SANTA FE WEDDING DRESS
What I want is to be married in that white Mexican
sundress hanging in the window of the dress shop
across the brick patio from Casitas.
What I want is to be married before the pomegranate tree
and the ten-foot saguaro
with a hole in its heart where the cactus wren nests
inside the wall that keeps out peccaries and bobcats.
What I want is to be perfect in love,
looking away from angry words
that touch me no more than rain
falling on the other side of the street
in Tucson.
What I’ll accept is to be drinking gazpacho,
reading in the shadowed light pierced by hummingbirds,
the nectar of your love
two thousand miles away
on my tongue
suddenly
sweet.*
PJC 1995
In visits to the American Southwest in 1993, '94, and '95,* surprise came each time, but my final surprise of the Southwest would arrive in December 2020 as a simple question, asked by a friend. It was profound (to me) as I opened to a new meaning of time. Being deliciously caught unawares, all I could do was smile, listen to the funny, small sounds of out breaths through my nose, and feel my head, dropped forward a little, swinging slightly left to right—as I thought of the question in admiration.
Early in spring 1993, my university sophomore-year daughter, my partner and later husband, and I were in the kitchen when out of the blue, my daughter announced that she was going to Sedona, Arizona for spring break.*
In split-second timing, I spun away from washing the dishes to look at her with lips tense and muscles tightened and said, "No, you're not!"
Without a pause, she countered, "Yes, I am."
My partner, silent, eyed us… waiting.
In a moment of divine inspiration I considered the cost of two tickets and added, "I'm going with you."
From recent readings on thought, emotion, and feeling, I have a newly enlightened view of what happened in that conversation over twenty years ago. Thought is content, and my daughter's comments were thoughts. As American psychologist Paul Ekman describes it, emotion, in its basic expression, is divided into sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise (including negative surprise), and disgust.* My reaction had been negative surprise from the ground of fear. With my daughter holding to her intent, I had moved into a state of strong mother-commitment to support my daughter when the message from my heart had miraculously appeared. The kitchen tension released and my partner offered his full support.
Feelings are more numerous, are all-embracing, and are more defining. In my recent reading of Marshall B. Rosenberg,* I found that he lists 110 descriptions for "How we are likely to feel when our needs are being met."* For that long-ago, newly planned daughter-mother spring break in Sedona, I now have found the words that I imagine could have described my feelings: relieved, relaxed, involved, animated, excited, adventuresome, and—peaceful.
The December 2020 surprise came from sharing a memory with a friend. When I had finished describing it, he asked, "Did it happen over twenty years ago—or just a moment ago?
My realization is, "In memory, even without its full sensory experience of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, time may collapse, and you find that you are there again."
* Prema Jasmine Camp, A Flower for God: A Memoir. Forthcoming in 2021.
* Purely Prema, "Tucson, Arizona, April 10, 2019," "My daughter’s and my time at our friend’s Tucson home on Via Raposa was special, for we lived more intimately in the desert’s nature. Two years later, the details of that experience became the source for the locale of my poem, “Santa Fe Wedding Dress.” Apart from the wedding dress having been purchased in Santa Fe, New Mexico when on tour with my future husband, the setting of the poem is from those earlier days in Tucson."
* Sedona, Arizona. "A land of energy vortices amid red rock buttes that jut up above miles of sparse, gray-green juniper and pinion pine." From A Flower for God: A Memoir. Forthcoming in 2021.
* "Surprise: A brief emotional state, either positive or negative, following something unexpected." “Fear: A primal emotion that is important to survival and triggers a fight or flight response.” https://online.uwa.edu/infographics/basic-emotions/#:~:text=The%20Six%20Basic%20Emotions&text=They%20include%20sadness%2C%20happiness%2C%20fear,%2C%20anger%2C%20surprise%20and%20disgust
* Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press, 2003).
* Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication, 44-45.