First I was in South Africa this morning and then I was in England and then a doorbell rang and I was on my couch. It was my husband’s phone. Sometimes I think about the words husband and wife and I have a little shudder because I fear the ways they were born. Borne, I mean. Husband, from “late Old English (in the senses ‘male head of a household’ and ‘manager, steward’), from Old Norse húsbóndi ‘master of a house’, from hús ‘house’ + bóndi ‘occupier and tiller of the soil’. The original sense of the verb was ‘till, cultivate’.” When I think of master and manager and house I think of ethnopoetics, which is a fancy imperialist academic term that, according to the Academy of American Poets—if you believe such a source, combining intellectualism and art—“emphasizes not only the written word, but also how it can be illuminated through oral performance (spoken, sung, or chanted) and what a distant culture's forms can teach us—and our poetics—linguistically.” But I am not sure I like calling a culture distant or the assumption that poetry is mainly the written word, that speaking, singing, or chanting comes from away. When I was a child I always felt distant from everything everyone else was doing, and even though words were a medium I found useful to express my inner language to others, I also felt weaving dune grass into shapes or pressing mud against legs was a kind of listening, and rain on the barn roof was a kind of language, and the beetle trails under bark was a whole story, and these were a singing and a dancing that was choreographed close to home, whatever home was, because living was something you could do as long as you knew the names and properties of the plants around you, and I had a house for that inside me, whatever a house was. When I think of ethnopoetics and the poem as a house, I am immediately drawn to ecopoetics, the ecotone, the edge-things, the house that moves, the shape of something inhabited, like a shell, empty, then full. Too full. Sometimes binding, if it isn’t time to be bound. And I think of a woman, and that Anne Sexton poem, “Housewife,” that ends, “A woman is her mother. That’s the main thing.” My husband’s phone sounds a doorbell that enters my mind when he receives a message. His correspondence always interrupting my thinking. I was reading Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know and I was with the bird leaving its cage and coming back without laying a blue egg. I was with child-Deborah who knew how to read and didn’t tell the nuns. And then I was here, in a house in America. I never got around to explicating wife, but the voice in my head that reminds me to trust the reader says it’s okay, you get it. You’ve been a wife or the idea of a wife, so I don’t need to tell you about how this all shakes out, how it rains, how it choreographs in the quiet hallways of a something-self.
Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017), the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015), and the poetry collection Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011); her prose appears in such places as Brevity, Gettysburg Review, Bellingham Review, and Booth Journal. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya has presented her work internationally at the University of Oxford and in Madrid at the Unamuno Author Festival. An Associate Professor of English for Central Washington University and Poetry Editor for Scablands Books, Maya is at work on a memoir called “Raised by Ferns.” Find her on Twitter @MayaJZeller.