Poems from
The
Definition of Place
Rosetta: How to
Stop a Man in His Tracks
When momma
washed my clothes
in a
slow-burning pot filled with
sagebrush and
sweetgrass, I would
move to the
half-light of our lean-to,
let the shyness
of my shadow hold me
as if I were a
smile that could stretch
no further. My
voice would betrayed me
as I sucked my
thumb and stared at
her long black
hair soaking in the sun.
The way it fell
like a river fall onto
a pool of
freedom made me proud
to be her
daughter. Momma was prettier
than a porcelain
statue when she wore
her white calico
dress on Sunday’s.
She told me the
way to get a man
was to bathe in
rose oil and myrrh,
let him smell
the scent of your skin,
hold him with
the rain-black of your eyes.
Night is an
anxious sky of liquid tar
as the drone of
rain falls steady on a pine
matted hillock
near the Quarters where
words filter
from Rosetta’s mouth, but
there is no
breath to give them sound.
Silence reminds
her of how two is greater
than one. Walls
are pale yellow and slits
between boards
reveal
Alabama night.
The call of the
whippoorwill is a vagrant poet.
Pine knots have
kindled a fire; the flames
cerulean lips
will kiss her goodnight
as she stencils
her lover inside every dream.
Elvie: About
Family
There is a
certain waiting-way about my Rosetta,
those
never-moving eyes—how her flesh melts
into mine when
we touch at night; tenderness in the
toleration of my
ways has given us two girls. My suckling
baby got long
cane stalk arms that wrap around my neck
and she can say
da-da; then there is the knee baby
whose eyes are
iron-cold with a temperament just like
a Merrill,
follows me how I did daddy in the fields
with my little
gunnysack, trying to keep up with what
by six in the
morning to fill five gallon milk buckets
before the
calves got to the tits. Daddy always
wanted a team of
five mules, figured he would have
something then,
a piece of land he could be proud of.
He didn’t know a
man’s family could make him complete.
Elvie’s Educates
His First Born
The harvest of
all that I am tells me he done with book learning and silly
college dreams. Wants to be grown, do man things like work the
railroad, do the gandy dance. Sometime a man got to find
himself for himself, go in the wilderness like Moses. I try to
tell him:
Six with rail
thongs on one end.
Six on the
other. A three-foot span
of track is
eighty-five pounds. That’s
eighty-five
pounds of dead muscle
riding flat-line
on shoulders of men
whose spit is
fresh with last night’s
taste of rot-gut
whiskey, fresh with
the root smell
of jook-joint easy women.
Eighty-five
pounds of steel looking
at sunrise and
sunset. That’s twelve men
who never turned
leaf pages of a
Blueback
Speller; learned to write with
a hoe and reap
with a plow, understood
math by how many
bales of cotton a pair
of hands could
snatch before the sun
dipped to it’s
knees. It’s the lift of lining bar,
the regular
sound of a mauling, driving
three hundred,
five pound spikes a day
It’s the sound
of a conductor moving
a dozen down the
line.
Damn young fool
lasted three days with men who forgot more work than he’ll
ever do. Men who been working since they stopped sucking milk
from they mama’s tit. Men born from can’t get no harder
than these times.
Mary Elizabeth:
The Knee Baby Moves in With Relatives, 1955
When I first
moved
to Look Out
Avenue
I still harbored
beliefs
momma beat in me
raw
with three braid
switches
until it became
difficult
to endure other
people
telling me what
to do
like I am their
daughter.
Now my skin is
hardened
with a defiance
of
an unbroken
mustang,
I do what I
please;
like chase boys
who drive
dark blue
Chryslers,
step my saddle
oxfords
in dime socials,
dance with
the First Street
Boys who
wear V-neck
cardigans
with razor sharp
crew cuts
caked full of
Murray ’s
doing the
Madison , cause
I’m free to
twirl like a top.
Let them pull,
snap the hem
of my ivy league
skirt
to Frankie Lymon
spinning real
crazy;
like a 78 on the
Victrola.
Stay out till
the moon
gets tired of
smiling.
Let them know
Momma
raise me
womanstrong
like the back of
her hand.
