Two Women

by Morag Daphne Morrison

Two Women in a Birth represents ten years of collaborative writing by two of Canada's leading feminist writers, poets Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland. The texts collected here include the individual long distance poems of Touch to My Tongue and open is broken, as well as Double Negative, written together while travelling by train across Australia. Between the Lines, quick exchanges on their process of collaboration, and Subject to Change, a charged sequence written from their west coast island home.

Genres: Poetry

51 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1994

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[mwpm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two Women in a Birth brings together Touch To My Tongue by Daphne Marlatt, Open Is Broken by Betsy Warland, and three collaborations by Marlatt and Warland - Double Negative , Reading and Writing Between the Lines, and Subject to Change...

From Touch to My Tongue...

a confusion of times if not of place, though you understood when i said no not the Danish Tearoom - the Indonesian or Indian, was in fact that place of warm walls, a comfortable tarot deck even the lamps pick up your glow, a cabin of going, fjords in there, a clear and pristine look the winds eave through your eyes i'm watching you talk of a different birth, blonde hair on my tongue, of numbers, nine flush with cappuccino and brandy and rain outside on that street we flash down, laughing with no umbrella, i see your face because i don't see mine equally flush with being, co-incidence being together we meet in these far places we find in each other, it's Sappho i said, on the radio, always we meet original, blind of direction, astonished your hand covers mine walking lowtide strands of Colaba, the lighthouse, Mumbai meaning great mother, you wearing your irish drover's cap and waiting alive in the glow while i come up worrying danish and curry, this place full of contradiction - you know, you knew, it was the one place i meant.

- This place full of contradiction, pg. 9

* * *

a kiwi at four a.m. among the sheets green slice of cool going down easy on the tongue extended with desire for you and you in me it isn't us we suck those other lips tongue flesh wet wall that gives and gives whole fountains inner mountains moving out resistances you said ladders at the canyon leap desire is its way through walls swerve fingers instinct in you insist further persist in me too wave on wave to that deep pool we find ourselves/it dawning on us we have reached the same place "timeless" you recognize as "yes" giving yourself up not in we come suddenly round the bend to it descending with the yellow canyon flow the mouth everything drops away from time its sheets two spoons two caved-in shells of kiwi fruit

- Eating, pg. 14

* * *

lost without you, though sun accompanies me, though moon and the maps say always i am on the right track, the Trans-Canada heading east - everything in me longs to turn around, go back to you, to (that gap), afraid i'm lost, afraid i've driven out of our territory we found (we inhabit together), not terra firma, not dry land, owned, along the highway, cleared for use, but that other, lowlying, moist and undefined, hidden ground, wild and running everywhere along the outer edges. lost, losti, lust-y one, who calls my untamed answering one to sally forth, finding alternate names, finding the child provoked, invoked, lost daughter, other mother and lover, waxing tree, waist i love, water author sounding the dark edge of the words we come to, augur- ess, issa, lithesome, lilaiesthai, yearning for you, and like a branch some hidden spring pulls toward our ground, i grown unafraid increasing ("lust of the earth or of the plant"), lasati, (she) yearns and plays, letting the yearning play it out, playing it over, every haystack, every passing hill, that tongue our bodies utter, woman tongue, speaking in and of and for each other.

- Hidden ground, pg. 17

* * *

out of the shadows of your being, so sick and still a shade under it, your eye looks out at me, grave and light at once, smiling recognition. draw close, i am so glad to see you, bleak colour of your iris gone blue, that blue of a clear sky, belo, bright, Beltane, "bright-fire." draw me in, light a new flame after your sudden descent into the dark. draw me close so i see only light your eye a full moon rides, bleikr in the old tongue, shining, white ascent above horizon fringed with black reed, horsetail, primitive flicker on the rim of eons ascending this white channel we wander in, a plain of "wild beestes" felt at the periphery of vision, fear and paranoia ready to spring - beyond the mind or out of it they say, though "defended . . . with apparent logic." in this landscape we are undefended in the white path of our being, lunar and pulled beyond reason. bleikr, shining white, radiant healing in various bright colours, blanda, to mingle and blend: the blaze of light we are, spiralling.

- Coming up from underground, pg. 21

From Open Is Broken...

what prompted me to write open is broken was the realization that the English language tongue-ties me. this "restricted mobility" was most apparent in my attempts to speak of my erotic life. such speechlessness is not peculiar to me. few erotic texts exist in north american women's writing. is it taboo? TABOO: "ta, mark + bu, exceedingly." are women afraid to "mark" the paper? or as Hélène Cixous writes, "inscribe" ourselves? it is difficult, women already feel (are) far too vulnerable in this society. "To write: I am a woman is heavy with consequences."
(Nicole Brossard, These Our Mothers)

"Patriarchal development of consciousness has an indisputable inner need to 'murder the mother,' that is, as far as possible to negate, exclude, devalue, and repress the 'maternal-feminine' world which represents the unconscious."
(Erich Neumann, "Narcissism, Normal Self-Formation and the Primary Relation to the Mother")

immediately surfaces the second intimidation: fear of narcissism, though few mirrors stand in which we can see our eroticism reflected, we are terrorized by the thought of this accusation. safer to have no "marks." no marks? pornography is ignorance. and romance? we have been persuaded to believe eroticism is romance. ROMANCE: "made in Rome." so much for romance! the world itself connotes fabricating an image outside ourselves compared to discovery of the erotic wellspring within.

- untying the tongue, pg. 33-34

* * *

the roses rise up
stretch into morning
each bush a brothel of red and pink orgy of opening
petals provoke
the do of desire
come womb-wooing
tongues bloom blooming

- Open is broken, II, pg. 49

* * *

the k(no)wing is the telling
is the leaving some things out

root up the word trees
in the manure the manuscript

the sows have come home

- Open is broken, VII, pg. 54

* * *

as you hold this / these pages throb
a radiant throat in your hands
each line a wave / blood / pulse
beware
words alter change:
'to curve, bend'

you expected to be uneasy
(wave / blood / pulse)
but not afraid
lungs fisting the air amulet against . . .
you could stop reading
but the pulse in your hands has led you here

- Open is broken, XVIII, pg. 66

From Double Negative...

none of either

saltbush, mulga dotting earth's red skin
'scrub' and 'plain'
scrubbed clean from plain as day she's just a plan Jane
who lives here
stares back unseen from windows we flash past
in constant motion lulled by the movement carrying us
forward into ourselves
we are fed we sleep are held nameless and content
umbilical track leading us to names on a map
Yunta, Paratoo, Ucolta, Yongala
words we head for down this birthing canal
'the oldest living language' shaping out tongues lips
to speak it out (though we do not known the meanings)

magnetic field of sounds
mouths move in anOther motion

- 13:50 Mannahill, pg. 82

* * *

as if (blue note) water doesn't sing (ka . tomb . ah) an air of the under wells up urely from hydrostatic pressure. o the permeable stratum you sank well into. this is what the women know sunk in upholstered couches opening their doors and closing them creates a threshold children cross. this under. this world the private. into. one another. your ka crosses mine to all intents and purposes invisible. intent in the shadow a closed door creates a stone rolled over the mouth. the mouth groans sings its fervid blue note. 'you you' muffled under the weight of the others the ones who do not sing out loud. and the children coming for something peer into other worlds as the doors open and close on private places. in transit publicity across the Great Dividing Range that places most of this continent in a rain shadow. this shared weather does not mean the mixed grey of our coast monumental thighs breasts slide into (islands touching under the water). this is the brilliance of rainless weather everyone discrete a brilliance flesh dryly supports. bu they are opening doors and when they glance up water artesian wells in their eyes.

- 'We entered this', pg. 114

* * *

what is there between them? in this in. desire in their desire room in their room somebody in the body of not in but in doubling of. mise en abyme. out in the outback we are in the desert then or the abandoned. the desert of ice of love of stolen dreams desert of the heart. but what if the boundary goes walking? refuses to be that place the hero enters with his gold his drums his caravans - o the desert generals the desert fathers the desert rats the desert revolution. (we saw hoofprint of camels and never camels but scrub and many varieties of: we stood in the middle of nothing and it was full.) bleak obstacle-boundary-space to and for his adventures ground to his figure and exploits grave-cave she has rolled over in all that red dust (the year in endless here) given herself a shake and birthed into subject. the inconceivable doubling herself into life no slouch-backed beast (even double humped) heading for Bethlehem but the doubling of 'woman' into hundred camped in the middle of desert outside Pine Gap's nuclear base, and the voice of the desert is the sound of their singing out their anger relentless and slow as dunes walking. we are off the train in order to be in the desert no longer the object of exchange but she-and-she-who-is-singing (as the women have always sung) this body my (d)welling place, unearthed.

- Two women in a birth, pg. 121

* * *

as the heart surrounded by all this flesh feels its weight (the pressure of pumping blood through such a system) throws up its hands in surrender the heart is never isolate never away (women cannot get away) as the people who inhabit this emptiness will tell you heartland laid waste (desert is not waste) dug up for uranium irradiated in nuclear testing (the fragile ecosystem the heart is) will fence off sacred sites to keep out the acquisitive the heart is consumed the heart is not allowed to throb for pleasure in what surrounds it (imagine a nation at home in the 'deathless body') the heart must be used (up) (imagine a nation uncommitted to surplus profit) working for love not pay imagination is at home with emptiness imagination a-muses herself with the emptiness of words and boards the train of the sentence empty handed and makes off with it de-riding the end point of the Final Product (she is not for termination after all) she is well on her way to de-railing the 'long straight' which can only see its own track while she is out on either side (surrounded she knows does not mean surrender) she is also she is desert come in waves the waves she rides she rises up and overflows the words a round around the word surround

- Imagin-a-nation in the heart of, pg. 124

From Reading and Writing Between the Lines...

and what about the talking we do that underlies or underlines (between the lines) what gets written on the page (what isn't there, the dark side off the record as the waltz winds down) - are we dancing in the dark? as if the page were a lit room read from outside while we go on doubling behind the scene, the you of the page i subvert in the unwritten you i walk our streets with, night, passing the lit rooms of story i saw 'you' of your page subvert in me biography or writing with our lives the tension necessary between what gets said and what gets written or left (out in the dark with other readers-in who are also us party to the parts we play in the game, apart and not) 'you put your whole self in' but what is yourself, your voice? as our heads slide through semantic shifts that are not ours as language never is

- And what about, pg. 140

From Subject to Change...

i want to edit this after & just write freely now

you know how hard it is to edit a collaboration - you can't rewrite what you say without affecting what i say in response

*

you can't look

why?

you know how i feel about being watched

*

i have this desire to draw a line and write down everything we say

let's try it

*

what's this?
reed.
r-e-a-d?
r-e-e-d

*

[the waiting, restlessness of your clothes shifting on your body]

- March 4, 1991, pg. 151