Poem: "Securities/Agency"

Securities/Agency

Inspired by Dorothea Lange’s Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas, 1938,
A photograph taken during her tenure with the Farm Security Administration

I. Security

The government controlled the development
process, kept a tight grip on the negatives,
dictated just what and just how much
truth was released to the public.
But they underestimated the power:
speed of the shutter, grip of the lens,
how one woman could harness blatant lies
told by natural light. She could photograph a soul
without a single body trapped in the picture.

II. Agency

We did not know, some sixty years prior,
we’d been caught in a frame. The taxed-out
state of soil not yet evident,
sold undisclosed. We did not know
our new coat of paint would peel like dead
skin from a clapboard farmhouse in the heart
of drought. Can we be blamed for our love, long
dead before the purchase—a gray-scale field,
one thousand rows, monochrome rainbows
bled fruitless to frowns?





















Image Courtesy of Christie's; Lot 21, Sale 1451

Inspired by Gertrude Stein...

I love Gertrude Stein, not because she was a lesbian and an expatriate, although lesbians and expatriates rank high on my admiration list. I love Gertrude Stein because she was imaginative, inventive; she challenges. She challenges and far surpasses any boundary of what is (or was) considered “mainstream.” Tender Buttons is to me, to this day, an inspiring work of literary art. Both of these poems were born of Tender Buttons, and one even borrows from it.

Servings

…and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet.
             Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot
and the steam rises; sequent
torsos stretch to the light
pull of the dusty stove fan.
Its heat and red-hot rim,
an exposed eye, hold me.
Those bodies weeping, bleed
kelly green, harmonic
bend of tired spines press
against the steel pot, stainless.
This makes it art, found
in a life so grown from dirt.

**********************************

Dreaming of Gertrude Before Morning Comes

Short days and nights shorter still and
still is night when I no longer write the cycle
begins again and again again and then I wake just
wanting to take a lover and no belongings but this longing to run away.

Poem: "Stir" (For Leigh P.)

Stir

Next

to you in the

green blue-

grass, I could

almost trust

that we

had sunk

deep

into the flesh

of some other

Kentucky.

But in this

light of not quite

mourning,

when I wake, blue-

faced and buried

beneath your bed

of thin nails,

I have become

nothing

more than skin,

ten half-

moons, blue

memory.

*****************

I've included this poem here for my friend, Leigh, because I know she's been concerned with some of her work in and of couplets and has been grappling with craft. I wrote this poem during a very rough time in my life. My marriage was falling apart; I was trying to get through a difficult and demanding graduate program; I was trying to be a good mother for my young son; I was just in the beginning of what would be a horrible and all-consuming, years-long struggle with serious alcoholism. Quite frankly, I'm surprised I actually came out on the other side of all that. But, hey, we've all got our battle scars... Right?

Poem: "Opening the Daguerreotype"

Opening the Daguerreotype

When I hold her against the light, just so,

fury takes her face with a flash.

Like white fire, it burns a skin that is thinner

than bible paper or mountain air.

This, an old theory on the body:

ghost-like layers, interlocking—

a delicate sheet of her neatly torn.

She’s been betrayed by day-

light, arrested in this silver-coated picture,

caged beneath the weight of scratched glass.

It is as though she feels my thoughts

before my fingers pressure

her dry, cracked spine or close

the worn red leather door. She pleads:

Dissolve me.

Make me whole.

*****************************

A daguerreotype was one of the earliest forms of photographs, developed and used around the late 1830s/early 1840s. They were usually made of silver or silver-coated copper plates and were extremely sensitive to light. Therefore, to be properly preserved, each daguerreotype was housed in its own case that closed with a clasp. Back then, people were pretty leery of photographs, as a common belief was that with each photo you posed for a layer of your soul was taken from you and forever trapped.

My former father-in-law had a truck load of these, and he loaned me one to share with my History of Photography class. She was so beautiful that I had to write a poem for her. I believe the current home of all his daguerreotypes is the Virginia Musuem of Fine Arts in Richmond.

Poem: "Displaced December"

Displaced December

The birds pick seeds

from the feeder

faster than I can fill it.

The trees have lost

their leaves—rich autumn

berries eaten,

but the spirits of spring

still haunt, stubborn

Southern winds still speak.

In late morning, they curl

fingers around bare arms,

taunt with whispers that slip

between grass-teeth, unnatural

green. The heated breath

consumes me, a flash without fire.

****************************

In light of all the traditional winter weather we're experiencing this 2009-2010 season, I thought I'd take you back to Winter 2001. I distinctly remember feeling very discombobulated while filling up the bird feeders on a December morning. I wore an old pair of clam diggers, a short-sleeved t-shirt, and flip flops, and it was winter in the Mid-Atlantic.

A Few of My Poems...

Tracks

…but I’ve made homes in the screams

of fast passing trains…

i. The Summer, 1982

A wonder, really, how the Maggodee

Creek held the weight of that train

on her slim back bank, how the rumble

of them both never broke the thin-paned

windows of the parsonage, how they swallowed

the cries that, in spite of the narrow space

beneath the twin bed, I failed to hide.

A wonder, too, how that old willow

still weeps, its yellow-green leaves a tithe,

an August offering, my deliverance

from distrust and the trickery

of fingers I once thought holy.

ii. Early Spring, 1995

Wise Avenue, one block up

from the projects, a house so settled

the floors slanted and the tops

of doors were shaven near the hinges

just so they could close, it was his joy

that he could beat me dreamless,

and after, I’d lie in wait for the roar

of a late-night train. Land’s flat

in Southeast, and that means speed.

Whistle’s pierce, the bold echo of steel

against steel, lifted me, carried me away.

iii. The Fall of 2002

I look toward Tinker Mountain,

more than a mound of rock and damp

earth that beacons light (from my left)

and sound waves, invisible to my opened eyes.

I amble through gray swirls of night’s

last cigarette and wonder if my boys are staying

warm, if they hear the chapel bells chime two

like I do. They are safe from any real crossing.

I have been drawn to the other side.

And I know they don’t welcome this rush,

train’s blunt force, the simple transport

sought in a low, bone-rattling hum.

**************************

Not Happiness, But the Pursuit Thereof

I’m taking a right, switch-

back onto the horseshoe bend

like I was flying, non-stop, to the top

of Buffalo Mountain. And I rise

by way of going on the down-low,

where let down does not mean defeated,

no traction, no grip of thick rubber and spinning

aluminum to bone-dry asphalt.

Nothing’s holding.

I feel faults, fractures pushing hard

against the inside of my summer

skin. I pull out the splinters like boiled

bird bones, sew them to the outside—

exposed. And when there is no more road,

I take off through the woods;

red stems of bittersweet

taunt the soles of my feet, and with this speed,

dogbane paints the forest floor

periwinkle blue. This is a land of

cattle farms and communes, a one-stoplight-

life with faint pulse. Breathless, I pause,

let hearts of honeysuckle beat on my tongue.

**********************************

Mid-Winter

and unclothed, splayed open,

exposed, Virginia is odd and cold.

Low clouds, barometric rise

and fall. All movement is measured,

radical but in hundredths of inches.

Little is relative here, save for slow-

passing bruises. Somewhere,

a woman drowns in blue, thick

contusion, night’s ink—see

how it bleeds between sallow flesh

and the atmosphere of deep sleep,

the truths refused, in waking, to be seen.

Mid-January

and even the birds have broken down.

Eyes open—every streak of her

iris is an open fault line or infinite

ravine, mark of the lost, or stripped

limbs, black as blame.

This is a poem for the spirit-

dead, a frameless grave to hold

the bones of the lonely, the nameless.

This is a eulogy for the loss of perspective.