The Many Faces of Mary

I've mentioned Mary Adams several times in my posts, always in the company of dogs, because here in Jackson county she has become a guardian angel for so many of our abandoned and abused animals. Here's another side of Mary, one that people tend to forget. She is one of our finest poets, an inventive formalist who can give George Herbert a run for his money. She's a Milton scholar, a computer whiz who has helped me set up DSL so that I can go blogging, and a devoted caretaker of numerous animals she fosters at her home and hopes to place with folks who will care for them as well as she does. She has been a member of the WCU English Department since -I'm not much good with dates-sometime in the early 1990's. She directs the WCU Spring Literary Festival, and her poetry has appeared in many magazines. She can boast of degrees from the Iowa Writers Workshop and the University of Houston's writing program, as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. Mary doesn't boast, though, so I will do that for her! Her first book, Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis, was published by the University of Florida Press. She will have a chapbook appearing in the next few months from Spring
Street Editions.




Mary is one of our favorite people here in Cullowhee, and we think the rest of you ought to know more about her. So, here are a few of her poems, from her forthcoming chapbook.


ANOTHER STORY

He dreamed he wanted all her wilderness.
She dreamed his smell of saffron and clean halls.
He dreamed about the souls of animals.
Her animals were tired of being wild.
Her house blew up. It oozed when he entered there.
He cherished her, but he was made of walls.
Her longing sang him in a foreign language.
He could not dress or slake her loneliness.
He wished she saw how everything hed had
swallowed everything hed thought he wanted.
She wished he knew she longed to be devoured.
He dreamed about the house he dreamed before.
She dreamed her body in which no one dreamed.
She tasted him recede, a ghost of salt.
She dreamed but it did no good.
His children throbbed in walls that compassed once
his world as perfect as the gusts of birds
he used to dream she winnowed in like song.
She gathered him as if he were not gone.




Mary at our dining table, listening to my husband make a comment.


TAME


It's when your house erupts
with animals, dogs on the roof, dogs
hassling joggers, dogs helping themselves
from the icebox, that you know
the man will leave. Why, exactly's
harder. A man undaunted by a cat's
flaunted asshole surely knows
love works the wrong end
sometimes. Nor should squalor
scare a man who eats mayonnaise
every morning. Maybe it's
a fear of ghosts, you think.
In a movie once, you saw the hero
tame a wolf and then an Indian.
You’d hoped for such a man,
gentle hands, gold
hair like prairie grass.
Even the wolf trusted him, blithely
standing on his groin
or wagging hopefully for days.
Nothing's worth that kind of wait.
Not you who cannot give the wolf back
to the dog, not he
whose kindness kills the wolf
and Indian before he rides away
at movie's end.
Love makes the wrong promises.
Above you, dogs are crooning from the roof
as from the wild.





Mary trying to explain something to my husband.

The following poem, intensely personal, is also intensely entwined with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Mary gave me a draft of it a few months after the towers fell, and I remember catching my breath at the sheer formal beauty of it and the pain and sense of loss it expresses.


MY SEPTEMBER

I know . . . what the stars conspire,
What willing nature speaks, what forced by fire. . . .
- George Herbert, “The Pearl”

Gravity is matter’s memory that it once was light.
- Gowan, John A. “Principles of a Unified Field
Theory: a Tetrahedral Model.”


Dear Charlie, In September when you left,
the towers fell. I don’t mean to equate
one with the other, or to make a deft
metaphor of either. But the date
of the disaster was transformed by where
you were and what I felt, by the stair
I watched the t.v. from. Quiet as water,
the towers burned to sky within my sight.
If gravity’s the memory of matter
that it was light,

then falling accelerates toward symmetry,
a fractal. People falling from the towers
and towers themselves fall down in patterns free
yet mathematic. Arteries or mirrors,
Mandelbrot might say–like coral, leaves,
lightening, mountains, how a whale breathes–
back to creation. I wasn’t at the scene
to pick up body parts or sift soot
and gases trailing from the dead. They train
dogs to root

the smell out. I read that. So I watched
daily, as if watching helped. My grief,
smaller than cataclysm, seemed attached
by coinciding with it, as a leaf
spirals slowly to the cooling ground
while, worlds away, a city spins around
in a cyclone. I couldn’t claim the dead
or you, either, or that June that seeped
inside, or seemed to. Not even how the red
candles kept

darkening as we turned to kiss each other,
how even now it feels like I could follow
the kiss’s vestiges or plot its weather
back through branching space. You used your new
cell phone to end it. You were on your way
to work. The cellular tower ascended gray
and masterful on top of Cowee Mountain.
I read that habitats of apes and the long plains
of elephants were stripped to mine the coltan
powering your phone,

pitching your words above the dying season,
above the towers erected in the path
of birds. You said you didn’t need a reason.
Maybe you didn’t. Fall, the aftermath
of the world’s love, drove the leaves down
and the towers and the bodies down
and burned the hole they would not cover over
lest the island, like an age, forget.
My emptiness that thinks it is forever
is different, yet

it helps me feel the other one. The edge
of chaos is the momentary source
of every choice, the now preceding knowledge.
Each choice creates a different universe.
In one your voice as from a doomed plane
rings with unearthly love. In one the fine
binaries blow into flesh and fall
blows back to summer. If I can’t stop it,
cannot die of it, can’t keep your hand still
where you laid it,

let me be ruin where your hand has been,
indifferent as love is to leveled plains,
be the empty cradle and the mountain
lofty as language, be the gorilla bones,
be bombs and buildings that relentless love
blew into being and dogs are dying of,
that pave the birds to roads and drive the crazed
fires. Let me be a field that lies
beneath them, razed and razed and razed and razed
when summer dies.


Mary, in glam-poet mode: