MOUNTAIN WOMAN: COMPOST

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: COMPOST: A poem for the end of November and yet another year added to my ledger of days. And in memory of Ruth Stone, who died just hours ago, at t...

CHAIRS

Chairs, from Magpie Tales

My grandmother had long chestnut-colored hair, or so I've been told, and her photosgraphs in her youth show a woman with thick hair piled atop her head.  In her later years, she dyed her hair red.  She had married a man much older than she, and after his death she married again.  She did not have the luxury of musical chairs during those difficult years of the Great Depression.  I wonder if she ever looked back at the ones she might have chosen.

CHAIRS

Because she died shorn

of her crimped, hennaed glory

called shameless for 

someone her age, I hate short hair 

that clings to the skull

and risks nothing.  Her fiery

profusion I like to imagine as flaring

out into the sickroom to shock,

to accuse:  all she might have become

had she not said “I do” and sat down 

in that chair when he pulled it out, 

scraping the floor,

making idle talk stop for an instant.

the old women frown when 

she whispered I must have this,

canna lily she plucked from the vase

on the table to pin at the nape 

of her barely contained bun, 

what she called a chignon. 

The other chairs she might have

chosen,  did she reminisce as she

wandered away from them into

 the mirrors of middle-age?  Goaded

by what she saw,  she dyed her gray back

to flaming rebellion they cut off

the last day she lived, for the sake

of what family called Visitation--

the coffin lid opened, no time for

embarrassment.  People might gossip

about her lack of repentance, the devil’s

own red coming loose from the pins.

So she lay  without any complaint, 

as I too have sat cowed in the stylist’s chair 

watching  my dishwater blonde hair

descending around me like chaff.

       

   

Freeze Warning

So cold this morning, down to 22 degrees!   Shivering as I pulled myself out of bed, I remembered this poem I wrote years ago for the collection that became Catching Light.

Nightcap

        Freeze warning.

  Leaves curled on emptiness

         crawl across

        sidewalks.  My gatepost

surrounded by wind jangles

         nonsense.

           I’ll stay put

          and kindle

        some fat wood

     with yesterday’s

   newspapers ripped to

        confetti.

    But what if the matches

won’t strike, the chimney

     won’t draw?

   What if  goose flesh

      I hug to my breast

 shivers not from the ice

        

 waiting outside but inside

 where no slug of whiskey 

       can thaw it?   

         

             Hush!

   I’ll take  a  jelly glass

    down from the pantry.

          Now stand back

        while I  pour a jigger

         of bottomless fire   

           

                    water,

               straight-up.

                 Last call.

WILLIE JAMES KING

Willie James King

I became an admirer of Willie James King a few years ago while I was still NC Poet Laureate.  Preparing a feature for the NC Arts Council on Pembroke Magazine's African American writers  issue, I knew that  I liked his poetry right away.  Since then I've come to like  him, his straightforward presentation of his life and his work, his obvious delight in the written word, and his sense of place and region.    Reared in Orrville, Alabama,  he is the author of three books of which only one is still in print, The House in the Heart.  (Such a great title, isn't it?)  It has a foreword by Cathy Smith-Bowers, our current NC Poet Laureate.  His poems appear widely in literary print journals and online as well, among them Alehouse, Appalachian Heritage,  Confrontation, Cutthroat, The Caribbean Writer, Pembroke Magazine, Obsidian, The Lullwater Review, and The Southern Poetry Review. ( Over a hundred-plus poems, or so.  Wow!) He resides in Montgomery, AL. His manuscript, Autumn's Only Blood is scheduled for publication in 2012.

I will be posting more about this book when it appears, but for now my readers will have to be satisfied with the following three poems from the collection and this testimonial that I wrote after reading Willie James's manuscript.




How a poet comes to his voice remains a mystery and so it should remain, for poetic lyricism and passion rise up in the darkest of times, as well as in the most beautiful. It sings those moments when the words in one's mouth taste of blood, as well as those when they taste of ripe plum, sweet, sweet, sweet, as Willie James King reminds us, closing out his powerful new book of poems. Dedicated to Troy Davis, executed by my native state of Georgia after denying an appeal that might have exonerated him, these poems speak honestly of the injustice inflicted by racism, the strength of resistance, and the sheer pleasure, inextricable from the pain, that being alive can bring, and doing so with what I call pure, unadulterated "wordlove." This poet has learned to trust his language, let it lead him where the poem needs to go. His poems sing, mourn, rage, celebrate, their language always remaining true to its source. 








It Will Not Slip

To pull away from it all, you know, quit!

without an effort to begin again

is as if you've done enough now to sit,

look, as if there’s so little left to gain.

You are allowed to feel the way you feel.

It’s a given; most journeys do get rough

as oil-slick hands trying to hold a wet eel,

whose struggle makes the slightest grasp too tough.

You just don’t give it only half your heart,

in doing so, expect to reach your goal.

Know that giving up is the hardest part

(a bud must strain before its flower shows).

Take a handful of grit to gird your grip;

then, let the eel struggle! it will not slip.

That Fear

Ah, winter blew-in hard, with it came snow,

and those who said they wanted it grew tired

too soon, in just a few drab days or so.

On T.V., a white world seems gentrified

but none of us had seen snow this far south;

and most would rather not since those who tried

found out how hard it is to get about.

Some want it if it would remain soft-ice,

think it might be better and fun no doubt.

But ice outside, in any form’s not nice

to me. Drivers just don’t know how to steer.

Taking on roads here is mere sacrifice.

Once out there one feels like a lane-locked deer

craving the safety of the woods, that fear.

It's True

More than once, I dreamt the world was on-fire

A blond, thick blaze sloping down the mountain,

unstoppable in its famished desire,

weaving a dark, monochromatic plain,

pitch darkness that contradicted its flame,

moving like lava-milk 'cross the landscape.

Waves from another planet was to blame.

And so it seemed there would be no escape.

Spew and soot like snow was all about us,

sedulous mainly, making good its threat;

but soon it dawned, I was dreaming; and thus

I woke in fits, starts, and all wet with sweat.

If you think something is out to get you,

don’t be surprised only to find it's true.

My thanks to Willie James for letting me showcase these poems on my blog!

Blog This Rock: Poem of the Week: Penelope Scambly Schott

Blog This Rock: Poem of the Week: Penelope Scambly Schott: At the Demonstration Back when I used to march in the noon of the green world, I sang like a crow. The cacophony of insistence ...

EL DIA DE LOS MUERTOS

  

Frida Kahlo

 El Dia de los Muertos

In Frida’s house, it was every  day.
She doted on skeletons,
contraptions of wicker and colored paper strung up
with twine, letting one hang alongside her bed
and another recline on her canopy.  Mis companeros,
she called them.  Compadres.
She’d stared back at Death,
nose to nose,
frente a frent ˙e,
for so long she called him
El Viejo.  Just part of
the household.  She knew he would
nudge her too soon and say Lista?
Esta lista, mi'jita?
No wonder she scrawled
on the last written page of her diary,
I hope the leave-taking is joyful
and I hope never to come back.

Forty years later,
I almost believe her.
It’s November second again,
and again I imagine her grinding
her teeth on those last words,
(despite being nothing but ashes
Diego sealed into a clay pot)
still trying too hard  to resist the fiesta
that’s dawning, its candy skulls hawked
from the corners, the jiggety-jig
of the bone-men in every mercado.

At nightfall, the cities of graves
with their pink vaults and blue stucco archways
will come back to life with the pictures of lost children,
wives, fathers, husbands, while flowers cascade
over gravestones where, nestled in baskets,
pan dulce and still warm tortillas
the living once loved to hold inside their mouths
keep the taste of life fresh for the dead
to come back to,  if only as wind playing
over the grass, blowing
out every  candle
before moving on again,
not having answered the question
we’re left to ask, begging the  darkness
that takes us,  Adonde?  Adonde?


from Catching Light, LSU Press

Candied skulls on sale in Toluca in the days leading up to
El Dia de Los Muertos
The link will take you to a great site on the culture and history of Mexico, with some stunning photos of El Dia de los Muertos celebrations.

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: ALL HALLOWS

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: ALL HALLOWS: These powerful days around the Celtic New Year have always pulled at my soul. Today is All Saints Day or All Hallows. I remember a poem...

HANDWRITTEN

The typewriter is now obsolete, and who actually writes with paper and ink anymore?   This poem was generated by the dozens of letters written by my great-grandmother to my grandmother, most of them during the depression, when she taught Latin and handwriting.  They came to light after my father's death.   I remember the sheer curtains above the writing desk.  Scattered sheets of paper.  Thanks to Magpie Tales for reminding me.

Correspondence            


A teacher of grammar and penmanship,
she saved her letters
in  chifforobe drawers or stacked
on the floor of her closet.
They lie even now where she left them.
Every last one of them answered.

I’d watch her bend over her desk,
words streaming onto the  ivory vellum
like blue tributaries,
and sometimes, when she left awhile
to tend gumbo that boile d on the stove
or fold linens she scooped from the clothesline,
I touched those rose-scented sheets

and tried to imagine I lifted
their seamless meander of words
from the envelope.

When I complained over school compositions,
that I could find none of my own words
for such disagreeable assignments,
she would say, Just pick a word
and then wait.
Like a leaf spinning
round in a backwater,
sooner or later it catches the current.

Her last letters never got mailed.
When I read them,
her perfect blue words drift away
on a tide of forgetfulness,
as if she lived out her days underwater.

A  few now and then break
the surface,
names of  roses
she still pruned
and watered. King’s Ransom.
Joseph’s Coat.
Queen Elizabeth.

Not  debris,
as a rescue team scanning the waste
might describe them,

but more like the named
things themselves,
as if she’d thrown them
one by one,
into the wake
of her vanishing.

from Catching Light, LSU Press