{"id":10757,"date":"2021-02-07T16:05:21","date_gmt":"2021-02-07T23:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/?p=10757"},"modified":"2021-02-07T16:05:22","modified_gmt":"2021-02-07T23:05:22","slug":"the-garden-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/?p=10757","title":{"rendered":"The Garden Well"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>
R\u00c3\u00a4ven och vargen<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0by Jenny Nystr\u00c3\u00b6m, 1900<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Rita Chen<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\nThey told me:\nDon't look down the well, girl.\nThere's something sick, at the bottom of it.\n\nA family curse, buried in the earth.\nA miasma rising\u00e2\u20ac\u201drotted smog.\nYear by year, the manor gardens wilt.\n\nGive us this day our daily guilt.\n\nThe other day, a bird lay dead in a rose-bed.\nAnd your sister is sick, and your brother is frail,\nand your father is failing, his heart swollen to bursting\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\nIf your mother had lived, she'd tell you this now:\nIt's that cursed thing in the well.\n\nListen now, sit, as an old grey lady\ntells you the story of a clan proud and stony.\n\nIt hung over us, call it a curse, or a spell\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\na way of being passed down from father to son,\nbeat and ground firm into everyone.\nA tradition of repression: bootstraps and hard lessons.\nDon't spare the rod, don't waste your tears.\nWe don't speak of those things round here.\nEvery man for himself.\nShut your mouth, it's good enough.\nGet the girl\u00e2\u20ac\u201dget her.\nTame her, tether her, take her.\n\nOur fears, they gather in the air and fall as words unsaid\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\nas proud, bitter words spat on the ground at her retreating back.\nAs grasping love, or as love's lack.\nAs love that comes at a price too dear:\nas garden-variety mundane shame and young, bewildered tears.\nOur slow-growing cancer of fifty-odd years\ngone by without a single fight to bright the air.\nTears shed in secret. Dreams laughed at, trod upon, lying in shreds.\nAh, the poison of a well-meant lesson!\nIf you cut me, do I not run red?\n\nMothers and fathers, sisters and brothers.\nYou know only the soil you grow in,\nand no other.\n\nLance and drain the poison in the dark, hunched upon a ledge of stone.\nIt leaches to the bottom of the well, pulsing, swollen, twisting\nround a dead thing's bone. The offal of us. Hardening\ninto a muscular lump of dried-up mucus.\nHomunculus, born of bad blood and bile.\nA stormy hot anger\u00e2\u20ac\u201dstrife\u00e2\u20ac\u201dpushed down\u00e2\u20ac\u201dburied deep:\nthat was the spark that, in the primordial dark of the well,\nbrought life.\n\nThis thing is our essence, creeping, steeping.\nIt grew three limbs with which to climb around with,\neyeless. And a maw.\nYour grandad saw it hunting, one cloudy moonless night\n(or so I've heard). If it can catch one, it'll eat a rat, a small bird.\nIt bites at children's legs for fun, till they stiffen and sicken\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\nyes, your sister will live, but she'll never not suffer.\nMake sure to love her.\n\nI'm sorry, my daughter's daughter, for this burden.\nOur men won't do it\u00e2\u20ac\u201dcall it women's work\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\nso (fair or not) it falls to us to\nrepent our sons our sins.\nIt's got to be you who tells the truth.\nDon't bite your tongue, don't eat your young.\nFight tough, love soft.\nDemand he give you more than just\nenough.\nScrape out the wound, let air heal it clean.\nBe seen. Be angry. Scream.\n\nBrave child! Climb down into the well, and at long last\ndredge up this ugly, fetid thing.\nThrow it in the hedge.\nStomp it (once or twice will suffice) (beware the teeth)\nand leave it there in the daylight glare\nto spasm, and shrivel, and\nstill.\n\nDon't let your father bury it in the ground:\nthe tainted earth will only bring it back around.\nAerial burial\u00e2\u20ac\u201dleave it on a ledge; the birds will have their revenge.\nThen the sun will come, and do the rest.\n\nAn eye for an eye for my heart-sleeved smile of a man,\nyour grandad, the gentle, sweet black sheep of the clan.\nLove of my life\u00e2\u20ac\u201dlove wasn't enough.\nLiving here decades, his sweet became rough.\nHusked by thirty, frame hale and sturdy,\nbut gone\u00e2\u20ac\u201dspent\u00e2\u20ac\u201dturned stone\u00e2\u20ac\u201dlong before death.\nMe alone with a ghost of a man.\nI got along. Best as I can.\n\nDown there in the dark, out of sight, and light,\nthat thing's growing. We all know it.\nI should have done it when I was still young,\nbut I'm bound to this bed now, for my time's come.\nThis tale needs a new heroine to find its end.\n\nYes, lovey, yes.\nYou're a very good girl for sitting still so long\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\nI hope you see now what's got to be done.\nListen to Grandma. Stay sharp and clever.\nGo play in the garden, little one.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rita Chen They told me: Don’t look down the well, girl. There’s something sick, at the bottom of it. A family curse, buried in the earth. A miasma rising\u00e2\u20ac\u201drotted smog. Year by year, the manor gardens wilt. Give us this day our daily guilt. The other day, a bird lay dead in a rose-bed. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10757"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10759,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10757\/revisions\/10759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}