{by any other name}

I've been thinking about the nature of identity and name lately, the rub between what we're called and who we are, were, could be. the ritual of the woman surrendering her name at marriage, trying to divorce myself from the immediate feminist recoil at the idea, trying to honor the new names of women I love who have decided for this reason or that to embrace the notion of... see, I almost said becoming property of the husband. but not that, I assume, I assume it is what? a joining? but why her? why not a joining of the two, a meld or hyphenation (I know, the complexity,) but I know not one man who has given up his name. I know one who changed it legally to incorporate his wife's surname, but his for all public purposes remains unchanged.

maybe to remove it for a moment from the marriage quagmire: naming the self, the changing name. trying to rope identity into these letters, this sound, or release it therefrom: was I ever going to be a poet as Martha McConnell? was that combination of letters just to the left or right of the person who'd leave the stability her cancer self craves for this sprawling, stumbling life of art, and somehow the shift to Marty aligns some of the dark matter they say now constitutes most of the universe so that here is where I land? so far from a Des Plaines where Brooklyn was a movie set, an unreality, and certainly Trinidad nothing more than a footnote in a geography text I hadn't yet read?

and the rub is more and less than that: I've been looking at information about Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party," a massive art installation from the early 70's that features a plate for each of 39 women from history or mythology, plus 999 other names embroidered around the piece, and wondering about the power of reciting these, wondering about whether these women feel trapped in the embellished lettering of the names they were assigned and that haul them still into our consciousness, decades or centuries gone.

this may be the next book, this idea of what would they say. to each other, to the fabric, to the 400 anonymous women threading their names into cloth and manufacturing symbols onto plates. but what a project. how many voices, the 39 plus the 999, how to get any of it right.

so off to research, and to maybe leave this apartment before the sun goes down today. I have to perform for middle-schoolers this evening, and I can't imagine what I have that would be appropriate and not bore them to death. why do I say yes to these things.

oh, oh, I'm re-reading Heather McHugh's book "Shades" -- listen to this:

Earthmoving Malediction
by Heather McHugh

Bulldoze the bed where we made love,
bulldoze the goddamn room.
Let rubble be our evidence
and wreck our home.

I can't give touching up
by inches, can't give beating
up by heart. So set the comforter
on fire, and turn the dirt

to some advantage -- palaces of pigweed,
treasuries of turd. The fist
will vindicate the hand,
and tooth and nail

refuse to burn, and I
must not look back, as Mrs. Lot
was named for such a little --
something in a cemetary,

or a man. Bulldoze the coupled
ploys away, the cute exclusives
on the social mall. We dwell

on earth, where beds
are brown, where swoops
are fell. Bulldoze

the pearly gates:
if paradise comes down
there is no hell.