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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810151543 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/13/2005 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 104 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
to be in this number
By alane rollings
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2005
Alane Rollings
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-5155-0
Chapter One sweetness night and day
I thought I inhabited my thoughts alone.
But those whose deaths I felt I'd die of, since I hadn't said or done as much as love required, live so vividly in me that others seem comparatively unreal.
Each death had left me over-swept with pain. All my senses ceased receiving anything but pain. Day, dust, night, love, time, thought: pain. Since I hadn't loved enough, I had no right to suffer it, no choice but to suffer it.
I studied the lost faces, soft and hard and vague as faces. Their gazes asked for nothing, but needed sweetness night and day.
My Dead, having lived, must be kept, somehow, alive.
As towns grow bright at sundown, drawing dwellers on dark outskirts into their lit-up hearts, I pulled my Lost toward my center, shared with them my blood, sweat, breath, and vulnerability. Hoisting them around like a bag of newborn lambs sticking noses out to nuzzle me, I asked them what I've asked since I was born-Why was I born?
Except that I was carrying them, we were not that different. I gave them constant reassurance of their actuality, while in my mind, I redid everything I'd done and said.
They observed me with the rapt attention of the ignorant, then flickered like a moving picture's strips of sun and shadow. They filled me with their absences, then led me to a countryside where breezes left the baby's breath untouched, yet brought, in unexpected gusts, solace through the morning haze. No low-wheeling hawk ruffled up the goldenrod or stopped a jacaranda from dropping violet petals upon a herd of yaks.
Afternoons, we'd mosey through the towns along the waterways-replicas of those upon opposing shores-with pre-grief sorrow, knowing that, at sundown, all the towns, absorbing our departures, would glow with loneliness for us, matching ours for them.
The towns were evanescent: ghosts of roses on a trellis. Yet each connected with a road that met another road running to another river, every river bearing cradles, trucks, deer mice, gates, God knows what atop its currents as it rushed through poplars, boxwood, bluegums, taking shortcuts through the wide landscape-where life and death took place-into a broader vista where imagination overtakes events.
The nights and days that gathered there illuminated every passing moment.
But back within the genuine atmosphere where I'd been raised, whole weeks were fading out and blaming me: I hadn't lived them.
I'd been holding out for more: an adequate good-bye and sweetness day and night.
I'd call to my companions: Courtney, Leanne, Arthur, Raman, Lynda, Helen, Aunt Rowena, Uncle Wayne, Aunt Evelyn, Uncle Robert ...
I'd become a crowd; I was three generations waking up in a different spot each hour to the sky's unbroken solitude. Journeying together, we traversed the glistening drifts of sand of our untrammeled sweep of land whose headstrong rapids wouldn't let one kingfisher go under. How could I let my Lost get lost once and for all?
I had more to do and say!
But Grandmother and the others I'd been born to bear-though often in bad moods, they needed love anyway-grew impatient with me: Needing love, I'd used them to protect my isolation. And all they'd been to me was not at all like who they'd been.
As a last, magnanimous gesture, they circled me, neighing inconsolably. Then, on wobbly, purebred legs haunch-high in black-eyed Susans, they crisscrossed through a mist-wall and stumbled off the landscape one by one.
What they'd been was me. The only way to keep them was to hold as closely as I could all the borrowed elements that recompose me by the hour on this substantial planet where I live.
Gardens here saturate the twilight air with scents of morning glories, tiger lilies, foxfire, larkspur, trillium-as if sundown could be overcome or anyone could love enough in such a little bit of time, and in the limits of this place whose sweetness night and day, when love moves through in infinite streams, nothing can exceed.
Chapter Two fire in the water
For this is the country where the age of the internal combustion engine has come into its own, where every boy is Barney Oldfield and the girls wear organdy and batiste and eyelet embroidery and no panties on account of the climate ... -Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
Ten years before the Crash, after an eclipse made Relativity a certainty, the marks of Civil War had been erased in Mississippi.
Riverside, a father slept, depressed; a mother sold Dry Goods. As she sashayed to town and back, her swinging hips split the world: Yes/No; Apple Betty/Lake of Hell; pot pies for the poor/no cokes, no smokes, no radio for men-Rebels-always squelched.
Riverside, their boy picked up New Orleans' radio ragtime. Home, she waited, radiant, with his "birthright": Noah, Job, Abraham ... rising by "begats" over wives and Kings to Chronicles and Acts, past Judges up the Prophets' pointers to Ezekiel's wheels-the big one, turning stars, and the others, interlocked with every worldly cog. The mechanism, overtaxed at every joint, sapped his soul.
He poled his raft toward riverboats. Pushed by steam, their engines turned the paddle wheels that cranked the siren songs out of calliopes. He sounded shoreward; cemetery-cities looming there scared him home.
Deep in downed pecans, she waited, night-gowned, in a backyard gang of ghosts: mothers nudging sons to sew the gashes that their fathers cut-specter-fathers still expecting these grown daughters to appease the spirits of their mothers-bullied speechless by their fathers, hounded by their mothers ...
So each-living, men, women, dead-battered and was beaten by the shame and blame inevitable in 2-by-2 existence.
Off he ran. Riverside, branches danced on cumulus; a bobolink was pining; a kingfisher, sapphire-winged, thrashed his bait-fish catch; the boy freed a fox that wept, Spring the trap; patch me!
Gusts whipped up the rain they spewed. The 3-yard stream soon overfilled into a 10-yard water wall, falling right and left, and then abandoning both sides. Stranding boats on bucking sand, it flooded 40 levees. It sucked barns up and dropped bulls down on 18-wheelers drowning on I-75. Louisiana cried: Evangeline!-she lay bleeding. Plaquemine!-6 feet down. New Orleans!-as lonely as a Lamentations town. Her living floated with her dead, spread the dogwood-catfish South with bile. And all that Spanish moss, in fact, hadn't yet absorbed the Mess of 60 years before.
The hurricane, tossing twisters, ran off to the Gulf. The boy raced back to riverside, where waves rolled over fireballs-main streets, pickup trucks, twin beds-then spat out wheelchairs, quilts, fig trees, fractured girls, dismembered boys ...
Mid-river, under frazzled power lines, business ledgers whirled.
They'd never logged a single heart's combustion! But under private waters, he was crackling toward an inner blaze.
Moans and sea-songs, always waiting up for him, rammed his lungs and disordered all of Numbers' numbers. Shamed and blamed by fantasies, he picked up, by Model T, the road. The hungry, comeback beat of jazz was throbbing on the radio. To and fro, he carted "balm-from-Gilead"-water!-to the hard-hit, to tent cities. Doctoring his people-everybody-let him snap back into socket.
In his head, on the phantom line between 2 tiny hammers that had twanged to his Mamma's cry-Baby!-he felt himself-his millstone-finally centered.
Near the end of a Depression it would take a war to finish, he hauled his expectations to New Orleans. On Clio Street, beside a girl as sweet as honeydew, he parked his ancient Packard. By radio, Swing sang, It's behind you:
The Chasm-as personal as nerves etched by friction, burned by want, burst by hurt, and added up by 1,000s on a life-wave reeling down 10,000 years. The Chasm that divides the race in two and multiplies suffering and passion by each other ...
She shifted half an inch toward yes. In self-defense, he alarmed her: YOU CAN'T TOUCH MY DIAL!!
Might as well try picking up what arced above them, linking all the cities: a big black bag of heaven's sea, leaking fire through star-pricks.
Chapter Three page-a-minute
An emperor besieged a town. He told the women they could leave, carrying what they could. They came out of their houses with their husbands and children on their backs. -old tale
I came out of my mother on my own. I used to think I'd lived my past alone.
When she met Daddy-'41-between Euterpe Street and Terpsichore, her green eyes tilted upward. Soon, they had two small girls, then four ('54). At the birth of Pamela and Janet, her 1st twins, her navel, a line, grew circular.
They'd skid, north-south, along our Georgia hall. She'd pace, east-west, the kitchen, praising all their steps. Catch them in a lockhold? She'd lock one up, one down, toss one The Brothers Grimm, the other Mother Goose, chiming to both 5-year-olds: Maybe you'll escape!
Soon, by Ford, we all made Daddy's house calls to the "coloreds," the hard-hit. Pinpoint's red clay roads-overgrown with green gardenias-turned to Isle o' Hope's shell-paved alleys, their deeper green magnolias. "Shalimar" from Mamma's hair, unbobbed by speed, increased the sweetness as it flew (as I-9-knew). That fall, Ol' Lady cut the romance short: Well, sit all day in the Mercury, if it makes you King of the Castle! Half an hour, I sat singing: I'm the king and she's the big, mean Communist!
Soon, spying through the nursery door hinge, I-11-watched her kidnap Robert. She bounced, kissed, hoisted him, then cha-cha'd with him up and down our row of antique desks. Then it hit me: dancing shoes could dance you-me-west o' the sun and 6 feet under ...
Soon, her Singer spun a costume for his spinning twin: Ellen, in a tutu, draped in crimson tulle, became the Firebird, grand-jêtéing into riddles' eyes: What turns common things to what you want? Then what you'll lose?
What marched off the Silver Screen to Gaston Street to Victory Drive to Habersham to White Bluff Road and into me, collapsing with my Moon Pie at the Minit Store? What Time was it, Old Witch? '63! I'd bled, fainted, tasted iron-and I thought Time was mine! A minute in the cooler, and I staggered home, to the attic-Leave me be! I'm on a streak!-bounding down to rev the Deuce Coupe through the fence to Largo Drive to Abercorn toward Beaufort.
Dear Diary, Today Mamma's wicked witch-hand whacked me.
* * *
(My Post-it Note-'85) All I ever did for you was to scream bloody murder. Some Red Rover sent her over-over all her griefs into my ocean-deep emotions. Came a spring ('97), we six kids caught her call for all of us, ran home. Loved the same, we wore our different versions of her face, loved the same.
Mamma-old; too sick too soon, in Daddy's nightshirt, prison-striped, and her pale-as-duck-down hair-took a baby step toward us-back into the March of Time-then sank into the arms of the violet girls in bonnets that her mother- her Melpomene-had whipstitched on her daughter's quilt. Mamma's first,
her fair Cynthia, held her as she fell. Now, in the guest room, she's asleep. Her closed eyes flutter: left/right, black/white, bright/pale, page on page ...
Beneath a scrapbook photo, clipped ('42) from the Times-Picayune: The treasure of Polymnia Street: Page-a-Minute Irma Lee, her midnight mane crowned in Pink Sensations by the former Secretary Queen of storied New Orleans.
Mamma's secret reading stops-she's awake-and starts: she's back with images that haunt, fade, return, return, return, return, return, and then, dropping the iron lace of inconsolable, planet-core emotions-stop again.
Full stop.
Who killed Cock Robin? Who pilfered silver apples from the moon, then flung us out into blank space to fetch them?
Golden Ogre, leaping greedily through stars-her stars-a lantern group, suspended there at my 1st-story window-her view-just east o' the North Wind's cookie-her moon-it's You! And here, in my high school spiral binder-page by 8-by-11-inch moonlit page-I see impressions of your teeth ...
And everywhere, with all my sensible, common-sensical diamonds-my moon, stars, mother-I'm caught inside Time's crooked bite.
January; '67; Henry Street; Savannah. Long red light. She wore turquoise (store-bought; Tall Girls' Shop) and waltzed around her kids as we got taller. A bus rushed out of who knows what, jumped the curb, drenched her face, and swirled her swept-up skirt-unveiling Mamma's skinny legs,
our helplessness.
Chapter Four gang of four
White coral bells upon a slender stalk, Lilies of the valley deck my garden walk. Oh, don't you wish that you could hear them ring? That will happen only when the faeries sing. -from "White Coral Bells," an old round
By accidents-our births-I found them not long afterward. They had my blood. To warm it, I pressed my chest to theirs. To read my thoughts, you'd have thought these four the only kids. Big Sis, I'd fetch my gang for visitors and start a round: White coral bells ... I sang. Then their White coral bells ... rang out, chiming to my lilies of the valley ...
Among the yard's blue gums, the twins scattered and regrouped.
One Monday, when they left the house, a cloud bank rushed off to the woods, fast-forward, hauling off the sky. Someone must have vanished! I cried and gasped for half an hour. My gang had gone to school.
One September, I left them, high-stepping at the tetherball. From college, I was still transfixed each time their faces crossed my thoughts. Then when, in flickering mixer strobes, classmates hit familiar notes, their new features also gripped my consciousness. Our talk-with intermittent strains of melodrama, comedy, bravado, revelation-rose above the thumping Rock to drop me, fast-reverse, on my inside backstretch, a private, mental space, never mine alone for long.
That sprawling lawn, always tended, always overgrown, still opens wide to strangers who can ferry, by any small resemblance, my brother or a sister up from memory. Then two eternal six-year-olds and two eternal eight-year-olds step forth from recessed orchestras of hollyhocks and 4 o'clocks and into my awareness, a resounding, central pit.
Passersby who bring to mind my sisters and my brother are tied to me by this: each is bound to others. Link by link, not thinking-flash-I make them "gang of friends."
In imagined rows of time-lapse photos, they unfold. Then they begin enfolding me, overcoming my resistance to a tie that might become too taut-if not too slack-to last for long.
For that moment-a chord prolonged by echoes-everyone is one of us. All of us, by one spell, are held: kin, friends, enemies, and some, the peace of whose strong lives had promised peace, in time, for me ...
Suddenly, their time had gone: Linton and Leona, Imre and Maria, Alberto, Edward, Kate, Peter, John, Omelia-"mine" long enough to call them "mine"-all had vanished.
Then there they were once more! In the sister/brother aura, everyone was backlit by my sudden recognition on a wide, brief terrace, ever-green with fragile bonds that strengthen in their blossoming. Momentarily, in the lengthening sweep of consciousness, all of us rock all of us in full refrains of baby's breath, counter-pointing lilies of the valley ...
Stepping out in my interior, I become a crowd-sistered, brothered by all kinds in a long-as-life exchange whose resonance intensifies a sympathy that heightens resonance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from to be in this number by alane rollings
Copyright © 2005 by Alane Rollings. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents PART 1 1 Sweetness Night and Day....................32 Fire in the Water....................6
3 Page-a-Minute....................9
4 Gang of Four....................12
5 Crossover....................15
6 Blood Sport....................18
7 Saint Venus....................21
8 The Secret Blackness of Red Roses....................24
PART 11 9 High Romance and Everlastingness....................31
10 World-Class Race....................34
11 Fair Seas, a Backup Breeze....................37
12 Models of Comportment....................39
13 Anti-Romantic....................42
14 Bozos, Bimbos, Scapegoats, Scum....................45
15 When Livin' Ain't Livin'....................48
16 Transfusion....................55
PART III 17 Winged Bike....................61
18 Altars in the Urban Heart....................64
19 In No Time....................67
20 Venus as a Ship's Light....................70
21 The Solace of the Possible....................73
22 The Stretch....................76
23 Town Meeting....................80
24 Instrument of Peace....................84
Notes on the Poems....................87
Selected Bibliography....................91