POETRY MONDAY: February 2, 2009
Linda McCarriston
I’ve been an admirer of Linda McCarriston’s work for many years, for the way she confronts trauma and pain, both her own and that of others, to create poems of layered complexity and grace. What she gives us in her poems in this vein is not the recovery of repressed memories but stark personal witness — actual memories, courageously actualized.
Of her three excellent collections, Talking Soft Dutch, Eva-Mary and Little River, the award-winning Eva-Mary (Tri-Quarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press) has received the most attention The first two poems below are from Eva-Mary; the third is a new, unpublished poem Linda McCarriston has generously agreed to share with us. I know our readers will fully appreciate the depths these poems plumb, what they have to offer, and to whom.
A native of Lynn, Massachusetts, poet Linda McCarriston is on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
To Judge Faolain, Dead Long Enough: A Summons
Your Honor, when my mother stood
before you, with her routine
domestic plea, after weeks
of waiting for speech
to return to her body, with her
homemade forties hairdo, her face purple still
under pancake, her jaw off just a little,
her holy of holies healing,
her breasts wrung, her heart
the bursting heart of someone
snagged among rocks deep
in a sharkpool – no, not “someone,”
but a woman there, snagged
with her babies, by them,
in one of hope’s pedestrian
brutal turns – when, in the tones
of parlors overlooking the harbor,
you admonished that, for the sake
of the family, the wife
must take the husband back to her bed,
what you willed not to see before you
was a woman risen clean to the surface,
a woman who, with one arm flailing,
held up with the other her actual
burdens of flesh. When you clamped
to her leg the chain of justice,
you ferried us back down to the law,
the black ice eye, the maw, the mako
that circles the kitchen table nightly.
What did you make of the words
she told you, not to have heard her,
not to have seen her there? Almost-
forgiveable ignorance, you were not
the fist, the boot, or the blade,
but the jaded, corrective ear and eye
at the limits of her world. Now
I will you to see her as she was, to ride
your own words back into light: I call
your spirit home again, divesting you
of robe and bench, the fine white hand
and half-lit Irish eye. Tonight, put on
a body in the trailer down the road
where your father, when he can’t
get it up, makes love to your mother
with a rifle. Let your name be
Eva-Mary. Let your hour of birth
be dawn. Let your life be long
and common, and your flesh endure.
(from Eva-Mary)
A Castle in Lynn
In the hometown tonight,
in the quiet before sleep,
a man strokes himself in the darkened
theater of memory. Best old
remembrance, he gets to play it
as slow as he needs, as his hand,
savvy tart of a million reruns,
plays the tune, plays the parts:
now hand is the hard bottom
of the girl. Now hand is full
of the full new breast. Now hand
–square hand, cruel as a spade–
splits the green girlwood of her body.
No one can take this from him now
ever, though she is for years a mother
and worn, and he is too old
to force any again. His cap hangs
on a peg by the door–plaid wool
of an elderly workingman’s park-bench
decline. I got there before
the boys did, he knows, hearing
back to her pleading, back to her
sobbing, to his own voice-over
like his body over hers: laughter,
mocking, the elemental voice
of the cock, unhearted, in its own
quarter. A man is a king in his own
castle, he can still say, having got
what he wanted: in a lifetime
of used ones, second-hand, one girl
he could spill like a shot of whiskey,
the whore only he could call daughter.
(from Eva-Mary)
Bear Valley: Overlooking Anchorage
She drew a swath of snow down
from the mountains’ saddle, drew
green up to meet it, the two at the solstice
a froth where time had scoured
the ridgeline back to rock. That’s
where she put down the house
with the cast-iron cookstove,
and the rosebush, the late, long sun
pulling a next generation of buds
out of its branches like a winning hand.
In dreams back east back then
she drove her two sons alone in the old Volvo
that came unraveled the back and forth
weekends between two rich fathers. Once,
in the White Mountains almost to Maine,
it burst into flame – close enough to Gorham,
thank God, to be able to choose between an hour
of a mechanic’s time and a meal. The dream road,
though, ran straight and flat, to a roadblock,
house sized monoliths, pyramided —
and to keep them, just those few years
–sons the fathers bet would follow
the money home when they were old enough –
to spirit them away from the idea that
a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother is
a throwaway cunt,
she had to get out and lift it —
the two still in it – and she did, bending forward under it
and tipping it onto her back like the laborer
her cousin was, bearing the gift of a used refrigerator
up the back stairs when first she was married
to their father, and climbed with it
this far, this high, this twenty-five
years to set it
above the inlet and city, empty
except for the other idea – for whatever
that’s worth.