosewood. The chessboard is rotting Flint Hills teak and the Granada’s smoking sandalwood, the golden arches of McDonald’s rim the Queen's crown. Knights of Kansas squirm in the rich alluvial mud, hooves of marble paw the prairie air. Still bishops and their brilliant cutlery mass after mass, saying hush! See? The two Rooks of Reeble’s North and South once bestriding the known Commercial World. And the local pawns, sleek and young, zooming up and down busy Sixth Avenue in swarms of new Japanese pickups. And the drone king, my dear, where does he reside? In the big red mansion on Exchange Street? The house that's so strange and gothic, haunted by the ghost of William Allen White?

                  William Allen White

Over his body the clouds of Kansas go, high up there on this icy gray winter afternoon. Peter Pan Lake is a little flat today, strange swans with creamy reflections float on the glass. All cool, all blue the sky over the crisp tans of Emporia's sunny December. The monkey house is empty, the empty trees are bribing the wind. William Allen White's a relic now, sleeping in a cabinet full of old Emporia Gazette clippings. He surveys the lake today, his bronze bust covered with years and years of ancient, oozing, midwest pigeon shit. William Allen White was our Gulliver and the rest of us were the little people who conversed in the valley of his toes. The big Red House of Colorado sandstone on Exchange Street, always filled with classical music and laughter. Mary White would end up Emporia’s new Queen Bee, having avoided snapping her neck horseback riding one day up by the college campus.

                   Among the Narcissi

Mary White had lived long enough to be an octogenarian, but unfortunately she’s definitely not alive and well anymore, standing with me here now on this cold March day among the narcissi. She never recuperated from losing her Big Daddy father, the wise Republican Sage of Emporia, the wise friend of so many Presidents. Being a goddess with her broken teenage heart was an awful literary thing to bear — she simply had to fill the silence with grand Feminist editorials though. I bow before her now and the young narcissi of Emporia, even though my stitches hurt. I walk with a fake limp where William Allen White once walked, pretending to recuperate,  like Marlene Dietrich in tuxedo drag at some cabaret show. Anything to keep from coming back to Emporia and having to be the next Editor. There’s a certain dignity to it, a strange Torch Song formality. The way Mary White lies amongst the narcissi, they love the attention. They thrive on it, they like to show off in the glorious morning. "I'm the Sunflower State!" I half-expect Mary to exclaim, excited by her first downhill run into Dis. Sleek as a young sailor with a blue pea jacket, on the deck of a fast ship.

                   Prairie Goddess

It's not a plain box, it's an elegant sarcophagus of alabaster, ivory and droning cicadas. She's Ishtar, young lioness, buried here. Through turquoise eyes, she stares up at me. Coiled ivory claws of Isis and Eagles brace the granite ceiling, there's star‑distances separating her and me. It's hard to imagine these dumb jewels and gold in‑lays once graced the imperial forehead of our grandmother, and now our Mirrors cloud over with grief, the flowers and Monkey Island wet with tears. Where has her spirit gone, flown out her (dynastic-mouth and eye‑holes?)

My cheek is warmed by her touch, but her cold blue eyes of lapis lazuli don't comfort me. Gold toys, rouge pots, lots of licorice seeds scattered around — a smell of Kansas eternity? They wrapped her up in white bandages, stored her heart between her toes. A neat parcel — her pickled liver and eyes and groin. Her sweet face beneath a gold mask of pharaonic tomboy possibilities, her last words over the prairie, "But I'm a goddess!!!"

                   Persephone

Mary White slips, down she goes deep into the tragic Persephone dirt. Into the lightless hibernaculum of the Maplewood Cemetery, beneath the cool hieratic stones of the dearly departed Roberts‑Blue‑Barnett dead.

That's back when the old cemetery, existed northwest of town, way out there in the Old Mother's prairie belly. Back when God­fathered Commercial Street flowed up from Soden's Mill to the teacher's college, businessmen too busy to worry too much about the divinity of dirt back then. Only wheat, flour, cattle and diplomas were important in the little Athens college town, while Mary White winters beneath sleepy, polished granite and sad, long‑fingered elms.

The mournful Santa Fe whistle of the Doodlebug’s lament at night consoles her somewhat, the lonely midwestern moonlight keeps her company. Small as a china doll in the attic, she's got a special niche in Emporia's crowded necropolis. I walked the same hallways she did, she knew even then that she was going to be a famous Republican populist journalist like her father was.

Suburbia and a shopping center stretch out from there now, where once farmland and sunflowers drank up her childhood. Where rifle cartridges clanked and scuttled on the gravel each Veteran's day and where Whitman stood weeping beside Lincoln and the G. A. R. ladies.

Now I'm seeing things differently, the prairie has cleansed my bloodshot hangover eyeballs. Another kind of moonlight intrigues me now, each headstone a last homecoming for most Emporians — stoic, gothic and grim. Old tragedies crowd the Kansas dead, foot to foot and head to head they're packed in. Paths of red gravel crunch beneath my feet, below me is an ancient, Eocene seabed with dead bodies embedded deep in it.

The plains roll on and on, the rains dissolve the fading dates on the old limestone decaying tombstones. The mother who stood over her Civil War dead son, she's way down there deep in underground G. A. R. heaven now. The dates are being erased, but the Maplewood Cemetery bones are still patiently waiting. They rot like slow toothaches, they smell the rotting flower vases left for the living on Memorial Day. The ghost of suave, good‑looking Dr. Eckdall escorts me down the Azalea Path, he says the thing he misses most of all is his sleek Jaguar sportscar down there.

                   Lost Conversation

Lotus, lute and meadowlark — delirious garlands of sunflowers dancing at her feet. She stalks the portico of the ancient mansion on Exchange Street, the red Colorado sandstone holding the Kansas heat back and keeping the coolness in. A net of words and journalistic decorum enriches the cool interior, Teddy Roosevelt's stormy eye once glared here.

Like an undaunted sea‑captain, Mary White refuses to quit the castle. She fractures the pillars and picture frames, prospecting the walls for her source of grief. She sits in the Victorian parlor, dressed in Grecian tunic and psyche‑knot. Her play of words is tragic, her Inca gold and journal estate bankrupt. No special edition editorial of The Emporia Gazette can ever patch things up now, the elegant little college town rooted in a lost conversation.