Will the Real Mary Please Stand Up?

Will the Real Mary Please Stand Up?

Androgynous Mary

Self Portrait (in robe with masks attached), Claude Cahun, 1928

I’m seeing it now, my ghost, and telling it  
to behave as if it were me, which 
leaves me to wonder what it will do.

I walk, it walks; I sit, it sits. The chair  
is covered in faux fur, the pattern the skin 
of a zebra. So far, it’s as I thought: 
There are at least two sides to everything.

I also see the ghosts of those who said  
I couldn’t be whoever I was. I twist those 
into pretzels and put them in my mouth.
 
 

Mary of the Stairs

Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, Titian, ca. 1534–1538

There are no staircases per se, 
although there are elevations: high, 
higher, and higher yet. 
Below, Saint Thérèse is napping 
shoeless under an altar.  
I’m searching for the overhead  
rapture—it holds such promise. 
Its role is to transport us out of this  
life and into inventive distractions 
from the acetone odor of sanctity  
rising from the blood flowing  
from a stone—a leftover sign  
of the times when people believed 
miracles actually happened. 
I tell myself, “You have to be a saint  
to keep waking and sleeping 
in this world.” Ironica. Uronica. 
It wasn’t me on the grilled cheese  
sandwich. It might be Mary 
Pickford née Smith. Or the equally 
long ago Clara Bow, the It Girl 
who starred in It. We all look 
alike standing on the steps,  
our diminutive dresses, our faces 
facing the world that says smile 
for the camera. Once captured, 
we’re handed back a facsimile  
we can use to compare ourselves to 
the Mary we’re told we should be.
 
 

Mary Jane

“Mary Jane’s Last Dance” Official Music Video, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 1993

Each thought a puff of air until,  
finally, there it was, the atmosphere 
as dense as a fogged-in city.
 
Still, I saw the going-up stairs 
on the face of the brick building  
opposite. The sun above
  
the sky line. A bird making a beeline 
across a balcony. What I didn’t see  
standing next to me was my future.
 
After all that was left  
was an ember at the end  
of a roach clip, the blond-haired boy
 
from some Scandinavia  
of the mind began to stroke my arm 
as if I were a cat. I moved my arm
 
but he didn’t stop. Some people think 
they can act on every odd idea  
that comes into their heads.
 
I got up, closed the blinds, then, 
sat back down again.  
He went back to petting me like a cat.
 
I looked at my shoes.  
I heard the future say, “Someday, 
you’re going to have to learn to speak.”