Reflections After Watching Grey Gardens

Have you ever seen Grey Gardens? It’s a pretty striking story — one I recently re-watched for a documentary discussion series we are doing at my day job. It’s been rolling around in my head for a while, along with a lingering fascination with poems formatted like paragraphs. Today the two came together in this draft that is maybe a poem, maybe a piece of flash fiction, or maybe some lines that will be pulled apart and stitched together into something completely different.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI watched Grey Gardens last night. Not the movie one, not the one with Drew Barrymore playing broken down rich and the glossy-slick flashbacks of perfectly fitted dresses and shiny blond waves -- The real one. Where Edie and her mother (or Edie and her daughter, depending on where your sympathy lies) wander in and out of a falling down house, wearing scarves as shirts and shirts as scarves as the September sun brings out the oily sheen of unwashed skin and the only way you can believe they knew the Kennedys is by their voices. With an afterimage of Little Edie in red, waving a tiny American flag, I woke up to messages from someone I used to know thinking -- Maybe I could. Maybe I would, even. Knowing -- I will not. Not in this body that is not the slender creature that I used to be. Not in this broken down old thing. Dawn breaks through and clears the last dusty fragments of Grey Gardens, tumbled down old houses and women stuck in a place out of time. Clears out the dust of broken old things and I remain. Lovely and whole.