Because when your body bruises and softens, you are perfected.
Because your soul, persimmon, issugar.
These are the final two propositions. All have been fragments. Knowledge has come to the speaker, and the poet, in a fragmented way. Everything that has happened to her in the course of her life, all that is unstated, has led her to this point. All along, by talking about the persimmon Silver has been talking about herself, her own body, her own spiritual journey. Throughout the poem, she has been teaching herself how to transform suffering into praise. At the end, she discovers and thus teaches herself that the persimmon becomes perfected only when its body “bruises and softens.” The persimmon is the adequate symbol because it is astringent when it is immature but sweet when it ripens. Silver is singular, however, in the way she imparts a soul to the persimmon and invests it with meaning. Thus, the ripening fruit becomes a way to reckon with her own physical and spiritual life.
Anya Krugovoy Silver died in 2018 at the age of forty. She wrote beautifully moving testaments as a witness and survivor, and it is harrowing to close the book on her life and work.
Patricia Smith
* * *
“Ethel’s Sestina”
(2006)
Ethel’s Sestina” is one of the last poems that Patricia Smith wrote for Blood Dazzler, her gut-wrenching and enraged sequence centered on Hurricane Katrina. She has said that because of the book’s subject matter—all the betrayal, the terror, the numbing loss—it was difficult for her to find a place to infuse the tragic narrative with light.
Ethel’s Sestina
Ethel Freeman’s body sat for days in her wheelchair outside
the New Orleans Convention Center. Her son Herbert, who
had assured his mother that help was on the way, was forced
to leave her there once she died.
* * *
Gon’ be obedient in this here chair,
gon’ bide my time, fanning against this sun.
I ask my boy, and all he says is Wait.
He wipes my brow with steam, says I should sleep.
I trust his every word. Herbert my son.
I believe him when he says help gon’ come.
* * *
Been so long since all these suffrin’ folks come
to this place. Now on the ground ’round my chair,
they sweat in my shade, keep asking my son
could that be a bus they see. It’s the sun
foolin’ them, shining much too loud for sleep,
making us hear engines, wheels. Not yet. Wait.
* * *
Lawd, some folks prayin’ for rain while they wait,
forgetting what rain can do. When it come,
it smashes living flat, wakes you from sleep,
eats streets, washes you clean out of the chair
you be sittin’ in. Best to praise this sun,
shinin’ its dry shine. Lawd have mercy, son,
* * *
is it coming? Such a strong man, my son.
Can’t help but believe when he tells us, Wait.
Wait some more. Wish some trees would block this sun.
We wait. Ain’t no white men or buses come,
but look—see that there? Get me out this chair,
help me stand on up. No time for sleepin’,
* * *
cause look what’s rumbling this way. If you sleep
you gon’ miss it. Look there, I tell my son.
He don’t hear. I’m ’bout to get out this chair,
but the ghost in my legs tells me to wait,
wait for the salvation that’s sho to come.
I see my savior’s face ’longside that sun.
* * *
Nobody sees me running toward the sun.
Lawd, they think I done gone and fell asleep.
They don’t hear Come.
* * *
Come.
Come.
Come.
Come.
Come.
Come.
Ain’t but one power make me leave my son.
I can’t wait, Herbert. Lawd knows I can’t wait.
Don’t cry, boy, I ain’t in that chair no more.
* * *
Wish you coulda come on this journey, son,
seen that ol’ sweet sun lift me out of sleep.
Didn’t have to wait. And see my golden chair?
Patricia Smith begins this impassioned lyric with a documentary headnote that dispassionately informs us in two sentences what happened to Ethel Freeman during Hurricane Katrina. We learn the cold hard facts of the situation. This journalistic decision freed Smith to launch herself into Ethel’s body, to speak from her point of view. We already know what happened to Freeman—some of us can recall turning on CNN and seeing the image of her body in a wheelchair outside the convention center in New Orleans. She was covered by a sheet. What we couldn’t imagine is how she must have felt in the hours leading up to her death. This suffering is the space that Smith enters. She formalizes an empathic leap of imagination.
Smith calls her poem “Ethel’s Sestina” because it is in some way meant to be Ethel’s poem. It is elegiac—we know that Ethel has died—but it is not an elegy per se, or at least not a traditional one, because it takes her point of view and ventriloquizes her voice. Smith assumes a familiarity with Ethel Freeman, a person she did not know, since she refers to Ethel by her first name and infers her vernacular. She has said that Ethel reminded her of many of the elderly women she grew up with who populated the pews of Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago, “women who sang in cracking altos with their eyes lifted to the rafters, unafraid of anything the world could do to them.” These women believed in one of the basic tenets of the Baptist Church, “that there is a glorious reward in death, a heavenly life waiting just beyond this one for anyone who was patient and faithful enough.”
It’s also true, though, that no one speaks offhandedly in a form as elaborate as a sestina. That’s why the mask slips and we inevitably feel the poet behind the speaker when we read this performative lyric. Like Anthony Hecht in “The Book of Yolek,” Smith exploits the fact that the sestina is an obsessively repetitive poetic form. Whereas he treats the form as a walk, a series of compulsive returns, she picks up on the fact that people often repeat themselves when they talk, and these repetitions are fundamental to the sestina. Smith told an interviewer that she “chose the form of the sestina because it mirrored the way that elderly black women speak, returning again and again to the same idea, the same comfortable words.” She calls these words “comfort spots.”
Smith, who began as a spoken-word poet, displays her technical virtuosity by making this highly elaborate form sound completely natural. She chooses carefully the six decisive, meaningful words that conclude and begin each one of the six stanzas that constitute the substance of the poem. These monosyllabic words create the framework of the story: “chair,” “sun,” “wait,” “sleep,” “son,” “come.” Smith tightens the sounds by using a homophone (“sun” / “son”). Ethel Freeman sat in her wheelchair in the scorching sun, waiting for help, while her son kept explaining that it was going to come. All the while, she kept trying to fend off sleep, which would lead to death.
Smith skillfully utilizes a five-beat, ten-syllable line throughout the poem. I have noted elsewhere how often blank verse has been used in the history of English-language poetry—from William Shakespeare’s plays to Robert Frost’s dramatic monologues—to evoke the spoken word, to dramatically place a speaker in a specific situation, and that’s precisely what Smith does here. She shortens many words—“going to” becomes “gon’, ” “suffering” becomes “suffrin’, ” and so on—which enables her to maintain the ten-syllable line while creating a conversational tone. She captures the local speaking voice of a woman in extremis.
There’s a kind of stage management operating in the penultimate stanza, where Smith loosens and radically stretches
the sestina form by repeating the word “Come” six times, on six different lines. We hear the desperation in Ethel’s voice as she keeps repeating the word. Her long wait is interminable. But no one comes to rescue her. The sestina is a poem of sixes, and Ethel’s repeated cry comes six times:
Come.
Come.
Come.
Come.
Come.
Come.
The chant breaks the stanza in half and marks the definitive turning point in the poem. Ethel says one more thing, like an aside, to no one in particular: “Ain’t but one power make me leave my son.” After that, she speaks directly to her son at the very point of her own death. The italics are emphatic: “ I can’t wait, Herbert. Lawd knows I can’t wait. / Don’t cry, boy, I ain’t in that chair no more.”
The three-line envoi is always a send-off, but this sestina literalizes the farewell and uses the six end-words to mark a crossover into death itself. Now Ethel speaks to Herbert as if from the other side. Her speech is calmer, no longer appears in italic, and has a kind of sweet wistfulness and longing: “Wish you coulda come on this journey, son, / seen that ol’ sweet sun lift me out of sleep. / Didn’t have to wait. And see my golden chair?”
Ethel’s wheelchair has been transformed into a throne, and the poem concludes on a triumphant note. It’s as if the poet had decided that Freeman could outwit death, much like the sacrilegious Cousin Vit in Gwendolyn Brooks’s sonnet “The rites for Cousin Vit.” Or, as Smith has asserted, “Death wasn’t going to be strong enough to end her.” “Ethel’s Sestina” ends with a question, which is directed to her son but overheard by all of us, believers and nonbelievers, readers who find themselves wishing that Ethel really has found herself in another realm, sitting on a beautiful golden chair in heaven.
Carolyn Creedon
* * *
“Woman, Mined”
(2006)
Carolyn Creedon writes out of the body, out of lived experience, with no holds barred, and refuses to prettify things. Here is the poem that opens her first book, Wet (2012):
Woman, Mined
In the cosmetics department of Lord & Taylor
they’ll take you right there, right out in the open,
plain as day, and snap you with an ultraviolet camera,
show what you’ve done to your skin just
by living, your face exposed suddenly like what’s
really going on under a lifted-up log, the real you
you are, caught and pinned like a moth,
like a shoplifter, like a woman on a table
* * *
and the lady in the crisp white smock will expertly
flick the snapshot in front of you, laid out
like a color-coded map of conquered countries,
the purples and browns places you gave up
without a care in your twenties, to late nights
and poolside deck chairs and men, all the men
you touched, the ones who marked you, whose traces
you bear, and now you can see the archeology
of tears, their white-acid trails, and the lady
will say, sternly: Look what you did
* * *
and you will see the mess of it you made, and you
will see the times when you carelessly went to bed
with someone without the proper moisturizer, when you
suckled that man like a baby, and when you moved
with another like a girl on a rocker until you fell off
and lost him, and finally picked another, like the best-of-all
flower, and kept him, cried on him, made him sandwiches,
made him a baby, and you’ll wear your face
with its amber earned, its amethyst, its intaglio tear-
etched diamond, and say, I am cut that way.
There is a Plathian virtuosity and bravado in Creedon’s one-sentence poem, which carries across three stanzas and twenty-eight lines. She sweeps us along on the music of her associations, letting the literal situation yield its metaphorical power. “I guess I try to write poems the way I think,” she once said, “and I ‘think’ a poem in long lines connected by lots of ands and ifs—I kind of believe that women naturally think that way. Ends of sentences only come when we run out of time or hope.”
Creedon’s poems are highly gendered. In “Woman, Mined,” the cosmetics counter of a department store suddenly seems like an illicit place because of what it exposes: how a woman has aged. Creedon writes about her own experience but also suggests that it is somehow representative. The title indicates an objective or objectified woman, who is confronting the cultural ideal or stereotype of flawless youth and beauty. Throughout the poem, though, the speaker always addresses the second person, as if talking to herself or some other intimate. “In the cosmetics department of Lord & Taylor / they’ll take you right there, right out in the open . . .”
This “you” is being excavated in public, dug up and “mined” for something precious. It seems she has done something embarrassing or shameful simply by living. Now she has been “caught and pinned like a moth, / like a shoplifter, like a woman on a table . . .” It’s as if the cosmetician is a lepidopterist, a plainclothes policewoman, a surgeon. A woman on a table evokes the helpless image of a patient, who is put in the position of being ill, vulnerable, laid out naked for inspection. There is a dark humor and grim comedy in the situation, in the scolding by the cosmetician, who says “Look what you did,” and the speaker’s interpretation of the words as she applies them to her own experience.
What’s really going on under there? At the cosmetics counter, magnification exposes how skin has been damaged over years of abuse. When the salesperson flicks a snapshot of the speaker’s face, she feels “laid out / like a color-coded map of conquered countries.” This triggers the memory of herself as a heedless young woman in her twenties, who gave herself up to so many unworthy men, the ones she touched, the ones who marked her so that she has been left with “the archeology / of tears.” There’s an echo of Allen Grossman’s phrase “the fame / Of tears,” now transformed into an anthropological term. Creedon returns us to the meaning of the poem’s title, “Woman, Mined,” to the experience of a woman whose sadness is being unearthed.
The speaker can’t stop wisecracking, but there’s a ruefulness to the way she numbers the memories:
the times when you carelessly went to bed
with someone without the proper moisturizer, when you
suckled that man like a baby, and when you moved
with another like a girl on a rocker until you fell off
and lost him . . .
All those crazed intimacies, infantile men, sexual escapades, lost days. But there’s fulfillment in the poem as she finally finds just the right one, the keeper, her lifelong partner.
The speaker herself seems amused by the way she reels off the experiences, linking the mundane and the life-changing as if they are equivalent: “made him sandwiches, / made him a baby.” There’s a kind of panache in Creedon’s linking of these two phrases. The phrase “made him sandwiches” has a sly eroticism and refers back to her love poem “Litany,” in which she asks Tom if he will let her love him in his restaurant; he can make her a newly invented sandwich, which she will eat and call “a carolyn sandwich.” Here she is reversing roles and making him “a carolyn sandwich.” In “Woman, Mined,” the sandwich making immediately joins up with “made him a baby.” Creedon has said that she is ashamed of the line, which is there almost to placate men, since the darker truth is that she had a miscarriage. Yet there is no way of knowing that from the poem itself. In the lyric, one thing seems to lead to the other, as if naturally, as if it’s a simple leap from making sandwiches to having babies.
The end of the poem seems reminiscent of Randall Jarrell’s poem “The Face.” In that poem, a woman registers the shock of aging and realizes that ordinary living is “dangerous,” more dangerous than anything else. But whereas Jarre
ll projects himself across the gender divide, Creedon writes out of her own painfully earned experience as a woman. The poem crescendos in the last line, where the speaker switches from the second person to the first: “and you’ll wear your face / with its amber earned, its amethyst, its intaglio tear- / etched diamond, and say, I am cut that way.”
At the end of “Woman, Mined,” Creedon’s speaker takes the metaphor of mining to its determined conclusion. She understands that she has mined her life and come up with something precious, after all; that her face has earned its lines. The “archeology of tears” has been transformed into a single “intaglio tear- / etched diamond.” She pauses for emphasis on “tear” and then converts it into “tear-etched.” She now owns her own face. She has earned and paid for it. For the first time, she speaks in the first person with a secure boldness: “I am cut that way.”
Natasha Trethewey
* * *
“Graveyard Blues”
(2006)
Natasha Trethewey is an elegiac poet. She catapults herself into the past and tries to excavate what has been obscured in memory or even obliterated from it. She investigates her own personal losses and connects them to larger historical erasures. She seeks to rectify and right the record. Her experience as a biracial Southern woman has led her to mine history for what has been overlooked or forgotten, lest it be lost. She is not a historian but a poet who dramatizes lost stories, who searches the past for what Ezra Pound called “luminous details.”
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 42