Wisteria, or, La Pasión Flamenca

photo by Rosegg (www.flamenco-vivo.org)

Last night the magic of flamenco came to Cullowhee.   The seduction.  The eroticism.  The exquisite yet passionate interplay of music, voice, and movement.   La Pasión Flamenca brought its touring performers to WCU's Fine and Performing Arts Center, and let me tell you, it was hard to sit still in a small auditorium seat during the performance!  My body wanted to move, my fingers wanted to coil around the rhythms, my palms wanted to drum against my blue-jeaned thighs.  I wanted to be part of it all!
  
I discovered flamenco music since I was in high school.  As a freshman at Wesleyan College, I signed up for Spanish because I'd fallen in love with Spanish music, and although I never learned to speak the language with any facility at all, I still love the sound of it, particuarly the voices of its poets.  Garcia Lorca.  Octavio Paz.  Jimenez. Cernuda.  I've always wanted to be able to dance flamenco, and in the following poem, I imagine doing so.  After last night's show, I am imagining this even more fiercely.  I think I'll try to order some flamenco dancer shoes.   I have plenty of shawls.   Now, let me dig out my old flamenco guitar records!



Wisteria


The hands.  The secret lies in the hands,
the dancer from Andalucia explains
on the afternoon radio program,
the secret of everything opening
over and over again.
Even these windows,
sealed shut over too many winters,
through which I can smell the wisteria.

Soleares,
Seguiriyas--
the guitar strings throb
through the static and  I feel
my spine arching,
arms begin twining
around me, my fingers seducing

the air.  Stroking emptiness.  Oh,
to be wrapped like a gypsy in endless black fringe          
I would slowly unwind from my hips and let
fall to the floor.  Kick it out of my way

and get on with the real work of dancing
this song to its end, drunk as always
I’ve wanted to be  with the scent of these blossoming
vines that my mother said ought to be  ripped
from a tree before they have enough time to kill it.

From Catching Light, LSU Press 2001)

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.

Franklin Public Library hosts WCU Literary Festival Authors

The Franklin Public Library will host three events celebrating the WCU Literary Festival that occurs during the first full week of April. I will be reading and discussing my book Coming to Rest on Sunday afternoon, March 27 at 2:00. Please go to this link to find more information about these events: http://www.fontanalib.org/pdfs/literary-festival-Franklin-2011.pdf.

Coming to Rest

1.

The Name

Because she’d not bury

the name with the dead child,

she made her surviving five children

swear they’d pass it on

to the first daughter born to them.

Another name for letting go.

Or holding on.

Another name for home.

2.

Birthday Ghazal

Why this old Persian form for today, of all days?

Why not sonnet or blank verse to help me take hold?

Down to the wire goes the season’s gold,

late this year, so long it took to take hold.

I don’t care that my days tumble down

to the compost pile. I want to look, to take hold.

Seize the day. Carpe Diem, if you like.

Bite down hard on the hook and take hold.

Down the creek float the leavings of what I once was.

Just a girl. Mostly waiting for luck to take hold.

Last night rain kept the roof busy scolding

me, wake up you dumb cluck and take hold.

I’ve already answered my e-mail, my voice

mail, my snail mail. My real work? To take hold.

Kathryn died too young. Age twelve. Now she tolls

in the dust of my name: to come back, to take hold.

3.

Sinking

The aunt I was named after died too young.

She sank at age twelve

into diabetic pneumonia. Then coma,

too pretty a word for her dying. Why cling

to another old form like this no-holds-

barred song for my aunt who died too young

to care about romance? What good is a song

now, to her? Or to me? Maybe I’ve grown too old

for such artifice, as if I’m trapped in a coma

of middle-aged dullness. My tongue

slips on names. But not hers. But why dwell

on her death. So she died, much too young,

not all like an angel who could do no wrong,

not at all blonde & pretty as I had been told.

When she sank into that final coma,

she must have looked ugly. I can’t make this

villanelle sing, no matter what I’ve been told

about Kathryn, who died too young,

years before insulin, of diabetic pneumonia.

4.

Stuck

She smoothes her skirt and squints at me.

I don’t know what to say. Or why she’s come.

The clock’s stopped ticking on the wall. Back home

again, she sees what I see, same old creek

reflecting nothing but a sky where trees

fish with their lines of moss all day. Let’s thumb

a ride to town, she dares. Let’s make the phone lines hum

above these droughty fields. Now that I’m free

I’m getting out of here. She says she wants to hear

the latest gossip, wants to have a little fun.

She tells me everything that hangs around

too long gets stuck. I nod. I don’t dare

ask her why she’s here, this dust I’ve stirred from

sleep. This shell of light. This sullen hologram.

5.

Free

This nameless creek

almost obscured by shade

where she was last seen

by the camera lens

keeps rushing through me

as she hikes her skirt

and stands wanting to be

brave enough to walk

into the current,

sickly girl whose cropped

hair won’t blow

in the summer

wind, too short,

too short, she cries,

coming to rest

in the photograph.

REMEMBERING MARCH WIND THROUGH ORGANDY CURTAINS

March has come in like a lion, blowing the clouds around like sheets on a clothesline. I call up a poem I wrote about remembering my grandmother again and again, her bloomers that swelled with wind on the clothesline, alongside her nightgowns and bedsheets. Her organdy curtains the wind teased when she opened the windows still bloom in my memory.

Again

I lie down in her sea bed that bears

me back home to the nothing left

after her house burned around it.

Her lavender handkerchief knotted

round nickels and dimes. On her dresser

a brooch in the shape of a peacock’s tail.

Organdy curtains that breathed in

and out when she opened the windows

for March to blow through like a lioness

stalking the boxwoods or a lamb bleating

out by the pump house. Her hairpins

sown over the rugs. Her voluminous apron.

Her false teeth that grinned

every night from a tall iced-tea glass

as she pulled off her house dress,

her shimmy, her bloomers

that even now swell like a mainsail with

nothingness. Lorna Doone shortbread

she nibbled till she fell asleep, leaving crumbs

in the bed sheets like sand from the white beach

at Panama City whenever I crawled into bed

with her body that smelled of the ocean

at low tide and tasted of salt

when she pulled me too close to her.

from COMING TO REST

LSU Press Poetry Series, 2006

TENT DREAM

Knife edge blue sky and sun on the winter-weary rhododendron leaves make me long for a campsite, a tent staked upon it, with night falling and woodfire kindling.

This poem is from Coming to Rest (LSU Press) and is part of the sequence Singing to Salt Woman.

Tent Dream

Bring your knife and your coloring book,

an old woman’s voice said,

so I tried to follow. I knew

day was waiting downriver. I heard

many voices advise me along the way,

mumbling in ancient Apache

or old-country Gaelic, a shudder

of Gullah tongues parting the salt

water. Native or non-native,

sometimes we hear the same voices,

like Zuni corn chanting

my grandmother up from the dust

into one last day walking her bean-rows

and suddenly so much green

singing around me, I take out my knife

and cut through to daylight.

The Zuni people call her Ma’l Oyattsik’i, the Salt Woman. For the moment she rests peacefully in her domain, a gentle refuge nestled among purple mesas, lush grasses, and tenacious trees. Zuni oral history tells how she used to live closer to the Zuni people, but grew angry with them and moved far away to Zuni Salt Lake, 50 miles south of the Zuni Pueblo in western New Mexico. For centuries, great pilgrimages have been undertaken by the men, not only of Zuni, but of neighboring Acoma Pueblo, the Navajo, the Apache, and others, to collect salt for their ceremonial life.

from an essay by Winona LaDuke

TIMBERLINE: Poem

TIMBERLINE

Looking up at the ruins of them,

ragged edges those dead trees

raise against the sky, and beyond

them the cut of a hawk’s wing,

the curve of the river

of cloud shapes, I’m likely to squander

this morning with dreaming them

turned back to women again, having grown

old along with these mountains

and left here to die like the rest of us.

I’d sit for hours and watch,

if I could, how the wind through their branches

keeps trying to make them sway,

supple as girls again, line-dancing

over the rocky horizon of Snowbird.

But not much of morning’s left.

I should be piecing a new quilt or mending

my husband’s socks. I should be stirring

the beans left to scorch in the pot.

What does wind whisper

up there of death? Or is dancing

the gist of it? As for my need to bear witness

to all I cannot keep from dying,

the truth is I’ve never liked loose ends.

Just look at my quilts: a succession

of rings, wreaths, and whirligigs.

Threaded since daybreak,

my needle waits here on the table

as if to remind me how stitches too small

to be known save by touch

of the thread toiling under my fingers

can fashion a way out of one death and into

another. So stand up, I tell myself.

Shake out your stiff limbs and sway

like your sisters up there on the ridge,

still in line for the next dancing lesson.

from BLACK SHAWL, LSU Press, 1992

LSU POETS-JAMES BRASFIELD

I came to know James Brasfield and his wife, fiction writer Charlotte Holmes, many years ago when she taught at Western Carolina University. Jim's collection of modern poetry must have been the most extensive of anyone's and surely the most capacious I had ever seen. I knew he was a poet himself, but it took a few years before I knew just how good he was. His reading at the WCU Literary Festival left me

in a state of profound silence. I knew I had to read more of his work. He obliged by sending me his first manuscript of poetry, later titled Ledger of Crossroads. LSU Press published the collection last year. I'm featuring several of the poems, in hopes you will want to order his book from LSU or from an indie bookstore. I believe you will share my state of attentive silence after reading these poems.

Here's a bit more about Jim.

An LSU Press paperback original

(from LSU Press catalog-www.lsu/lsupress)

In James Brasfield’s Ledger of Crossroads, layered by light and shadow, the crossroads emerge from distinct yet inseparable geographies. Grounded in the sensual world, the poems fuse American and Eastern European landscapes: “the char of silence and beauty, / brick foundations of what was here, dirt roads / cut through pines, rivers and the dust of the dead.” Here are experiences from the American South, of those who believed Jim Crow “the way things . . . had to be,” and from the fallen imperiums of those “who have always / returned to fewer trees and a wall,” whose intimate perceptions provide moments of reprieves: “beyond the faint scent / of almond in the air and heavy clouds / funneling from the earth into snowfall, / the current calmed within that distant / bend of the Vistula.” Here we become the identities of others, their time and place, from the strata of their histories. They enter our lives.

James Brasfield has twice been a Senior Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine and has received fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Prize in Translation, and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He is the cotranslator of The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha.

HEART OF DIXIE

Every day came, the char of silence and beauty,

brick foundations of what was here, dirt roads

cut through pines, rivers and the dust of the dead,

bone silt and a song, bird cries, the freight train

through the county, crops and cows, chickens wandering

a patch of yard, wind through sun-silvered leaves,

the clay baked hard, undulating in August, farmers

in a field, weathered wooden sheds, isolated.

Every day came, a hound in the yard.

Call it circumstances, the way we thought things

had to be, rough and polished stones on a creek bank.

We had no choice but to believe, sincere and alone

and the black faces, their eyes lowered

in our homes on Broad Street. We did not sympathize.

It was almost normal. Call it circumstance,

the alarm and nature of sidelong glances,

the way we thought things had to be,

God's will, our history and we wanted it quiet.

It was always dark. You get used to anything, we said

with eyes lowered. It was almost perfect here,

mist and wildflowers, the charred cross

in a field. It was almost normal, a quiet stream

and a gravel road. Every day came.

It was dark and no one could see.

WAYNESBORO

Through the colonnades of oak

arched over the cold road, I drive through rain

filtered through the moss cathedral—

the outbound sun, distant at the crossing,

night, a large cloud, fills the air.

I remember my last spring here,

the air warm with the coming of another season.

Nothing was in the field, then a tent appeared

and a cross nailed to a sign. There

I witnessed the Pentecostal fire.

Fifty chairs circled a low stage

and two poles held the canvas high.

Four bare bulbs lit that tabernacle.

With a tambourine, Lurleen, our go-between,

beat out a rhythm on her thigh.

"Pray for me, I pray for you," she chanted,

while the organist moved from chord

to chord, holding each a long time.

The small clamor of hands clapping

was meant to stir the air in hell.

But who heard the wind rising

through sycamores, shifting the paunches

of the flaps, or past the hymns, the field,

miles away the serene code

of successive beats upon the tracks. . . .

Yet what I remember most about Waynesboro,

governed still by its white grandees,

is an old woman, black, standing alone

on a hillside, watching from scrub grass,

waiting as the last passenger

run between Savannah and Atlanta

approached town, not to stop here,

never having stopped here, its whistle

like salvation blaring only nearer

before it was gone. Forever for me

she stands there, facing that train

as now on this road the dark, inbound

stillness trails the long freight of light.

She stands there, like the eternal

white sun over a tin-roofed shack.

Mechanical blades beat time, sweeping

rain from the glass. She is here—

borne up motionless above the crossties,

a place in mind, through the moonless night.

___________________________________________________

CHERNIVTSI

Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.

—Shakespeare, Sonnet 5

Such weight, Little Vienna,

snow falling across Europe, villages

lost to avalanche. People who return

say the streets are clean in Deutschland—

on the walks, a mere light dusting

from the newly fallen. Here

in the crosswinds, streets

and walks are buried in ice.

Wherever they are, Little Vienna,

shovels wait shivering.

Last night, who spread the path

of ashes on the walk? Some new tenant

not knowing what else to do

with a cigar box of ashes, handed down,

found far back in the wardrobe?—

the new tenant happy after a night

of polka and a waltz, losing his feet

with his new wife, arm

in arm, and saying later, "Well,

there's this from yesterday?” . . .

Oh last night with stars scattered

across the blackest night—

ice giving way from the balconies . . .

The winter potatoes I peeled were stones

softening, deeply bruised.

Today, I'm nearly out of bread. Granules

of white mold brighten the heel of the brown loaf.

How those wisps of clouds closed in on the stars—

that sky now, a pale cotton curtain

about to fall from its string.

Already the path's covered as under a field

of crushed apples. Bags of ash wouldn't make

a foothold here where winter, as long

as snow falls, lasts a lifetime,

and not to remember the star lodged

in the branches, a crow now to light a limb,

and as it happens suddenly, those flocks

take flight. The gaps between them

are like those places where we hope to see

any star beneath moving clouds.

Does the old man hear those wings?—

in each hand a long poplar branch,

the knife-chipped tips probing

the furrowed millimeters of rippled ice—

or does the man leaning against the building

at the corner of Tolstoy Street?

He sings lightly to himself, staring

beyond the tin roofs, heavy with snow,

over the heraldic crests on the faded plaster

of your cracked facades, Little Vienna—

or bundled in black, returning to the village,

does the old woman under a scarf, sliding her feet

like a wind-up doll about to stop?

She leans into the knot end of a rope—

two bags of potatoes on a little wooden sled.