Listen Here

Home > Other > Listen Here > Page 42
Listen Here Page 42

by Sandra L. Ballard


  In busy hands lie the greatest stillness, in

  mountains quilted with rain, where crickets cry

  midnight and noon, I walk, you walk on bane-

  laden slopes bathed in green, stroked long ago by

  the steps of the circuit court rider.

  We step over his satchel, where tobacco and

  script, paled to the vein of a flower,

  lie curled among the vines

  that crush them. (Beside them toadstools push

  up their shadows.)

  We step over his saddle, whose cinch broke the

  night when attacked by the headless horseman, he

  spurred his fine gray stallion to a stumble.

  And perhaps no night goes by but he doesn't rise

  from the bones that float their silver from one

  mountainside to another.

  The dead laugh knowingly, but can they peel this

  fruit? How the worm removes even the wildest

  rose to another country.

  In West Virginia, no one walks on water. A wind

  rises as we start to cross the border, and on a road

  that plunges straight down to the flatlands,

  narrowing as it goes (like a fountain), farmers

  wade to church on Sunday morning.

  THE HOLLOW

  from Short and Simple Annals: Poems about Appalachia (1983)

  Reading Li'l Abner in the Sunday paper, she thinks

  of her grandmother and how she wore her hair:

  All coiled, white and gleaming, tucked at the back

  of her head.

  She thinks of Al Capp's wit. He spreads it across

  the page in screaming reds and yellows, but it ends

  up silent: all coiled, white and gleaming, tucked

  at the back of her head.

  Reading Li'l Abner in the Sunday paper, she thinks

  of her sister, who's dumb but sweet; whose vital

  statistics like Daisy Mae's are 36-24-36; whose

  husband is some General Motors VIP.

  All coiled, white and gleaming, tucked at the back

  of her head are yesterday's dreams, today's poverty,

  tomorrow's chores. She bites her fingernails down to

  the quick, and then some more.

  Reading Li'l Abner in the Sunday papers, she thinks

  of her husband: his shoulders are narrow. He's smart.

  He's an Irish Catholic who shadowboxes with the wall

  and reeks of Scotch.

  All coiled, white and gleaming, tucked at the back

  of her head is a vision of her father dead in a

  cemetery in West Virginia, is a vision of her mother

  still in bed, sleeping late on Sunday morning.

  Reading Li'l Abner in the Sunday papers, she thinks

  of her childhood, lost forever in a hollow overhung

  by towering Appalachian beeches. Her tears lie all coiled

  white and gleaming, tucked at the back of her head.

  MOTHER MILKING

  from Short and Simple Annals (1983)

  FOR CHRISTINE MCKINNIE

  Turn down the brim of your old felt hat

  so all I can see are your rosy lips

  Chew on them absently

  Think thoughts I have no way of hearing

  Step carefully through

  the muck of the barn

  Stop to look at the beginning of sun:

  beside each brown slat a blue one

  Sigh and rub the ache in the bone

  the place over the heart where fullness

  has flown like a hen out of a coop go

  around the black snake that lies in your path

  The eggs inside its belly strung out

  like cocoons just before the butterflies

  emerge from their safekeeping Shush the hens

  that roost in a row on the cow's back

  Listen to the soft cooing issuing

  from their throats to the ruffling

  of their shiny feathers as they rise

  to the rafters like powder puffs

  Here where nothing moves but the cow chewing

  its cud its dull stare turning to rock

  Make your hands flash in the dark

  make them light up the barn

  as they take me back to that moment

  in my childhood where nothing belongs but milk

  filling the pail inch by inch

  with its white froth

  warm and sweet

  as the breath of a baby

  MUSIC

  from Short and Simple Annals (1983)

  The house where I was born had a big front yard.

  The porch was blue eye shadow.

  The dwarf cedar had eczema. Rain rolled

  down it like water off a duck's back.

  The moon-faced walk led to a gate

  that creaked when the wind opened it.

  This music rivaled the bee's tiny bell,

  the bird's bubbling promise. Most of the time

  I heard it: the iron gate's solo, its dog face

  looking both ways, its ears curled up like snails.

  Sometimes I made this music myself:

  swinging back and forth, listening to

  the click and moan that sounded

  like my heart in the dead of night

  when in the bedroom alone I heard

  through the wall the ghost of a quarrel:

  mother's dark hair, pressed against the chair's

  pale flank, my father's fist raised and juggling

  the anger that when it fell smashed

  my mother's face in two like precious china.

  IRENE MCKINNEY

  (April 20, 1939–)

  “I'm a hillbilly, a woman, and a poet,” says Irene McKinney, “and I understood early on that nobody was going to listen to anything I had to say anyway, so I might as well just say what I want to.” She has said what she wanted in four collections of poetry. In 1985, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She has also been awarded a West Virginia Commission on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. In 1994, she was named Poet Laureate of West Virginia.

  Born in Belington, West Virginia, where she currently lives, McKinney is the daughter of Celia and Ralph Durrett. She earned her B.A. from West Virginia Wesleyan College, her M.A. from West Virginia University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Utah. She has taught poetry at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Utah, the University of New Mexico, Western Washington University, and Hamilton College. Currently, she teaches English and creative writing at her alma mater, West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon.

  About McKinney's book of poems Six O'Clock Mine Report, poet Maxine Kumin has written, “I am grateful for the poems that burst forth from her West Virginia roots to shape this fine collection.”

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Poetry: Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989), Quick Fire and Slow Fire (1988), The Wasps at the Blue Hexagons (1984), The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap (1976). Edited book: Backcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia (2002).

  SECONDARY

  Maggie Anderson, “The Mountains Dark and Close around Me,” in Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 39. Jeff Mann, “A Conversation with Irene McKinney,” in Her Words (2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 194–205.

  TWILIGHT IN WEST VIRGINIA: SIX O'CLOCK MINE REPORT

  from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989)

  Bergoo Mine No. 3 will work: Bergoo Mine

  No. 3 will work tomorrow. Consol. No. 2

  will not work: Consol. No. 2 will not

  work tomorrow.

  Green soaks into the dark trees.

  The hills go clumped and heavy

  over the foxfire veins

  at Clinchfield, One-Go, Greenbrier.

  At Hardtack and Amity the grit

  abrades the skin. The air is thick
>
  above the black leaves, the open mouth

  of the shaft. A man with a burning

  carbide lamp on his forehead

  swings a pick in a narrow corridor

  beneath the earth. His eyes flare

  white like a horse's, his teeth glint.

  From his sleeves of coal, fingers

  with black half-moons: he leans

  into the tipple, over the coke oven

  staining the air red, over the glow

  from the rows of fiery eyes at Swago.

  Above Slipjohn a six-ton lumbers down

  the grade, its windows curtained with soot.

  No one is driving.

  The roads get lost in the clotted hills,

  in the Blue Spruce maze, the red cough,

  the Allegheny marl, the sulphur ooze.

  The hill-cuts drain; the roads get lost

  and drop at the edge of the strip job.

  The fires in the mines do not stop burning.

  DEEP MINING

  from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989)

  Think of this: that under the earth

  there are black rooms your very body

  can move through. Just as you always

  dreamed, you enter the open mouth

  and slide between the glistening walls,

  the arteries of coal in the larger body.

  I knock it loose with the heavy hammer.

  I load it up and send it out

  while you walk up there on the crust,

  in the daylight, and listen to the coal-cars

  bearing down with their burden.

  You're going to burn this fuel

  and when you come in from your chores,

  rub your hands in the soft red glow

  and stand in your steaming clothes

  with your back to it, while it soaks

  into frozen buttocks and thighs.

  You're going to do that for me

  while I slog in the icy water

  behind the straining cars.

  Until the swing-shift comes around.

  Now, I am the one in front of the fire.

  Someone has stoked the cooking stove

  and set brown loaves on the warming pan.

  Someone has laid out my softer clothes,

  and turned back the quilt.

  Listen: there is a vein that runs

  through the earth from top to bottom

  and both of us are in it.

  One of us is always burning.

  SUNDAY MORNING, 1950

  from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989)

  Bleach in the foot-bathtub.

  The curling iron, the crimped, singed hair.

  The small red marks my mother makes

  across her lips.

  Dust in the road, and on the sumac.

  The tight, white sandals on my feet.

  In the clean sun before the doors,

  the flounces and flowered prints,

  the naked hands. We bring

  what we can—some coins,

  our faces.

  The narrow benches we don't fit.

  The wasps at the blue hexagons.

  And now the rounding of the unbearable

  vowels of the organ, the O

  of release. We bring

  some strain, and lay it down

  among the vowels and the gladioli.

  The paper fans. The preacher paces,

  our eyes are drawn to the window,

  the elms with their easy hands.

  Outside, the shaven hilly graves we own.

  Durrett, Durrett, Durrett. The babies there

  that are not me. Beside me,

  Mrs. G. sings like a chicken

  flung in a pan on Sunday morning.

  …This hymnal I hold in my hands.

  This high bare room, this strict accounting.

  This rising up.

  THE ONLY PORTRAIT OF EMILY DICKINSON

  from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989)

  The straight neck held up out of the lace

  is bound with a black velvet band.

  She holds her mouth the way she chooses,

  the full underlip constrained by a small muscle.

  She doesn't blink or look aside,

  although her left eye is considering

  a slant. She would smile

  if she had time, but right now

  there is composure to be invented.

  She stares at the photographer.

  The black crepe settles. Emerging

  from the sleeve, a shapely hand

  holds out a white, translucent blossom.

  “They always say things which embarrass

  my dog,” she tells the photographer.

  She is amused, but not as much as he'd like.

  VISITING MY GRAVESITE TALBOTT CHURCHYARD, WEST VIRGINIA

  from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989)

  Maybe because I was married and felt secure and dead

  at once, I listened to my father's urgings about “the future”

  and bought this double plot on the hillside with a view

  of the bare white church, the old elms, and the creek below.

  I plan now to use both plots, luxuriantly spreading out

  in the middle of a big double bed.—But no,

  finally, my burial has nothing to do with my marriage, this lying

  here

  in these same bones will be as real as anything I can imagine

  for who I'll be then, as real as anything undergone, going back

  and forth to “the world” out there, and here to this one spot

  on earth I really know. Once I came in fast and low

  in a little plane and when I looked down at the church,

  the trees I've felt with my hands, the neighbors’ houses

  and the family farm, and I saw how tiny what I loved or knew

  was,

  it was like my children going on with their plans and griefs

  at a distance and nothing I could do about it. But I wanted

  to reach down and pat it, while letting it know

  I wouldn't interfere for the world, the world being

  everything this isn't, this unknown buried in the known.

  LOUISE MCNEILL

  (January 9, 1911–June 16, 1993)

  Poet Louise McNeill was born in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, on a farm that was settled by her ancestors in 1769. She earned an A.B. degree from Concord College in Athens, West Virginia, and, at the age of nineteen, began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. She later earned a master's degree from Miami of Ohio, and a Ph.D. in history from West Virginia University.

  In 1938, McNeill won the Atlantic Monthly Poetry Award and was invited to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference where she studied with Robert Frost. In the fall of 1938, McNeill was awarded a fellowship to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  Her first major collection of poems, Gauley Mountain, was published in 1939, after Archibald MacLeish took an interest in her work. In that same year, she married “Yankee schoolteacher” Roger Pease. The couple lived outside the region for many years, but returned to West Virginia in 1959.

  For the next twenty years, McNeill taught history and English at various West Virginia colleges and universities. She was named Poet Laureate of West Virginia in 1979 by West Virginia governor Jay Rockefeller.

  In McNeill's autobiography, The Milkweed Ladies, she reminisces about the West Virginia farm that had been in her family since the eighteenth century.

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Poetry: Hill Daughter: New & Selected Poems (1991), Elderberry Flood: The History, Lore, and Land of West Virginia Written in Verse Form (1979), Paradox Hill: From Appalachia to Lunar Shore (1972), Time Is Our House (1942), Gauley Mountain (1939), Mountain White (1931). Memoir: The Milkweed Ladies (1988).

  SECONDARY

  Maggie Anderson, Introduction, Hill Daughter: New & Selected Poems
(1991), xiii–xxvi. Arthur C. Buck, “Louise McNeill, West Virginia's Hill Daughter,” From a Dark Mountain (1972), 24–26. Loyal Jones, review of The Milkweed Ladies, Appalachian Heritage 17:2 (spring 1989), 63–64. “Louise McNeill,” Appalachian Heritage 13:4 (fall 1985), 12. “Louise M. Pease, 82, Poet of Appalachia,” New York Times, 19 June 1993, 10.

  THE OTHER WOMAN

  from Appalachian Heritage (1985)

  This windy morning as I stuffed

  The rags around my window sill,

  I found the strips that she had tucked

  Against a wind that now is still.

  Her rags were brown, and mine are gray

  Hers stained and rotted; mine are new;

  And yet, as women learn to stuff

  (As once, at least, all women do)

  Rags against terror—so she bent—

  Then I, and now our rags are blent

  Gray in the brown; from hill to hill

  My wind goes screaming—hers is still.

  AUBADE TO FEAR

  (HEAVY WITH CHILD)

  from Hill Daughter (1991)

  Last night as I lay cold with fear

  Of my travail now drawing near,

  A gray wind I no longer hear

  Blew from the darkness over me—

  Blew southward from the Norn-white skies

  Until I slept with seeing eyes—

  Seeing no bauble fit to prize.

  Not seeing dawn, its thin gray trace

  Turn gold upon the pillow lace

  And touch the warm beloved face.

  Not seeing all I lived to own:

  The torque of rubies, stone by stone,

  The living pages touched and known.

  Seeing instead that nets are small

  Which shield us from the sparrow's fall,

  How frail the rooftree and the wall,

  How thin the string by which we tie

  Our great ships of the wind and sky—

  And what a little thing to die.

  HILL DAUGHTER

  from Hill Daughter (1991)

  Land of my fathers and blood, oh my fathers, whatever

  Is left of your grudge in the rock, of your hate in the stone;

 

‹ Prev