Grand Right & Left
Elizabeth Alexander
1. In the Beginning
Anne’s second birthday, first bikini,
tiny bows across the hips
I pull on one, say “Blue.”
“No—aqua,” Anne corrects me.
Mine a boring tank suit: stoplight yellow, purple stripes
I have dark eyes & short black curls, look like a bee.
I can’t recall not knowing Anne—not in this life, or earlier:
I have a dream, recurrently, of Anne & me, a pond.
We know it’s deep, we know that we'll forget.
We hold hands, face each other, we are smiling.
“1, 2, 3, GO!” we cry & jump.
The water turns to night, we tumble in it
(somersaults & cartwheels)
Ursa Minor waves a paw, the sky becomes a warm moist chute—
a final thrust, a searing light, our soft pink baby faces.
Elizabeth & Anne, Anne & Elizabeth
best friends, worst enemies, inseparable.
First overnight when we were five
(I wet the bed)
Car trip to Galveston
(You ate fried shrimp & tartar sauce, threw up)
The games we played, surreal & ordinary—
We powdered your stuffed frog to look like Mozart/Haydn/Jefferson,
intrigued by their white wigs.
It took all day.
2. Tickle Bee
Magnetic bee inside a plastic maze,
a magnet wand to guide the bee from START to honeycomb
a buzz (sting, I suppose) if you steered wrong
3 stings you lost, as did the bee
It worked like baseball.
Say you’re the Tickle Bee, who wields the wand?
For me once it was God, then it was not,
& then it was a panoply of super beings
clad variously, yet always in the attributes of someone I admired.
The best was when there was no God, when Anne & I were Goddesses,
co-regents, you might say, queen & queen bee.
We took turns with the wand & in the maze
Our purpose then (mine now)
Find the way home.
3. Betrayal
At nine years old, I fell in love with twins
their long & skinny legs, flat chests, broad shoulders
their matching bowl cuts, matching dimples, matching everything
the blue jeans they changed into after school, the way they spun the football (like a boy)
I wanted to be like them, strong & agile
I wanted to be with them, day & night.
All else eclipsed, like drawings on an Etch–a–Sketch:
Shake gently & they fade, shake hard they’re gone.
Anne puzzled, disbelieving, then enraged
my rigid back, crossed arms
her hard blue eyes.
4. Grand Right & Left
Sometimes I think the point of life is keeping dates that we made worlds ago—
a meeting up again, as Anne & I did on her second birthday,
having made prearrangements at that pond.
It’s not that everyone you meet is foreordained
Neither can you differentiate, on first acquaintance,
whom you just simply meet (luck of the draw)
& who may verify your dharma/change your life.
There may be many such or only one, & we may never know—
the cosmic dance
clasp hands, move on
grand right & left.
5. Three Such of Mine
Mrs. Thomas cleans our house, teaches me “died in infancy,” she bore a son who did.
My piano teacher, Mrs. Sims an Eastern transplant—
Her father owned a Yiddish theater in New York.
My parents pay them each to mind & teach me,
Instead they love & swaddle me in stories
from a world or two run parallel to mine.
Cynthia Davies, riding partner at Sky Ranch, first woman that I loved.
6. Ruptured
And through it all a glacier in my chest,
a cold blue tomb, a deep crevasse, my flailing lungs:
the absence of Elizabeth & Anne.
I started it, back with the twins, you finished it in junior high—
that hell on ice, a precipice where one kind word could be your last.
“Just talk to Anne,” my mother said, she even wrote a script.
“We have been friends for a long time,” Mother began.
I could not talk to you, you could not look at me
(the tyranny of pride, the cost of cool)
Conjoined we’d shared a heart, each took a half.
What happened in your empty half?
At first mine was a hole I veiled with branches—
So many people fell inside, that is I snared them,
then saw who they were not, apologized,
fed & released & sometimes had to shoo them.
And then my empty half became a chamber,
I made a door of tiny bells & colored beads—
So many people wandered in, or I seduced them
the dance of love & power, the dance that you & I created
once upon a time, when we were queens.
7. The Partner in my Corner
He did not fall or wander in: I stumbled out
& spotted him one Saturday, in Harvard Square.
(We knew each other slightly, friends of friends.)
So strong the pull that day I ran & hid
So strong the pull he followed unawares.
Moo shi chicken, lentil burgers, sweet dark beer at Jacob Wirth's,
Snow angels on the Charles, full–body kisses.
Two hearts, not one.
Perhaps that was the problem, Anne: that you & I were one, not two
& knew our nakedness & were ashamed,
so we recoiled & cast each other from the garden.
8. At Café Pacific
High school reunion, 1994—
We have a drink, then two, just Anne & I.
At first we speak politely, in staccato
(your long red fingernails
my frizzy curls)
and then we have another drink & then
we tell the stories that nobody knows:
the powder we sequestered in our panties—
Cashmere Bouquet from Safeway, for the frog.
(“Just leave the Cheetos, stupid. Hurry up!)
The one tree you would climb in Echo Park
Six Flags, the Tilt–A–Whirl, the Flight To Mars
The night my father died, December 1975,
you were a thousand miles away, & you flew home.
Our heads bent close,
Anne & Elizabeth
reflected in the glass behind the bar.
Your voice is lower now & smoky, like your mom’s.
You gurgle when you laugh, you always did.
I've laughed so hard & full only with you.
“My treat,” you say. We stand and stretch.
It’s time.
The caller clears his throat—
grand right & left
notes
“Grand Right & Left” began as an elegy to a lifelong friend. My first challenge in composing the poem was to reimmerse myself in feelings that I wanted—as strongly at age fifty as I had as at age ten—to avoid. Having resolved to treat the relationship’s defining conflict, I dissembled in the early drafts.
As the unvarnished story began to emerge, the poem’s focus widened.
With “Elizabeth and Anne” as the scaffolding, the completed poem explores the ideas in the title stanza: that our most important relationships are predetermined (by us, before we’re born) and that the purpose of personal life is to remake those connections.
I know this sounds completely mad.
about the author
Elizabeth Alexander grew up in Dallas and lives in Seattle, where she works as a freelance textbook writer and editor. Her creative work has appeared in Gargoyle, Archipelago, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and many other publications. Elizabeth spent her youth behaving and regrets it.
