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Monument Page 8

by Natasha Trethewey


  A gift, you said, when we found it.

  And because my mother was dead,

  I thought the cat had left it for me. The bird

  was black as omen, like a single crow

  meaning sorrow. It was the year

  you’d remarried, summer—

  the fields high and the pond reflecting

  everything: the willow, the small dock,

  the crow overhead that—doubled—

  should have been an omen for joy.

  Forgive me, Father, that I brought to that house

  my grief. You will not recall telling me

  you could not understand my loss, not until

  your own mother died. Each night I’d wake

  from a dream, my heart battering my rib cage—

  a trapped, wild bird. I did not know then

  the cat had brought in a second grief: what was it

  but animal knowledge? Forgive me

  that I searched for meaning in everything

  you did, that I watched you bury the bird

  in the backyard—your back to me; I saw you

  flatten the mound, erasing it into the dirt.

  Torna Atrás

  AFTER De Albina y Español, Nace Torna Atrás (From Albino and Spaniard, a Return-Backwards Is Born), ANONYMOUS, C. 1785–1790

  The unknown artist has rendered the father a painter and so

  we see him at his work: painting a portrait of his wife—

  their dark child watching nearby, a servant grinding colors

  in the corner. The woman poses just beyond his canvas

  and cannot see her likeness, her less than mirror image

  coming to life beneath his hand. He has rendered her

  homely, so unlike the woman we see in this scene, dressed

  in late-century fashion, a chicqueador—mark of beauty

  in the shape of a crescent moon—affixed to her temple.

  If I say his painting is unfinished, that he has yet to make her

  beautiful, to match the elegant sweep of her hair,

  the graceful tilt of her head, has yet to adorn her dress

  with lace and trim, it is only one way to see it. You might see,

  instead, that the artist—perhaps to show his own skill—

  has made the father a dilettante, incapable of capturing

  his wife’s beauty. Or, that he cannot see it: his mind’s eye

  reducing her to what he’s made, as if to reveal the illusion

  immanent in her flesh. If you consider the century’s mythology

  of the body—that a dark spot marked the genitals of anyone

  with African blood—you might see how the black moon

  on her white face recalls it: the roseta she passes to her child

  marking him torna atrás. If I tell you such terms were born

  in the Enlightenment’s hallowed rooms, that the wages of empire

  is myopia, you might see the father’s vision as desire embodied

  in paint, this rendering of his wife born of need to see himself

  as architect of Truth, benevolent patriarch, father of uplift

  ordering his domain. And you might see why, to understand

  my father, I look again and again at this painting: how it is

  that a man could love—and so diminish what he loves.

  Enlightenment

  In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs

  at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:

  his forehead white with illumination—

  a lit bulb—the rest of his face in shadow,

  darkened as if the artist meant to contrast

  his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.

  By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,

  he was already linked to an affair

  with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue

  and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems

  to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out

  across the centuries, his lips fixed as if

  he’s just uttered some final word.

  The first time I saw the painting, I listened

  as my father explained the contradictions:

  how Jefferson hated slavery, though—out

  of necessity, my father said—had to own

  slaves; that his moral philosophy meant

  he could not have fathered those children:

  would have been impossible, my father said.

  For years we debated the distance between

  word and deed. I’d follow my father from book

  to book, gathering citations, listen

  as he named—like a field guide to Virginia—

  each flower and tree and bird as if to prove

  a man’s pursuit of knowledge is greater

  than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

  I did not know then the subtext

  of our story, that my father could imagine

  Jefferson’s words made flesh in my flesh—

  the improvement of the blacks in body

  and mind, in the first instance of their mixture

  with the whites—or that my father could believe

  he’d made me better. When I think of this now,

  I see how the past holds us captive,

  its beautiful ruin etched on the mind’s eye:

  my young father, a rough outline of the old man

  he’s become, needing to show me

  the better measure of his heart, an equation

  writ large at Monticello. That was years ago.

  Now, we take in how much has changed:

  talk of Sally Hemings, someone asking,

  How white was she?—parsing the fractions

  as if to name what made her worthy

  of Jefferson’s attentions: a near-white,

  quadroon mistress, not a plain black slave.

  Imagine stepping back into the past,

  our guide tells us then—and I can’t resist

  whispering to my father: This is where

  we split up. I’ll head around to the back.

  When he laughs, I know he’s grateful

  I’ve made a joke of it, this history

  that links us—white father, black daughter—

  even as it renders us other to each other.

  Elegy

  FOR MY FATHER

  I think by now the river must be thick

  with salmon. Late August, I imagine it

  as it was that morning: drizzle needling

  the surface, mist at the banks like a net

  settling around us—everything damp

  and shining. That morning, awkward

  and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked

  into the current and found our places—

  you upstream a few yards and out

  far deeper. You must remember how

  the river seeped in over your boots

  and you grew heavier with that defeat.

  All day I kept turning to watch you, how

  first you mimed our guide’s casting

  then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky

  between us; and later, rod in hand, how

  you tried—again and again—to find

  that perfect arc, flight of an insect

  skimming the river’s surface. Perhaps

  you recall I cast my line and reeled in

  two small trout we could not keep.

  Because I had to release them, I confess,

  I thought about the past—working

  the hooks loose, the fish writhing

  in my hands, each one slipping away

  before I could let go. I can tell you now

  that I tried to take it all in, record it

  for an elegy I’d write—one day—

  when the time came. Your daughter,

  I was that ruthless. What does it matter

  if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting

  yo
ur line, and when it did not come back

  empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights,

  dreaming, I step again into the small boat

  that carried us out and watch the bank receding—

  my back to where I know we are headed.

  VI

  Articulation

  Repentance

  AFTER VERMEER’S A Maid Asleep

  To make it right Vermeer painted then painted over

  this scene a woman alone at a table the cloth pushed back

  rough folds at the edge as if someone had risen

  in haste abandoning the chair beside her a wineglass

  nearly empty just in her reach Though she’s been called

  idle and drunken a woman drowsing you might see

  in her gesture melancholia Eyelids drawn

  she rests her head in her hand Beyond her a still life

  white jug bowl of fruit a goblet overturned Before this

  a man stood in the doorway a dog lay on the floor

  Perhaps to exchange loyalty for betrayal

  Vermeer erased the dog and made of the man

  a mirror framed by the open door Pentimento

  the word for a painter’s change of heart revision

  on canvas means the same as remorse after sin

  Were she to rise a mirror behind her the woman

  might see herself as I did turning to rise

  from my table then back as if into Vermeer’s scene

  It was after the quarrel after you’d had again

  too much to drink after the bottle did not shatter though

  I’d brought it down hard on the table and the dog

  had crept from the room to hide Later I found

  a trace of what I’d done bruise on the table the size

  of my thumb Worrying it I must have looked as she does

  eyes downcast my head on the heel of my palm In paint

  a story can change mistakes be undone Imagine

  Still Life with Father and Daughter a moment so

  far back there’s still time to take the glass from your hand

  or mine

  My Father as Cartographer

  In dim light now, his eyes

  straining to survey

  the territory: here is the country

  of Loss, its colony Grief;

  the great continent Desire

  and its borderland Regret;

  vast, unfathomable water,

  an archipelago—the tiny islands

  of Joy, untethered, set adrift.

  At the bottom of the map

  his legend and cartouche,

  the measures of distance, key

  to the symbols marking each

  known land. What’s missing

  is the traveler’s warning

  at the margins: a dragon—

  its serpentine signature—monstrous

  as a two-faced daughter.

  Duty

  When he tells the story now

  he’s at the center of it,

  everyone else in the house

  falling into the backdrop—

  my mother, grandmother,

  an uncle, all dead now—props

  in our story: father and daughter

  caught in memory’s half-light.

  I’m too young to recall it,

  so his story becomes the story:

  1969, Hurricane Camille

  bearing down, the old house

  shuddering as if it will collapse.

  Rain pours into every room

  and he has to keep moving,

  keep me out of harm’s way—

  a father’s first duty: to protect.

  And so, in the story, he does:

  I am small in his arms, perhaps

  even sleeping. Water is rising

  around us and there is no

  higher place he can take me

  than this, memory forged

  in the storm’s eye: a girl

  clinging to her father. What

  can I do but this? Let him

  tell it again and again as if

  it’s always been only us,

  and that, when it mattered,

  he was the one who saved me.

  Reach

  AFTER MY FATHER

  Right off I hear him singing, the strings

  of his old guitar hemming the darkness

  as before—late nights on the front porch—

  the mountains across the valley blurred

  to outline. We are at it again, father

  and daughter, deep in our cups, rehearsing

  the long years between us. In the distance

  I hear the foghorn call of bullfrogs,

  envoys from the river of lamentation

  my father is determined to cross. Already

  I know where this is headed: how many times

  has the night turned toward regret? My father

  saying, If only I’d been a better husband

  she’d be alive today, saying, Gwen and I

  would get back together if she were alive.

  It’s the same old song. He is Orpheus

  trying to bring her back with the music

  of his words, lines of a poem drifting now

  into my dream. Picking the first chords,

  my father leans into the neck of the guitar,

  rolls his shoulders until he’s lost in it—

  the song carrying him across the porch

  and down into the damp grass. Even asleep,

  I know where he is going. I cannot call

  him back. Through the valley the blacktop

  winds like a river, and he is stepping into it,

  walking now toward the other side where

  she waits, my mother, just out of reach.

  Waterborne

  AFTER ELLEN GALLAGHER’S Watery Ecstatic

  Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

  as if it were a given property of the mind . . .

  —Robert Duncan

  As now, this meadow of seagrass, tangle

  of history—a nest of myriad,

  mirrored faces. How not to think of words

  like cargo and jettison, each syllable

  a last breath, vesicles rising to the surface

  of the sea. How not to think of loss,

  how it takes hold and grows: like lacuna

  snails, slow and deliberate, on a reed?

  Why is everything I see the past

  I’ve tried to forget? In dreams

  I am a child again, underwater, my limbs

  sluggish as I struggle to wake. Always,

  I am pursued. Waking, I am freighted

  with memory: my mother’s last words

  spoken—after her death—in a dream:

  Do you know what it means

  to have a wound that never heals?

  And now this thirst:

  how many times have I cupped my hands

  to drink, found—in the map

  of my palms—this same pattern: lines

  crossed and capillary as veins

  in the body, these willowy reeds?

  How can I see anything

  but this: how trauma lives in the sea

  of my body, awash in the waters

  of forgetting. In every resilient blade

  I see the ancestors, my mother’s face.

  Shooting Wild

  At the theater I learn shooting wild,

  a movie term that means filming a scene

  without sound, and I think of being a child

  watching my mother, how quiet she’d been,

  soundless in our house made silent by fear.

  At first her gestures were hard to understand,

  and her hush when my stepfather was near.

  Then o
ne morning, the imprint of his hand

  dark on her face, I learned to watch her more:

  the way her grip tightened on a fork, night

  after night; how a glance held me, the door—

  a sign that made the need to hear so slight

  I can’t recall her voice since she’s been dead:

  no sound of her, no words she might have said.

  Letter to Inmate #271847, Convicted of Murder, 1985

  When I heard you might get out, I was driving through the Delta, rain pounding my windshield, the sun angled and bright beneath dark clouds—familiar weather, what I’d learned long ago to call the devil beating his wife. I was listening to two things at once: an old song on the radio and, on the phone, a woman from Victim Services—her voice solicitous, slow, as though she were speaking to a child. I was back in the state I still call home, headed south on Highway 49, trying to resurrect my mother in the landscape of childhood as the Temptations were singing her song—the one she’d played over and over our last year in Mississippi, 1971, that summer before we moved to the city that would lead us, soon, to you. It was Just My Imagination and I could see her again: her back to me, swaying over the ironing board, the iron’s steel plate catching the sun and holding it there. For a moment I was who I had been before, the joyful daughter of my young mother—until the woman on the phone said your name, telling me I must write the parole board a letter. I was again stepdaughter, daughter of sorrow, daughter of the murdered woman. This is how the past interrupts our lives, all of it entering the same doorway—like the hole in the trunk of my neighbor’s tree: at once a natural shelter, haven for small creatures, but also evidence of injury, an entrance for decay. When I saw it, I thought of how, as a child, I’d have chosen it for play—a place to crawl inside and hide. And when I thought of hiding, I could not help but think of you. What does it mean to be safe in the world? Everywhere I go she is with me—my long-dead mother. Is there nowhere I might go and not find you, there too?

 

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