Amie Whittemore

MAID MARION WAITS INSIDE THE DIM HALLS OF PATRIARCHY
 

Like a glove all summer. Like a shelved bell.
Haunted? No, nor bridled. Not quite petulant child. 
More like reading by brooks and sighing. Or leaning
against a wall like a painting of someone painting. 
 
I don’t have Penelope’s loom or Demeter’s winter.
Nor would I want a face to launch war’s ships. 
If heart’s only good for defining seasons, 
if beauty sparks battle, give me peace, endless spring,
 
his purse heavy against his thighs. His arrival,
bow and arrow thrown to the floor, clothes spurned,
his face a mask on my sex—yes, like that.
Then to taste myself on his lips,
 
then our bodies a boat rowing itself. 
 
He’s no fox, no animal if meaning divides us from them—
he’s compass, his north everyone else.
The poor whose numbers are a forest.
A chorus. An empty stomach for every hair
 
on my head, he says. He tastes like pine needles. 
Hiding in the woods, in his pitiful clothes,
beside his stupid arrows gone soft as his sex
when he sleeps, soft as his grip when he dreams,
 
soft as my breasts in his hands—give me to the poor
sack of his body. But how to keep him whole? 
To slip him from his bright courage dismantles him.
Like bell without clapper. Glove without winter. 

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MAID MARION ILLUSTRATES GENDER IS PERFORMATIVE

                     “perplexed and vexed, and troubled in mind,
                     Shee drest her self like a page,
                     And ranged the wood to find Robin Hood,
                     The bravest of men in that age.” 
                                  –Robin Hood & Maid Marion, Child Ballad 150
 

If waiting is for women, let me no longer be one. 
Dress me drably in men’s pants and a bonny hat, 
send me off to Sherwood, my arrows hard and jolly. 
 
If nobility means immobility, fleece me of it. 
For so long my story has stood in the throats of men
like a fire nearly tamped. I feast every time
they open their mouths. My vinegar heart is its own
 
compass. When I find him, pulling water to his lips
alongside a creek, still as a painting of himself—I lower
my voice. My stride no longer arrested by petticoats,
 
he makes me a man when he salutes as he would
a hunter, a sheriff, a king: all men are each other’s enemies.
I shake off femininity as a tree its leaves—I interrupt,
I accuse, I claim this flimsy creek as my own
 
because the earth is a sister underfoot, babbling
mindlessly. We spar. I cut his cheek and as blood
rises to his flesh, something new rises in me—
 
he is weak as a girl. As we all are. The show
I want isn’t this—our ferocity determining our grip.
I take off my hat, pour my face into the creek.
When I rise he sees me as I am—not woman, not man. 

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