I Am a Gold Coin
After Orhan Pamuk My Name is Red
1. A Gold Coin
Once you admit another, all is known: names the men in my head call me.
I was the right consistency, but I still contained sediment.
The blind Persian master’s account of how to draw two-hundred-and-seventy-two horses is found in the book “The Flow of Horses”.
A garden fork is the right consistency for drawing a thick mane.
For years, I dug up things in the garden – marble, plastic soldier, rusted nails. Never a gold coin, or a Kennedy half-dollar.
To build a gate for the garden. Iron forged with heat and sentiment. A staff to bar the way. Hinge, switch.
Every time Father told the story the lost coins became more valuable. Once found they were not the right coins. Or I was not right – I had the right constitution but contained… impurities.
The sky beyond the gate.
2. I Am Your Beloved Uncle
My mother’s brothers were her toolbox, hidden from Father so she’d never have to use it. Paul was a saw with teeth bent the wrong way. Sam a mighty hammer, could pull you out of any adamancy as if you were a short bent nail. Once, when I thought I had escaped, he climbed a tree to bring me down.
Mother drew the one-hundred-and-fifty-fifth horse, then hung a dishtowel from its left foreleg. Though she believed in art, she didn’t believe in waste. One day she gilded all of the silver half-dollars with spray paint. I still have some freckles of that paint on my thumb.
What did Paul love? In his garage, the plastic pot of withered mums, a tool with no name found in the gated garden. His pen ran out of ink before he finished drawing me.
3. The Blindness of a Latticed Gate
Though my father was a river, my mother warned me “There is no cure for thirst.”
My life in three volumes – any page you open shows my face peering through the gated lattice of syllables.
Hard to tell it’s me – once a man described me as “the purtiest little thing”.
In my sleep, I pack a tiny brush made from a single dog’s eyelash, pots of paint colors we tried to name at dinner.
I draw each rung of the escape ladder from my window, each hoofprint of the invisible steed on hard winter ground.
The wind shakes its mane, takes my bit between its teeth.
Roberta Feins
Roberta Feins received her MFA in poetry from New England College, where she studied with Judith Hall, DA Powell, Carol Frost and Alicia Ostriker. Her poems have been published in Five AM, Antioch Review, The Cortland Review and The Gettysburg Review, among others. Roberta has published two chapbooks: Something Like a River (Moon Path Press), and Herald (Autumn House Press) which won the 2016 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Prize. Her first full-length collection, A Morsel of Bread, A Knife, was published in 2018 by the Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle.
Perhaps it's my love of things I don’t fully understand because it leads to contemplation and growth, or maybe merely mystery which offers more questions than answers, but I find this piece appealing on multiple levels: its ability to fragment; its power of bringing to life a dysfunctional family where people are tools to escape their toolbox; and its dexterity in presenting an all to humanly flawed situation as rational, or at least tenable.