Arden Tice

  Tice’s published articles and poetry are on travel, artists, social issues, the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico and Eskimos of Point Barrow, Alaska.

  During the 60s and early 70s, Tice was a busy and productive social activist. She wrote poems in Spanish for barrio protest marches. An article written in 1957, on a trip through the south with Vivian Ayres Allen and her three children, Debbie Allen, Felicia Rashad and Tex, prompted The Texas Observer to run off 10,000 extra copies on their experiences as they traveled by car through the South at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.

  Her chapbooks are inventoried in her archive at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. In Time to Tango, co-authored by Nichols Sands (Vergin Press, 2002), is the story of a love relationship impacted by post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Her life-long interests include working with people, poetry, psychoanalysis, play and the philosophy and practice of Buddhism.

Excerpt from Copyright © 2004

Chimerical Mind of a Poet

I think about what I might present at the writing group this morning at the Veterans’ Center. I’ve carried around for seven weeks copies of “Stories”. In the first part, it tells about the death of a boy. The second part is about a woman’s “craziness.” Why am not able to even name this trauma in front of the men, or for that matter even name it directly to N?

 In the Son that was Young Once Always

I’m driving down the street. Suddenly in my rear view mirror is my friend in his car, frowning and waving. I stop and he motions me to get in. He says sharply, “Did you hear, do you know?” I answer, “No, know what?”

Wildly he drives down the street stopping at a fire hose that blocks the road. Turning the car he tries another street also blocked, saying nothing but, “He is trapped, he is trapped.”

“What? Who?” I cry, not understanding but feeling a breathless quality to the air.

There is a carnival atmosphere as we approach the house. For blocks around people mingle – hair curlers, dogs, babies, school children, fire trucks, hoses, TV news cars, police with the whamp and whaking and whine of their radio.

Someone is trapped, who? They don’t know. Why don’t they get the child out? Two boys have been taken to ... No one knows ... “Did one have red hair,” I ask. A little girl touches me, says “I saw a little boy run down the street ... “ “Did one have red hair? I ask. But then I mutter, “no, no ...” Another woman grabs me and in this slow-motion-dream sequence she says, “All we can do is pray.”

Feeling a sudden need to move, I shake off the arm that holds me. “I’ll get the child out,” I say. But they push me back, tell me to sit down. I sit on the rock wall observing the people observing me – I too am rock – silent as stone. Now there are no words. I sit there for the child to burn so he can be taken away.

After 30 minutes of eternity, of nothing, a man comes to tell me they have a body.

“Let me see him,” I mutter, but know they won’t, know already that the body looks like Romotsky’s painting of Trotsky, charred flesh and bared bone – the red and black in sharp contrast.

I ask, “Did he call me after the first explosion?”

“Did he call after the second explosion?” After the gray flower blossomed, did he call as in my dreams he still calls me, and I cannot go?

Now the show is over and people begin to drift away. The blocks are desolate, as after a carnival packs up and leaves an emptiness of wound and color.

Three months later, the early morning fuses the air and distant, treeless mountains have a Tiepolo light. I’m in a yellow dress vigorously clipping sunflowers, sobbing by the side of the road. A milkman pauses, stares, and decides, no. Crying and clipping sunflowers, sobbing in the yellow light, I place the sticky flowers inside the car.

Driving on the mountain road, sunflowers beside me, I scream and sob, my eyes blinded and salty; I accelerate, hope the car will plunge off the side, smash my splitting chest, but the car drives on – onto the cemetery road. I wander alone among the white marble military stones, clutch the sunflowers, but can’t find the headstone. Finally I see a new mound of brown bearing a card marker with his name. It is his name … how can his name be printed there? As I scatter the sunflowers on top, I’m thinking, my son is lying below, all burned and black.

Two years later on Easter, I take a basket of colored eggs, kneel down, and lay them carefully around on top of the green ground. I’m remembering, this is how it is in Greece at 12 midnight. The Greeks salute each other at banquets by cracking together their Easter eggs and shouting, “Christos anesti! Christ has risen!” But I’ll never forgive those who live.

I wonder how I can survive – live with ... wonder how I can live ... after their looks, after their words: “You didn’t take care of him ...”

I muse on how I might start: “I had a young son.” At that point I break into sobs and smother them in my pillow. The thoughts are: the men won’t be able to hear this; I’ll break down and they’ll blame me and they’ll hate and reject me. I am a mother who killed her son. I’m so despondent that I have to get up and write. I’m imagining the men (Vets) asking, “Why Vietnam Vets?” I say, “You see, he was buried in the military cemetery. The Boy Scouts stood at attention. Someone played Taps for a Vietnam veteran.” I begin to sob.