Watching Clips of the Democratic National Convention, July 19, 1984
There she was, looking beautiful and looking female.
Cokie Roberts
Pearls encircled Geraldine Ferraro like tiny moons around a mother earth. Pearls
created from mother of pearl, protective: that iridescent hard layer, the hard
luminescent surface inside the hinged shell.
Ferraro wore long strands, long to her breast bone. Back then, I took fistfuls
of tiny fake strung pearls — white, gold, gray — and I’d twist them like cables,
wore them tight, wrung, and torqued around my neck.
As I watch the clips of the nomination of Geraldine Ferraro to the Vice-Presidency
of the United States, I look away, out my east-facing window
to the warm sun, warm finally this late in June. The doomed
Japanese cherry tree, split, then split again by lightning bolts, flowered for the first time
this season, flowered pink and full of tiny leaves so lush and
tangled, I almost forgot the thick branches we lost to the chainsaw.
My name, she said, is Geraldine Ferraro. All the women reached their arms up to her,
waved and reached as if they were offered open-handed a merciful pearl,
a grace, that one time, then snatched back and slapped shut.
* * * * *
Ferraro v. Bush, October 12, 1984
My height compared to Bush’s was going to be a disadvantage for me.
Geraldine Ferraro
In the year of Ferraro, my “An Officer and a Gentleman” poster
let loose from the cinderblock wall of my dorm room in the tower looming
over Comm. Ave. and draped the back of a boy who lay on top of me.
Debra Winger wore Richard Gere’s big white shirt, cuff to finger tips,
tails to thigh, his white naval cap over brown curls. In the movie he lifted her
out of a life in a Puget Sound factory.
The boy who lay on top of me loved Donald Trump. I look up to him,
he said, he’s building a castle above the East River. Quarterflash
played down the girl’s side of the dorm hallway: It feels so close but always disappears.
I remember women afraid of a woman so near to power:
what if she gets her period? lets loose? bleeds? And yes, the men!
Weren’t they playing saxophones all the time? Wailing, oiled and salted, dripping
all over us?
* * * * *
Oracular
In the year of Ferraro, I loved my drugs, my runic-ludes,
loved to dance under those mirror balls,
thought I was beautiful, thought I was heard.
I carried a skinny mirror back then —
wet my gums, shaped my brows. Saw the sky,
saw an 8-ball moon. I saw The Cure.
The First Lady loved astrology, loved Chanel.
She loved her little body all wrapped in red —
a real picker-upper, she said. The cut-glass mirror beads
on her de la Renta sheath refracted light, all crystal
white. She read the stars. She loved
her husband’s moons, his metal pig, his licorice beans. On a mirror
I wrote my name in powder, deep-
bellied beneath a night club floor. I heard
half disco/half punk feet dance over me, beneath the mirror ball.
Could you hear me?
Whole nights and into the next spent dancing —
we loved our drugs, we loved our ludes, we tossed back the luminous runes:
you are heard, they said, they said, you are beautiful.
* * * * *
In the Year of Ferraro
To not see your personage reflected in politics is a pain.
Marie Wilson, former president, Ms. Foundation for Women
I had a pair of Vuarnet sunglasses, rims as red
as come here, come. I sold them for one gram
of cocaine in a little white envelope.
I had five more years of this, but couldn’t see that then.
Friends wore Ray-Bans like Tom Cruise
in that movie where he danced in his boxers and white shirt.
Remember how he broke his mother’s crystal egg and she
saw the crack when she turned it this way to the light, and then that way?
Think of how information travels. So much enters through the eye.
The dark pupil dilates and constricts like a cervix, pulls tight and shut:
nothing that goes in can leave or ever go back.