Shelved

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I began this poem by cataloging things that are set away for another time. While writing I became nostalgic and thought of my Uncle Jimmie, and the grief of his life when he lost his wife, my Aunt Ginny, first to mental illness shortly after their daughter, my only cousin, was born, then sometime not too long after, to death. Later he lost their daughter, too, much too young. Then the poem slipped into fiction, as he never lived on a farm that I know of, and he did find love again with a second wife, though he outlived her, too. So this is about a farmer who was not as fortunate as my uncle perhaps, but who I'm sure must have lived like this. I don’t write many rhyming poems, but rhymes seem suited for nostalgia.

Shelved

Bone plates in the cupboard
for blackberries and pears;
onions in a basket flaking
down the basement stair;

photos crammed in shoeboxes
behind the cabinet’s frieze;
winter boots under winter coats,
and under the lid: piano keys;

clippers in a copper bowl,
mauve eggs in the house of wrens;
golf clubs in the attic next to
the glass ballerina “Madeleine”;

amber rectangle of Chanel
shining at the bottom of a vial,
sleeping eyes and teeth and tongue
in the silent accumulation of bile;

poems in books, bats in the barn,
attar in furrows of unopened roses,
the moon and stars in the light of day,
the sun, after night’s closet closes;

needles and yarn in an old crewel bag,
half-finished sweater, an undarned sock,
piles of cotton, batting and lace,
a refashioned dress just ready to smock;

shovels and rakes hung head up
between the nails of the shed,
firewood honeycombed along a wall,
the axe asleep in its bed

like old Uncle Jim, love-lost and meek
when at last we laid him in earth;
wind in the crotch of the giant oak,
hens lined up on their berth;

his heart in its shell as snug as an egg
dropped warm from its mother hen,
eclipsed by a shroud when Aunt Ginny died
and it never came out again.



May 2012

Poetry should be heard.

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Poem: What survives

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Photo 'lead type' from jm3 at flickr
via Creative Commons license

Our children, and subsequent children, will know little about the printing press, movable type, and typesetting, except from history books and very cool art departments where book printing continues as an art form. My Uncle Jimmie had his own printing press and these tiny letters and symbols of different fonts. He had a nice little private printing business and printed our wedding invitations thirty-three years ago. I got to thinking about the loss of this painstaking "black art" sometime late afternoon yesterday, when I looked out the deck window and noticed that all the birds were gone. There had been hundreds of them on top of the bird seed on the ground all day. It got me thinking about . . .

What survives

Not a one is left
on the basin of ground

under the spruce tree
where sunflower seeds cover
snow

like black letters
on a white page

And evening draws down
its fade --

sky, rooftops and ground
the same shade of white-gray

The bamboo leaves
are still

and graceful,
like vintage wallpaper

A hundred birds
scavenged
all the day,

tirelessly
picking up and
rearranging black seeds

like typesetters preparing
the evening paper

for hours,
in a rush,

furiously, against
a cold night

as if their livelihood depended on it
as if a deadline approached

And where are they now
gone from this silent basin

Perched on the bars
of pine trees

inside a thick atmosphere
of huddling?

Their black claw feet
tapping each other,

knocking snow
from the boughs

their gullets
transforming seeds

into words
inside them

like

y e s t e r d a y

and
t o m o r r o w

and
n o w

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Father's Day

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Sunday, June 20 is Father's Day in the U.S. Since I devoted a recent post to my dad (the oak book case), I'm going to focus this Father's Day post on my dad's brother, Uncle Jimmie.

My dad was the pastor, the sun shining from the pulpit. Uncle Jimmie was the moon, the kind of man who could slip by without notice. (Not that I don't always look for the moon when I'm out at night.) Two of his dark losses the poem refers to are losing his wife early, and losing his only child Marjorie in her thirties, in a tragic death. Also born in Virginia, like my dad, he stayed there his entire life. I love how he said "Mrs. Culpepper" -- Mrs. Culpeppah. Maybe the Virginian accent is the most beautiful of all the Southern accents. Uncle Jimmie had the humblest and most loving smile of anyone I've ever known. He was very shy, even physically. You could feel him try to disappear into his skin. Yet somehow he managed to transform himself for us kids when he hand-combed his hair down over his eyes, shrank his tall thin self down, dragging his knuckles on the floor, jutting his lower jaw out and sticking his tongue inside his upper lip to make himself look like an ape, and leapt and oh-oh-ohed monkey gutturals around the room, just to entertain us. I miss him. He was a tremendous man, uncle and father. He died in 1994, and I wrote this poem shortly after that.

"Flying to Uncle Jimmie's Funeral" is a catalog poem. That just means you write lists and descriptions, cataloging something, or many things. So if you look, you can see many catalogs of different things. It's a way of expanding a metaphor, like the moon, into more layers.

Flying to Uncle Jimmie's Funeral

He was not magnetic in life.
We did not gather to him like birds
around a sunrise,
airplanes on the tarmac around the hub of gates,
garden club seniors around flowering dogwoods,
doctors around the bed of a dying man
or mourners around a coffin.
He was not central.

He was adjacent.
Reflective of someone else's glory,
like the moon outside my cabin window,
or the pond reflecting the moon
in the farmer's field below,
a point of interest along the route
under a plane flying somewhere else,
the man in the moon, slightly off center,
shy of looking at you full-faced.

More accurately, he was adjacent
and translucent, the man in the moon
in daylight,
a filmy petal at the side of the sky,
delicately agreeing with the sun,
drawing little attention to himself,
allowing other light, not only to take credit,
but also to define him,
so simply lucid he was.

Still, he was light,
undeniably brighter and warmer than the space
to which he was adjacent.
Now that I have looked long enough to study him
I don't recall that a shadow
ever eclipsed his face even a sliver,
somehow, miraculously staying full
throughout the dark losses
of his life.

Now, he lies in Richmond in a casket,
waiting at the center of all our routes,
my parents, my brother and I from Michigan,
my sisters from California,
Chicago, Atlanta,
and those in Virginia,
his sister from Bridgewater,
his ancient friends from Fredericksburg,
Harrisonburg, Charlottesville.
He is the hub of our spokes,
a magnet guiding our courses,
the point to which we aspire,
the focus of every thought.

I imagine the man in the moon, contained
in a closed box
that can't accommodate the rays,
like his fragile body that condensed power
and couldn't keep it from spilling out
despite his efforts,
beams overflowing,
having the life of a respirator tube,
the beauty of a dogwood branch
and the attraction of
a simple white line on the edge
of the runway that turns out
to be an arrow.


~ Ruth M.
February 1994
Published in the Red Cedar Review May 1994

Listen to me read "Flying to Uncle Jimmie's Funeral", here.

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