POETRY MONDAY: June 1, 2009
LOIS MARIE HARROD
Lois Marie Harrod has won many awards for her poetry, including three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and seven Pushcart Prize nominations. She has published six full-length collections and three chapbooks, the most recent of which, Furniture, won the Grayson Books 2008 Poetry Chapbook Competition. Wisdom, humor and compassion run through all of her poems, but most noteworthy, in our view, are those in Spelling the World Backwards, which, as she says, is “both a story of a family coping with Alzheimer’s disease and a meditation on the nature of memory and poetry.” The strikingly original Furniture deserves to be read in its entirety, but the sample below will give you an idea of how Lois Marie Harrod imbues even inanimate objects with soul.
The third poem, “Her kisses were more stone than licorice,” is published here for the first time.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Spelling the World Backwards
(Spelling the word world backwards– a difficult task even for those in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s–is a standard test to diagnose the disease.)
This is the world
and these are its letters
separating themselves
from my father’s mind
like falling leaves:
the d flipping itself
into b’s and p’s,
the l flung at his fingers,
a twirled baton
he cannot grapple.
Today he tells me
some woman came
to show him the radio.
He means my sister.
She brought the tapes
of her daughter’s wedding.
So now we are turning
once again toward the vestibule
with the nervous groom.
Now my sisters and I
are remembering
that fifty-five years ago
this day, the tenth of August,
our parents were wed
in a little white church
in New Bedford.
Now Rebecca, my niece,
my father’s granddaughter,
is riding the long aisle,
the regal R of her existence.
It was like being there,
my mother says.
O, isn’t she beautiful,
now and forever,
the white circle of her dress.
Is anyone a virgin anymore,
the preacher asks.
O, the bird seed
scattered this way.
Rice swells the belly
and kills the sparrow.
It was like being there,
my mother says again.
W needles its slow hurricane
through the brain.
At the center my father’s eye,
the letter with which
each world ends.
The Clothes Grinding Down the Line
And now they are separated from the sweat
that made them, the bump and grind that brought them
to the dirty stage and hung them like so many dancing
convicts in a line, their heads missing except the parka
ballooning in the breeze.
To be cut off like this from what informs the flesh, what
gives it substance, listen to the stories the poor rags tell.
Every sleeve is an empty mouth,
and you’ve heard it all before, work and love,
the little red hen, I’ll do it all myself.
So you are condemned to wash the aprons, and now
your fingers ache with hanging, any colder outside
and the socks would freeze. What was it your mother
said about the daily flap, “Hang the brassieres
on the middle line so the neighbors cannot see”?
The sheets were strict as figgy leaves. You should
be writing, you should be reading but love
keeps bringing you to this–labor and your mother
and the sex she never understood, now why would
a woman throw her panties to Mickey Mantle.
You stand, arms uplifted, wondering where
Freud’s wife hung his long underwear,
still smelling of analysis and stale cigar,
did she tell the maid to be sure that the flaps
were buttoned down in that stiff Austrian tease.
“Her kisses were more stone than licorice”
Harry Graves
You’ve tried to fit your mother’s kisses,
into four corners,
east, west, north, and sullen –
your compass to the world–
and along the straight edges
to frame your comings and knowings.
You know time solves
some x’s–
your mother’s tombstone
scored beside your dad’s.
Thirty years ago
she wrote
that she and he
had bought their graves.
Bury me, she later said,
in the gold chiffon
I wore for jubilee,
then buried your father
before herself
in a mismatched suit
as if that too was something
lost and reassembled.
You remember the kiss
of the closet that matched his threads,
and the smoothness of the cedar chest
that hugged her weeds,
She bought it long before she was found
and fitted. You suppose your sister,
who seems to have so little, has that too.
You wonder what else is missing
