Field Guide to the Heart

Home , Prose poetry

A dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School

of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of English of the College of Arts and Sciences

Adrienne Cassel

M.F.A. Bennington College

January 2001

Committee Chair: Don Bogen, Ph.D.

Dissertation Abstract Adrienne Cassel

Field Guide to the Heart is a collection of poems that explores the intersection of nature, ecology, and grief. It draws on the poetic tradition of Robinson Jeffers, Margo Berdeshevsky, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard, and other contemporary poets to encourage the reader to look again at the marvels of everyday occurrences. Using the heart as a symbol of the connection among and between species, the collection draws out the interconnectedness and interdependency of all things. As John Felstiner explains, in Can Poetry Save the Earth: “First consciousness then conscience.”

In addition to a collection of original poems, Field Guide to the Heart also includes a critical paper, Muddying the Waters; June Jordan and the Prose Poem, which interrogates the psychological geography of the prose poems in Jordan‟s Things That I Do in the Dark. Cassel argues that by exploring the psychological integrity of a physical place in her poetry, Jordan has been able to make peace with the relationship she had with her parents.

iii

for all the Maries for Sarah And for Mary Beth

L’homme a des endroits de son pauvre Coeur qui n’existent pas encore et où la douleur entre afin qu’ils soient.

– Léon Bloy

Table of Contents ASPHODEL ...... 1 FIRST SIGNS OF SPRING ...... 2 COLOR THE HEART ...... 3 LOGIC OF THE HEART ...... 4 BIRD HEART ...... 5 LESSONS ...... 6 FALSE HEART ...... 7 BLACKBIRDS, LATE WINTER ...... 8 COLDEST DAY OF THE YEAR ...... 9 EXCURSION INTO MONK’S HOOD ...... 10 RIVERSPEAK...... 11 DAUGHTER ...... 12 TENDER ...... 13 FINDING THE CHIPPED BOWL WHILE MOVING ...... 14 MOTHER LOVE AT THE MUSEUM ...... 15 SPIDER AND MOTH ...... 16 SUN: ITS RADIANCE SPREADING OVER THE EARTH ...... 18 FLYING LESSONS ...... 19 ATONEMENT ...... 20 I WANT TO BE A WHIRLING DERVISH OR AN ANGEL SENT TO SAVE YOU ...... 21 DEATH MASK ...... 22 GLAD EYE ...... 23 BEETHOVEN’S LAMENT ...... 24 TWO PINK SHELLS ...... 25 PELICAN MOUNTAIN III ...... 26 HIS DARKNESS ...... 27 ONE ...... 28 RADIO DAYS ...... 29 BEFORE NAMING ...... 30 NAMING ...... 31

SECOND GUESSING ...... 32 LEAVES ARE TO GRASS ...... 33 ODE TO AN ORCHID ...... 34 END OF THE SEASON ...... 35 VISITING DOTTIE AT HOSPICE ...... 36 VAGUS NERVE ...... 37 TWO WORDS ...... 38 ROSIE’S REEDS OF KNOWLEDGE ...... 39 CLOUDS ...... 40 LAMENT: A SKETCH ...... 41 FATHER ...... 42 APOLOGY ...... 43 WITNESS ...... 44 GATHERING DUST ...... 45 CHIEFLY COPPER AND COAL...... 46 ALLEGORY OF MISRULE ...... 47 FIVE OF HEARTS ...... 48 WIFELY ...... 49

MUDDYING THE WATERS: PROSE POEMS IN JUNE JORDAN’S THINGS THAT I DO IN THE DARK ...... 50

vii

Acknowledgements

“Two Words” in Northwest Review Spring 2003 “Tender” in Northwest Review Spring 2003 “Death Mask” in Ambulant Fall 2003 “Finding the Chipped Bowl While Moving” in 5 A.M. Spring 2002 “Flying Lessons” in Flights 2001

viii

Asphodel

Red buds trip over five red-winged black birds swaying on the wire. The sun hangs above the maple, yet, it has never heard the crystal notes or the way they clang against the black bark rotted and riddled with worms.

I am one of the lucky ones who has seen sorrow and a man take his own life at his own hand. Felt the gun against his chest and the plummeting of the pulled trigger.

This scene repeats itself as I pass beneath the bridge in the South Glen --where all that remains is the bloodstain on the wall --and a handful of chickweed decomposing on gravel.

First Signs of Spring

A child weeps by the bank.

An arm thrown over the back of the chair, but not his arm.

She feels her way to the river counting stones.

One sweeet sweeet from the chickadee.

Color the Heart

Wild mouse barley where the deer once slept, its stems the color of fire. Snow packed into the crevices along the path, river frozen between its banks. A star pierces the sky and another and another until what was once black is shredded by light. The lunar disk backs away until it too is a tiny star. A sycamore appears one branch at a time, draped in ash-white. I have been walking all night. A shadow asks for an offering. I have nothing. The gift of sight too shy to give away. Irises torn with blue. But not here. It is too dark, too cold. How does the bear know when it is time to return. It is no longer winter. Does he hear a click muffled in the snow? Does an upstairs dweller return? But it is not you.

Logic of the Heart

Even after science came to know the truth about the heart, contradicting what Galen had taught, what had been considered infallible for 1300 years, it missed the truth about the sun.

Take the Ptolemaic theory that the center of the universe is the earth:of course that was convenient for the priests to believe, otherwise how to make a living. Copernicus knew Ptolemy was wrong, but he didn‟t let on for fear of being charged with treason. And so when Adorno says, “He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy,” we know the possibility of an exception. But, you have someone else. So, if Adorno is proven wrong that means you are not lying when you tell me:

I am happy now, and if he is right: We were happy and can only know it now. Either way, it‟s hard to get one‟s head around it and why you are not here beside me when I walk to the river or jot down the names of the birds landing in the yard.

Bird Heart

Coracoids protect part of it, and the keeled sternum provides a cleaver for pinions, hoisting hollow bones along lengthening meridians, the singing bowls between perihelion and cymbal. West of my house, I wander alone on the edge of a meadow imagining a common rose finch perched on a tuft of grass far from here: the culmen‟s distinct shape and the rufous shield tilting beneath its wings, An ancient hegira claws beneath my rib, marking me with a bloodied tattoo, a bird heart beating next to mine and still I forget how to pray, or where to find the woodcock pining for its mate. But once, wandering off the path, you showed me where to watch their dalliance and we stood awed by the piercing peeenting of the male and the unrelenting submission of the air.

Lessons

I remember your eyes muscling their way into mine – nothing has changed. There are still stars, the season of decay, snow and snowdrops blossom on the ridge in spring. My heart sings with sorrow: lesson one.

There is no love deeper than the river, but sometimes the river sings when you are with me. Sometimes its mute song is the shadow of the morning or the reflection of the moon moments before red claws its way through. This is not religion.

It is a gold coin tossed away for naught. It rests in the depths and no one knows it‟s there: lesson two. And yet, when I place my palms open and flat against the table, nothing covers them. I haven‟t given up but you have: lesson three.

My words tumble over each other accomplishing nothing. Forgiveness falters. The snow gathers on the ridges and slips into the rocks, the chorus departs, the aspens strain against the wind that knocks the breath out of me.

False Heart

A six-inch strip of viscous cells extended beneath the dirt, the earthworm is a favorite food of the woodcock, whose breeding ground lies just a few miles east of here. I‟ve seen that woodcock only once in his spring dance, preening for a mate, hurling head first through the sky at twilight, stooping east, then arching west in celebration of sex. Such grace unparalleled, I think in humans. We grunt and groan once its over, succumb to sorrow or some perversity, craving wine and a cigarette, after the act, and the woodcock all wings and heart -- beating 500 times a minute -- snatches a worm that doesn‟t have a heart at all, only a series of pseudo hearts, more like arches than hearts, five to be exact, moving not blood but what acts like blood, the heamolymph, expanding and contracting, not pumping, just swishing. Doesn‟t need a heart and, doesn‟t need a mate: a self-contained mating machine with eggs and sperm in one long writhing case.

Blackbirds, Late Winter

A chorus of shadows rises above the field, one black crescent pulling a black thread from the ground. The dark center sags, touches the earth, and flings mystery into cerulean firmament mottled by clouds.

I stand at the end of the lane watching, the cold parting familiar as an old quilt, its scraps of cheap dresses pieced together with a fine seam sewn by hand.

Coldest Day of the Year

Snow-white pelvis, femur, cracked skull of deer with teeth missing – clean as a licked plate.

Hepatica, wilted, rests against stones beside the path, and here and there, an ice float bangs against the bank.

Cardinal fingers slip between clouds, sidle up to branches, and tease out a hermit thrush.

Excursion into Monk’s Hood

Sable fulvous pellet plows head first into downy dungeon hammering on a molten crown while velvet hands grip gossamer wings and drops of bliss, dangle, disappear, or hover and hiss on hems of clover, Foxglove, purple monk‟s hood, those “buccaneers of buzz” dripping nectar not for him.

Riverspeak

Today I spew black oil, water beneath the bridge. The girls let their hair down over me.

Are they untying their ribbons? I am falling backward over logs. Have they pulled off their wigs? I am listening for them downstream.

Will they jump in spite of me? Now they are home lying across their beds, peering between fingers at maple trees impaling leaves, the reckless foliage, and the dogged current runs beneath their sleeves.

Daughter

In the black of the Night Hawk‟s wings there is a shimmer.

Light shines between a feather and a wound.

A scab forms; you pick it. I kiss it.

Tender

He and I sit outside on a painted bench beneath a cottonwood. It is just after lunch; shadows gesture across the street.

Once we walked in the glen, made love four or five times a day. Stayed up all night.

Now we pull words from memories, love from axioms.

Wait, he says, looking away.

Finding the Chipped Bowl While Moving

Where did you get the chipped bowl? Remember? During the cherry blossoms. The girl with the black hair gave you a present. Which girl? They all had that black hair? Who? Who was it?

What was it you wanted when you bought the black lacquered bowl? How did it feel when you first held it in your hands?

Momma Love at the Museum

You two black-wired tangle-haired girls bent over your knittin‟, who left you here, knockin‟ coppered knees?

Who sat you down here in tiny rust-bottomed chairs? Who connected those big black wires comin‟ from your head? Girl, your feet are too big and your back too wide, but it don‟t matter none. Still, I get on my knees for you and whoever made you so damn big.

Spider and Moth

A moth has created a mobile of itself in the window above the kitchen sink. It is dusk and its wings, flapping at great speeds, blur in twilight. It looks like an an upside down pinwheel, dangling from a thread. That silent wolf spider I saw earlier is waiting for dinner.

I can‟t help recalling the moth‟s beginnings: just a nub beneath a leaf ridge, chosen by the mother because it is the only leaf the moth can eat, each Lepidoptera hungry for its one and only preference. The fate of the Monarch attached to dwindling milkweed, I know but I don‟t know what this spinning top prefers.

From nub to what looks like a stuffed worm and still more to go. Five times it gorges and molts and then when it can eat no more, it hangs naked, head down, from a silk thread, a fate of its own spinning, and wrapped inside a folded leaf it has tied around itself like a bathrobe with another silken thread and it is not resting, but making wings and antennae and all the other paraphernalia it needs to what? To live for a few hundred years like an elephant or the tancho crane?

Can you blame me for wanting to interfere? But it‟s a crapshoot, isn‟t it? If freed it would be trapped between the windowpanes, which do not open to the outside, and my small apartment that has more than its share of spiders. If I leave well enough alone, the hairy spider will live for several weeks and maybe eat some mosquitoes or the pesky flies that find their way inside.

Anyway, that‟s the way my thinking goes, but is it true? I walk away. It‟s too much.

Next morning I check on my little ecological experiment and see nothing – no moth spinning on a thread, no spider chewing on a furry wing, nothing spun tightly in a spider‟s thread

16 like the wasp you showed me in the fireplace more than a decade ago, spun so tight in that case, all it could do was protest; the more it buzzed, the tighter the trap. Life is not simple.

I wonder then about the ending. Does the spider‟s heart accelerate or does the wasp feel regret? Is there a female with offspring in the muddy case in the corner of the patio? Does another male just move in? And not to sound morbid or disconnected from a possible tragedy is this really the end? Will there be one more time to get it right? Or is this right?

What if at the last minute, the wasp turns left and returns to the muddy cave? Or, the spider slips, loses its footing, drops the thread? And what if you finally find your way home? Will you leave again? Find another home? Or will we carry on weaving another web like we have before as many times as the spring- white has molted its skin? Or, even more unfathomable will I let the moth escape only to find it plastered to the light, its wings slightly charred, an acrid smell filling the night.

Sun: its radiance spreading over the earth

I thought I was looking at steel heated to molten trapezoid opaline mosaic. It was not round. That is what threw me. You hear sun, think round, but I guess light is not always round, or ever round unless the source is round. Why is the image of the sun square? Gases cling to their source, but light can create shapes that have nothing to do with fire. Fire thinking. Shapes of flames are not shapes of log or wick. Source provides outline. Only. Wick and flame thought. Some shapes control lightning. Think lightning. Think first glance: light passes through steel. I had never heard of this, but if steel were molten light could pass through. It is not impossible. First, heat the trapezoid to white mosaic. At points of stress, think lightning. Light trails through like tangled rope. Side b is invisible and side c one thin line hanging white-hot. Side a curls up a black tunnel. On the other side smoke, not heart of steel.

Flying Lessons

My granddaughter, age two, has taken to recounting her dreams to her mother. She's been flying, it seems.

I picture her, arms akimbo, diving over houses, twirling through clouds, the wind vibrating against her face. Two years ago,

I stood by the Toyohira River watching silver fish swim upstream to breed, their faces frozen in conflicting currents, while she fluttered in the dark place for days. My daughter pushing and pushing. And it is here in this roaring, that I first knew freedom. In this battered juncture where we neither linger nor soar. I could not have known had I not seen it with my own eyes nor heard it with my own ears: “Fly like a bird. Fly like a bird.”

Atonement

Outside it is cold: minus one below, but it is here I heard valor falter.

Here I saw wind monogram sorrow across the face of the world. Turn it inside out.

I felt like humming. Yesterday the sun shone for one second.

Today, rumors of war grow louder. Around every corner twilight twitches and calls one name. One name at a time. Just one.

I thought I heard singing seeping through floor boards, thought I saw a red dress picking her way through the trash. I‟m trying to pay attention to the seven vowels.

Trying to hear the cardinal call or see the cardinal flash across the pane.

I want to be a whirling dervish or an angel sent to save you but instead I whirl in your mush and lick sweet salt from gossip, clamor against honeysuckled manacles. We extricate ourselves from fire. It is not here that we live. It is in the jangled halls of some place else.

Consider this: You cannot die unless you live. You cannot live unless you suffer. What was once diseased returns to the earth dark humus of autumn, as lovely as a virgin moon floating over the ocean.

In the glow of this fire, we hold hands, but else where we could be enemies, enemies of the state or enemies of the heart. We could throw plates at each other, throw bombs. There are no end to the possibilities.

Each day brings its own questions. Where are you? I want you with me, I want to be alone.

Today I walk along the shores, rest against crumbling granite. I can‟t find what I came for, but there is this endless beauty, around every curve another pretty scene and at night I make a fire, turn in early.

I don‟t believe in anything in particular and yet I believe in everything. God. Gaiea. Mohammed. Buddha. The girl next door. Castro. Freedom. The revolution, socialism. Everything. Not capitalism. Not global economies. I don‟t care what you say. I believe in everything.

Here we are stung by mosquitoes over and over and our blood is carried across the mountain we hiked this morning, and someone smacks it against their temple and wipes my blood from his head. It could be anywhere.

Death Mask

Here I am behind these precious stones behind these glass eyes. I am bone and hair, decay. Logging chains banging across the heart.

Glad Eye

Hanging just outside my window, a hairy wolf spider with a rufous belly spins leaves into dragonflies then hides while a magpie in cottonwood‟s shade struts black and indigo.

Morning light reaches into mountain shadows, five shades of hoary silver across the dry grass glide, the most ordinary things – just outside my window.

And, an infinite fencerow pens cows into waning pastures, weaves between sunlight and gate, and the mailbox leans to one side, while a magpie in cottonwood‟s shade struts black and indigo.

Lines on the telephone poles bow before the mountain, and that pointed pinnacle with its venerable plum dye shouts back to the sky – that‟s what I see outside my window.

And, midges strung upside down in a sticky, well-made orb like the deer hanging in the barn waiting for the butcher, while a magpie screams and struts in black indigo.

It‟s quiet this side, and what the other bird on the branch is I don‟t know or where the bats that at night drip tar on my windowpane go, but I feel it buzzing on my skin and see it outside my window: a magpie strutting indigo. Oh, braggadocio!

Beethoven’s Lament

I left off counting bars and beats and instead felt along the ridges for something beyond a sound.

I lived in a terrifying obbligato where silence‟s cadenced tail beat across my face.

That rogue, music, abandoned me and then in death, tortured me with chords unheard of in the afterlife. I am no longer a man. I am a sadistic aphorism resting head in hands in an empty hall.

Two Pink Shells

You are my broken Pacific Pink: still life with the ecru hole calling me down to where, in silk and gauze, I forgive you your flawed perfection – your unwavering heart against the small Rose Petal Tellin. It is evening now and all day I have struggled to love the way sand loves the waves that give it its design in the day and then rip it away when it carries on with the night, but the best I can do is dip my brush into paint, swirl it around, and add tincture of indigo. Wait. I think I see how pink washes out into a rueful mother of pearl, but still I do not understand where regret ends or the color of remorse. Every morning, I begin again layering the clouds onto the sky, searching each face for baby-blue eyes.

Pelican Mountain III

Baby-blue wing sleeps at the bottom of the canvas. On top of that, a red trail. A bat in broad daylight, its only wing folded tight against its chest. Storm held back by a sapphire boulder. Red flicks its tongue. The cotton clouds are nothing new. She‟s been painting them for years, but it‟s the first time the silver buttons were held in place by the blushing cliffs like elephants parading by, and I have never noticed the brown hand resting against the nape or tugging on something hidden beneath her sleeve.

His Darkness

Inside the white house, a black room and on top a weather vane spins in the wind.

Out front a flag pole bends and waves. Behind it a silver slide returns an unknown.

In the west, she camps beneath a stand of cedars whose shade stretches and folds like eagles‟ wings.

One

Here is the dress draped over the chair. Here is the dirty one. Here is the clean one. Here is the bed with one pillow.

What does it mean? She sleeps beside the bay rocked by moonlight beneath shooting stars?

The moon rocks the room I ride, here with the dogs on my feet.

Cold feet beneath one blanket. My head on one pillow.

Night drifts to my breast, like snow.

Radio Days

I knew the sound of heat when it hissed and hollered over rivers, knew how love looked dressed in red when it sang across

someone else's thigh. I had seen high smeared across asphalt and tasted saxophone tongues when blue notes fought air for lies. And I knew the

wet streets that night, knew the owl playing tight wire on the phone line. Knew the tight wire. Walked it many times. Felt fear suspended between

orchestras and death, between resurrection and dead air.

Before Naming

I drive in backward, park by the firing squad and ask for forgiveness.

I am not absolved. The General binds my hands with black organdy and poppies printed on faux silk. I have forgotten how to pray and there are no words that can convey what is not named.

Naming

Today is a teacup lined with blue. Lift the rim to your lips and sip.

In the bottom asphalt and gold, and yes, cruelty.

Outside snow fills up one crevice with wind and another with ice and yet: somewhere a heart turns inside out like a sock, its rough seams showing and somewhere else someone reaches for those who turn from anything reminding them of grace, and then there‟s you with your heart like a cooper hawk‟s heart, the sternum battered from flying low through matted underbrush searching for a darting shape or the smell of burning flesh.

Second Guessing

I‟d like you to see the light as I see it tonight – draped across the snow like a torn sheet, to have you hear my heart shift inside summer. I‟m lost like the red shirt I wore only once, like someone whom we‟ve never seen before who walks out of our bedroom as if we should know.

Leaves are to Grass

Leaves are to grass as feet are to stairs, blue is to alkaline night is to summertime love is to legerdemain you might not recognize.

Ode to an Orchid

Your head a striped shield and two flying leaves curling behind you like a nun‟s habit.

How did those magenta hairs find the edge of your leaves? Your pocket mouth is so heavy.

How did it learn to counsel air? I am in love with your upper lip, your veiny chin, each variegated part of you. You, my paphiopedilum. You, my Venus Ward. You, my singing hood, break my heart.

End of the Season

Now the garden gives its last gifts and folds its yellow leaves into a brown pocket.

Only the marigolds hold onto their green plackets; a red-gold button sprouts here and there.

It is the end of a season. The colors muted, rust, and yet the tufted titmouse still clacks in the meadow; a robin whistles before dawn.

Visiting Dottie at Hospice

Alpana met me in the parking lot and held my hand while Dottie lay inside dying. Around here it‟s like that. Death around every corner, but especially on the corner of Wayne and Wilmington where the squirrels steal the bird food from the box outside Dottie‟s window and Gary sits on the floor at the foot of his wife‟s bed telling us stories.

Mary and Annette met us there too, and when we walked into Dottie‟s room, Gary was reading poetry to her. She held her hands in front of her like a rabbit. There is nothing much there anymore – a few bones with skin drawn over. When Gary left the room, Dottie watched him go then kicked off the covers, showing us her pain. We sat in four corners watching. Gary came back and said to me, "Go find a nurse." I did.

The nurse arrived with six syringes and Dottie whispered “bad pain” and shook her head. Her eyes were like dark clouds and death stood in the doorway reminding me that when my mother died of cancer, I stood in the doorway watching as a nurse held her hand. I could not move toward her, and it haunts me.

Later Mary, Alpana, Annette, and I walked the grounds at Hospice looking at roses and chrysanthemums and exclaiming how beautiful it all is, but is death ever beautiful? When my mother died, we were glad she was no longer in pain, but I wouldn‟t say it was beautiful. Alpana tells the story of a graduate student at the University of Nebraska where she used to teach whose father had brain cancer. The father was a biker, rode a Harley and all that. When he died, the family stayed drunk for days and did all his prescription drugs. Fought over them. Got stoned drunk. Smoked hashish. What is love anyway?

But here that is impossible. All day Gary sits close to Dottie and their daughters float in and out, carrying their broken hearts, whatever is needed or water. .

Vagus Nerve

I like anything electrical, he says, and I think Vagus Nerve, searching for electrons along the spine.

My spine against this once living sycamore knows the pulse of blood and longs for the wanderer, that vagabond, not vagrant, a nerve that responds to your palm in mine and loves Indigo, not the color, not the mood, but the plant.

It dyes a bolt of cloth or a rope a dark Mediterranean blue, a plant hung like a painting, dried and tied by its thick stems on the gallery wall.

The gallery fills with an aroma I swear is tobacco. And yet, why when I push my nose into its leaves, nothing but a crackle, directly wafts from there? Don‟t touch, whispers the attendant, but touch is a need that keeps firing beneath the skin, arching along the nape of my neck, and I will do anything.

Two Words

It was a traveler‟s antique trunk trimmed in gold. Uncle unlocked the little hole. Stole inside lace lined river grab the raft.

Uncle Ted, Uncle Ted what treasures hiding there.

Next to it was an armoire. I only knew this because my cousin once moved away from home.

There are two words we learned: armoire and fuck. Fuck came in handy; armoire exists only in this poem.

Rosie’s Reeds of Knowledge

Inside knowledge there is only grey matter. Oedipus recognizes his father -- dead inside the dark oracle, Electra searches for justice as they take away her brother. Christ gets nailed to the cross, wears a crown of thorns.

These waves of black suspended in glass are splattered with blood. The hills are draped with a few strands of uncertainty, and then reflected in the glass your face.

Clouds

I dip my hand into a boisterous light and wave my fingers in the face of god.

Inside his eye, there is a mountain; above the apex, clouds.

Someone has named them: nimbus, cirrus, cirrocumulus; but if you go high enough, it doesn‟t matter, names disappear.

Not even god knows why. There‟s still a cloud weaving water into frayed threads, dropping them on the heads of mountain goats butting against sky.

Lament: A Sketch

I think of prayer and what it might mean five times a day for an ailing heart.

Would it consider the humble stance of the sayer? Last night a storm talked in voices of crows and trees warped by wind. I cried for home: the rain pelting a tin roof.

Father

Beneath the dark surface, a fish flicks its tail.

Beyond the row of pines across the way, a few cows graze.

Before memory there is a bellowing train.

I cannot see the black engine, the many cars that lumber by, the yellow caboose, but I can hear it wail beyond the pines, feel it tremble beneath a shadow.

Apology

No bats hang in the rafters, flexing their supple arms. No gunmen stand by the side of the road carrying M16s. I am not teetering on a ledge staring down into a precipice on Mt. Rainier, no place to go but down, not about to jump from a plane, my breath a stone I cannot swallow, not worried about pulling the string, not wondering if I will live or die. I know I will live, and so I talk myself away from the edge, move from the widening grates,

the gaping moat of another and watch him weave between the castle and the woods.

Witness

I had forgotten what it meant until I saw that leaf pinned beneath the water, shining copper, until I saw the brook skipping between the rocks like a young girl, until I saw fog rubbing against stalks of corn in a field where tips of dried grasses glowed in the sun like the burning ends of cigarettes, until a raindrop kissed my nape with cold lips.

We are deep in September, but still a few pearly asters shine by the path and the blue lobelia bow their heads.

Gathering Dust

I saw you slip the 2 of spades beneath your shoe, under the table, but when confronted, you wouldn‟t confess, you rascal, you.

I never could figure out what happened to our wedding vows so painstakingly typed on the tracing paper, all those years ago –

Remember? They lay casually on the dresser until they began to yellow and curl and then – just like that they disappeared.

When I asked you, you said, “Gathering dust; they were just gathering dust.”

And the queen of hearts? I would have never guessed it. Was it you who stole her, folded her into a fish, and then let her suck all the joy from our poker game?

How will I ever trust you again? The salmon I was saving for your birthday supper? Dried and tied.

The quartz I had wrapped in tissue and carried across the sky, the first love poem you wrote me, my favorite marble – all of these? Here they are suspended on tiny pins beneath plexiglass, on a plywood board wrapped in a flannel sheet also vanished from the bed many years ago – and even the moon disappeared beneath a red diaphanous skin. And yet how can I think of scolding you, who took such care to hang them here, their shadows dancing with each other across a blank wall.

Chiefly Copper and Coal

Trade water for copper, subtract coal and figure in a few board feet of timber. Triple the amount of tillable soil and the mountains collapse beneath the weight of the sky – dry and brittle.

Add cows and sheep, schlep off a few thousand years of silt and slowly the prognosis is: homeless.

Say we deliver another load of limestone from the east and work our way through the canyon, crying wolf. Pray for more rain. On the side of the road, layers of stone mark off eternity. Has any asked where is the heart of the tree? Why are the layers ochre? Why are they rust? What do the growth rings of the Sequoia reveal about the aquifer or the muddy river?

When fire ravaged the canyon, the conifers burned for days giving light and heat to the seedlings now raised like cathedrals, wanting worship.

In the Sapello watershed the trout streams once lined with willows burned like cane sugar when the fires forced their way along the bank. The willows laid low for centuries and then came back green and supple. Cows chewed their way through the crevice.

Only two years to turn willows to stone. What fire could not do, cows could. There is a wind that whips through the canyon blowing up red dust, throwing it into our eyes.

Allegory of Misrule

Piled among the bodies haphazardly thrown in a pile head to toe, toe to sternum, heart to ear, ear to arm. A hungry blue drips its honey.

The layers: grey cloud mushrooming behind a familiar form: lover rejected.

And yet toppling from the apex: a burnt orange wreck tumbles through the air and occasionally a torso wrestles free.

Five of Hearts i.

When my mother lay dying, I stood inside the doorway. Just inside. I couldn‟t get to her bedside. If I could just get through or stand on the other side. That‟s what I‟ve always thought. If I could just take one step toward the bed where my mother lay dying, the nurse holding her hand, it might have been different.

ii.

Last night I dreamt of nothing -- same as the night before. I am listening for the sound of forgiveness. I am praising the darkness, feeling my way along the edges of a vast chamber filled with ignorance and blood. We have given over the right ventricle. Listen to the trickling of fluid forced through the bloody twist.

iii.

There is a space between dark and light that is nameless. I live there with my heavy hand.

iv.

Once she told me a story or rather she wrote it down and I found it hidden among her cotton lingerie. The pages yellowed and curled. It wasn‟t the truth. My father never brought her roses or took her dancing. He went to the bar after work and sometimes we joined him there to eat fried fish or retrieve him, too drunk to drive, an image burned into stone and smelling of bourbon or beer, and yet this same man remembers the exact time of my birth and the smell of his first car. v.

I feel my way around, fingertips touching the prickly pear called memory. It‟s a heart. It shoots through to another sphere. I try not to go too deep or damage the intricate arrangement of muscle and blood. I thought the door existed on a ventricle plane, but I see now I am mistaken. The door is lying on the ground and there are steps leading down to it, and once you enter, there are steps leading down.

Wifely

She sits on the edge of the bed before dawn and watches the light gathering its hues from the mourning dove.

Blue-black sky rocks her, but she is not listening; she is remembering the lilies in the vase downstairs, the blossoms shouting at her as she passes by, their scented song leaping from cherry spotted petals. She remembers sex before it was an aphorism. No waiting for spring to fill the yard with burgeoning buds and blooms: her heart a drum.

Muddying the Waters: Prose Poems in June Jordan’s Things That I Do in the Dark

Much has changed for black women writers since 1977 when Barbara

Smith wrote: “All segments of the literary world – whether establishment, progressive, black, female, or lesbian – do not know or at least act as if they do not know, that black writers and black lesbian writers exist.”1 The first change occurred with Smith herself rereading, and thus critiquing, Toni Morrison‟s Sula as a lesbian novel. Then, in the mid 1980‟s, the publication of gay and lesbian writing surged, initially in response to the AIDS epidemic, but finally gaining a momentum that went beyond the AIDS epidemic and resulted in gay and lesbian literature earning its own section in books stores and its own classes in many

English department curriculums in the United States. Around the same time, thanks to the tremendous efforts of Alice Walker and other dedicated black feminists, texts such as Zora Neale Hurston‟s Their Eyes Were Watching God became standard reading material in both graduate and undergraduate literature courses across the country, creating ongoing scholarship and debate concerning black women‟s literary history. Scholarship on black women writers was further expanded in 1997 when W.W. Norton published an extensive anthology of African

American Literature within which black women writers were adequately represented.

Publication of the Norton anthology was followed with the appearance of

Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, and Toni Morrison, simultaneously, on national best-seller lists in the summer of 1998. Indeed, much has changed. Not only in

English departments, but also across the country, many black feminist writers are recognized, read, and talked about. While academia has begun to more readily recognize the literary significance of black women writers, attention to other literary genres has been ignored. Specifically, scholarship on the prose poem has ignored some of its most important contributors, namely, writers of color and women.

Margueritte S. Murphy‟s A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in

English from Wilde to Ashbery provides an example of the usual tract that scholarship on the prose poem follows.2 In her book, Murphy traces the history of the prose poem as an identifiable genre from France to America by beginning with the French writer Baudelaire. From there she gives a bow to Baudelaire‟s precursor, Bertrand, before considering the significance of Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde,

William Carlos Williams, and John Ashbery, and the mother of the prose poem,

Gertrude Stein.

Michel Delville‟s The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the

Boundaries of the Genre,3 Jonathan Monroe‟s A Poverty of Objects: The Prose

Poem and the Politics of Genre, 4 Stephen Fredman‟s Poet’s Prose: The crisis in

American verse,5 and Steven Monte‟s Invisible Fences: Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature 6 all outline a history of the prose poem similar to Murphy‟s, and while they all offer only a cursory discussion of prose poems

51 written by women, they do not offer any discussion of how poets of color have used the form.

The most recent example of the neglect of black women in the scholarship on the prose poem is David Lehman‟s anthology Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to the Present.7 To his credit, more than half of the “great” poems are by women, and a few even by women of color; however, in the introductory essay that discusses the history and significance of the form, no mention is made of the contribution of writers of color. Instead, Lehman reiterates the history that has already been given by Murphy, Delville, and the others.

The prose poem is a hybrid form, an anomaly if not a paradox or

oxymoron. It offers the enchantment of escape whether from the

invisible chains of the superego, or from the oppressive reign of the

alexandrine line, from which Charles Baudelaire broke vehemently

in his Petits Poèmes en prose (1862), which inaugurated the genre

in France.8

During my research of prose poetry and its history, I located only one article that discusses the prose poem and the black writer; its premise continues my lament. Aldon Lynn Nielson‟s “Black Margins: African-American Prose

Poems” attempts to explain why scholarship on the prose poem has excluded black writers.9 According to Nielsen, black poets who use the prose poem genre fail to represent the dominant thinking held by white critics about what black writers are writing. Nielsen indicates that what editors, and therefore the public

(because they get what the editors give them), expect from black writers is an exploration of the self in the context of race rather than in the context of class, gender, religion, culture, sexual preference, love, or anything else. As Lawrence

Rainey states, “Cognition of the Other turns out to be a mirror in which, dimly discernable at the margins, we also find its uncanny double the Self of current criticism.”10 Thus, Nielsen says, we will not see the prose poetry of Bob Kaufman,

N.J. Loftis, and Nathaniel Mackey in any anthology because these writers use the prose genre for reasons untoward what is expected of black writers.

According to Nielsen, Kaufman, Loftis, Mackey, and other black writers of the prose poem buck the expectations of the critics in three distinct ways. First, black poets use prose as a subversive act of form that not only reacts against constricting rhyme schemes and rhythmic forms as Murphy et al suggest, but also as a subversive act of form that questions and unravels reality in ways that go beyond issues and concerns with race. Second, Nielsen claims that the prose poem is a place to challenge the “self-identical presence and mimetic expression of always familiar personal experiences of the margins.”11 In this case he uses

N.J. Loftis„s Black Anima as an example, arguing that Black Anima “remains a significant moment of alterity in black writing, one that will not conform itself to the ethnographic gaze . . . .It promises a discovery of black identity, but it guarantees that the discovery will be unsettling.”12 Finally, Nielsen argues that the prose form allows the black writer to interrogate the dominant views of race and identity.

Here he refers to Nathaniel Mackey‟s collection of prose-letter poems titled,

Bedouin Hornbook, to discuss how Mackey uses a reference to painted faces to

53 write against Paul Laurence Dunbar‟s mask in the poem “We Wear the Mask.”

Mackey needs to write against Dunbar because, as Nielsen explains, “any who have read or recited Dunbar‟s dialect Lyrics of Lowly Life will recognize that just as the persona who speaks in those poems is a mask, so the very forms of his lyrics are masks of an autoconstitutive self formed to answer the self constituted for him by a white readership.”13 As is evident from Nielsen‟s examples and explanations, in order to understand how the prose poem has evolved and developed at the hand of writers of color, one must move beyond the definitions and histories outlined by the contemporary critics writing on the genre.

Nielsen‟s essay is important in that it opens up a long overdue discussion on the prose poem and the black writer; however, even in the theories purported by Nielsen, theories that intend to take the discussion of this genre beyond a discussion about race, race still seems to be the defining factor. In fact, Nielsen‟s theories do not move much beyond those of Murphy and the others. He too talks about the prose poem as a subversive act where, for Nielsen, the subversion is against white critic‟s expectations of the black writer rather than against strict rhyme schemes. Nielsen seems to be saying that the black writer writing in prose is writing against himself as a recipient of racist attitudes and perceptions. But again the definition comes back to the black writer‟s racial identity. It is this way of being situated that is under examination in this essay. In other words, in this essay, I will move beyond the limitations of race and subversion to argue that the use of the prose form in the writing of June Jordan springs organically from a specific requirement of the poem rather than in response to the racist attitudes in

54 our culture. Of course, race must figure into any discussion of the black writer, but in the prose poems that appear in Jordan‟s Things That I Do in the Dark, race is a cursory consideration. In these poems, as in poems by other women writers of color, prose surfaces as the best form for making meaning.

Lehman‟s anthology includes a poem “Kentucky, 1833”14 by Rita Dove which fits into the aforementioned expectations of the critics writing about black writers. It describes the experience of black slaves in Kentucky in 1833. It explores the exploitation of the young boys by their master, and how the limited experience of the slaves prevents them from understanding that they are being exploited. At the same time, there are other poems by black writers that do not fit into the expectations. Harryette Mullen‟s “Sleeping With the Dictionary,”15 and

Thylia Moss‟s “An Annointing”16 are two examples. Neither of these examples mentions race or refers to race, and yet, they are in the most recent anthology on the poet and the prose poem. The anthologization of poems by Mullen and Moss may well be indicative of a changing time for black women writers of prose poems, or maybe it‟s just that Lehman has been sensitized to include poetry by women of color, and the different types of poems are mere coincidence. In any case, although the introduction to Lehman‟s anthology does not indicate that he has thought about how black women writers using the prose poem affects theory and history of the prose poem, the prose poems that he has chosen do seem to challenge both Nielsen‟s thesis and the scholarship on the prose poem as previously outlined by Murphy, Fredman, Monte, Delville, and even Lehman himself. I will focus specifically on June Jordan‟s prose poems in Things That I

Do in the Dark as a place to begin looking at some other possibilities concerning the development, evolution, and continued use of this genre.

For Jordan, there appears to be no definable line between prose and poetry. She switches from poetry to prose and prose to poetry in her essays and poems, as easily as it is to kick off a pair of shoes and put on another. And, there is nothing particularly more subversive about her prose poems as compared to her lyrical or verse poems or vice versa. Jordan is always subversive regardless of the genre she writes in. That is true for other black women writers as well, and, I believe it could explain why the scholarship on the black writer and the prose poem does not exist. In addition to the inherent racism of academic scholarship, (i.e. poems by black writers were not examined by Murphy, Delville,

Monte, and others,) a further explanation as to why scholarship on the writer of color and the prose poem has not been pursued is that a close look at black writers‟ prose poems would turn the scholarship on its head. Black writers‟ poetry written in a prose form does not fit with the definition or historical outline provided by Murphy and the others. Black writers use of the prose form cannot be traced back to Baudelaire‟s rebellion against rhyme and form. Rather than a rejection of a particular form or stricture, for the black women poets, using prose is an authentic response to the demands of the poem. If anything, the use of prose by black woman poets actually returns to, rather than rejects, an earlier tradition of chanting and preaching that included the rhythms and lyrical characteristics of poetry, but if written down would look like prose. Evidence of these earlier

56 traditions, the chants and other aspects of the black vernacular sermon abound in the prose poems of June Jordan and other black women poets.

Of course not all black writers of the prose poem will embrace the black vernacular speech patterns I am referring to here. For some black writers, the prose poem does incorporate the subversive elements mentioned in Murphy and

Delville. Haryette Mullen‟s Trimmings is one obvious example of how a black woman writer might fit into Murphy and Delville‟s descriptions of the prose poem as a form of subversion. Mullen‟s entire collection of prose poetry is written in response to the “racist markings” that often appear in Gertrude Stein‟s work, specifically, in this case, Tender Buttons. According to Nielson:

This volume renders central and primary all that which is normally

considered supplementary and decorative, the trimmings that are added to

the otherwise already finished, by name itself with a black pun, by naming

itself for the very anatomy of tender buttons, by naming itself for a center of

erotic experience.17

Yet even within that tradition of subversion, for which the prose poem is famous, there exists a return to rather than rejection of the earlier African oral traditions; this is evident in the writings of June Jordan.

About two-thirds into the collection, Things That I Do in the Dark, a series of poems appear in which Jordan explores her relationship with her parents. She

57 writes these poems in order to come to terms with the abuse that she endured at the hands of her father and the neglect that she experienced by her mother‟s complicity. The series culminates in a prose poem, “Ah, Momma,” which illustrates how the black writer‟s use of the prose poem is not necessarily an act of dissidence, but rather an act of necessity. Prose provides the particular form or language that will move the poem forward. “Ah Momma” is best understood in the context of three poems, “One Minus One,” “On the Spirit of Mildred Jordan,” and

“Getting Down to Get Over,” that lead up to it.18

For Jordan, it was easier to understand her father‟s abuse than her mother‟s complicity. Early on she realized that it was her father‟s hard-driving personality that led her to poetry and to her life‟s work. Even before Jordan could read and understand poetry, her father would force her to memorize the poems of

Shakespeare, Dunbar, and Edgar Allan Poe; she quickly came to know that her memorizations and recitations of those writers‟ poetry pleased her father. In

Soldier, A Poet’s Memoir, she recalls how she could stop her father from coming after her mother by asking him to listen to her recitation of a poem.19 It was also her father who successfully arranged to have Jordan enrolled in Northfield, one of the finest girl‟s high schools in New York. Jordan struggled much longer to come to terms with her mother‟s silence, with the way her mother backed down so easily against her father, and with the way her mother did not intervene in the violent confrontations between Jordan and her father. In an interview with David

Barsamian conducted just a few years before her death, Jordan discusses how

58 her father‟s “inordinate ambitions for me have everything to do with most of the really happy, productive aspects of my life,” but when asked about her mother, she only says, “I was not that close to my mother.”20

The series that explores her relationship with her parents begins with “One

Minus One Minus One,” a poem not specifically about her mother, but one that hearkens to a generalized experience reflective of Jordan‟s personal experience.

Jordan writes:

My mother murdering me to have a life of her own

What would I say

(if I could speak about it?)

My father raising me

To be a life that he

Owns

What can I say

(in this loneliness)21

Although numbers or extra spaces do not divide the poem, it actually has two distinct sections. In the first two stanzas the speaker assumes the persona of an

59 aborted child. The mother “murders”/aborts the child in order to have some autonomy. The speaker in the poem takes on the persona of the child and wonders what would she/the child say if she could speak. Then, the speaker speaks as a child that has not been aborted but is living with a tyrannical father who is raising the child for his own needs. The juxtaposition of the two perspectives implies that living a life designed by her father is no better than being aborted. In one way, the poem can be read as if her father did abort her emotionally more so than physically; in another way, the poem points to the connection between the lives of the mother and daughter: what is implicit in the poem is that the mother who is considering an abortion is the same as the daughter whose life has been “aborted” by the father.

The next poem in the series on her mother, “On the Spirit of Mildred

Jordan,” is a brief portrait of her mother as she heads out to the store with

“stockings baggy on her shrunken legs/. . .and a powder blue straw/hat with plastic/flowers . . .she let the family laugh/again/ she wasn‟t foxy/she was strong.”22 The poem is written specifically to capture how her mother‟s physical presence represents her inner strength insofar as she rejects the judgment, from family members, of her appearance. She travels onward to the store to fulfill her motherly duties in spite of the disrespect she receives from the very people she is serving. This is the mother‟s lot, isn‟t it? She has given up on herself and on her own life to care for her family – a family that rejects her even as they depend on her for their most basic needs.

Following “On the Spirit of Mildred Jordan,” is “Getting Down to Get

Over.”23 This poem continues with the theme of motherhood, but with a broader and more generalized portrait of all black mothers (women?). The poem begins with “MOMMA MOMMA MOMMA/momma momma,” but quickly switches to

“mammy” indicating the direction toward generalities that it will take. Since it follows right after the small, detailed portrait of her mother, I believe it indicates that Jordan understands her mother‟s plight not just as her own mother, as an individual making certain choices, but as a black woman in the context of the culture and history within which she lived. This poem is a portrait of her mother in the role of black woman within the American immigrant-slave-girl history in which she lived. Before the poem ends, the father enters and his presence further complicates the role of the black women and the plight that is hers, for the collective she (black woman) is meaningless to those around her. In spite of this patriarchal structure, she is something and someone to herself, and in this rare instance, she becomes meaningful to her daughter who is trying to understand and honor her.

Although the first three poems in the series are beautifully written, the form, rhythm, sounds, meaning all presented skillfully, it is the last poem, “Ah, Momma,” that provides the clearest picture of Jordan‟s mother and of June‟s discernment of her mother‟s life. “Ah, Momma” is a prose poem, a form that I believe was chosen during the act of creation because it allowed Jordan to record a plethora of mundane details needed to make sense of her mother‟s life. Choosing forms and genres that fulfill the specific needs of the writer demonstrates how many black

61 women writers use the prose poem. Jordan‟s use of the prose poem, in this instance, forces her to move away from her own very personal view of her mother into a more profound perception of how her mother saw herself. Her mother‟s view of herself, one that includes the disappoints and longings that the daughter cannot know about, is so much larger than Jordan‟s view of her that she cannot contain it in a verse or stanza.

We comprehend Jordan‟s deepened understanding of her mother because of the preceding poems. While the first few poems provide an image of the mother that readers can relate to in relation to all mothers, they dance around the issue of Jordan‟s own relationship with her mother, a relationship that defines

Mildred Jordan as much as it defines June Jordan. Rather than trying to conceive of her mother objectively, historically, culturally, as she has done in the previous poems in the series, “Ah, Momma” allows Jordan to step inside her mother‟s life in a more personal and intimate way. The prose form allows Jordan to create and visit her mother‟s most intimate space -- the “little room.”

Ah Momma,

Did the house ever know the night-time of your spirit: the flash and flame of

you who once, when we crouched in what you called “the little room,”

where your dresses hung in their pallid colorings – an uninteresting row of

uniforms – and where there were dusty, sweet-smelling boxes of costume

jewelry that nevertheless shone like rubies, gold, and diamonds, once, in

that place where the secondhand mirror blurred the person, dull, that place

without windows, with doors instead of walls, so that your small-space most

resembled a large and rather hazardous closet, once, in there you told me,

whispering, that once, you had wanted to be an artist: someone, you

explained, who could just boldly go and sit near the top of a hill and watch

the setting of the sun24

Here is the beginning of awareness where, in that little room, the mother reveals to a young June her desire to be an artist. This is the first that Jordan has heard of this, and it is something that Jordan can comprehend on a very personal level, as the struggle towards art is one that June herself knows all too well, even at this young age. But how and why did mother keep that desire secret? “Ah,

Momma!/You said this had been your wish when you were quite as young as I was then: a twelve-or thirteen-year-old girl who heard your confidence with terrified amazement: what had happened to you and your wish? Would it happen to me too?”25

What had happened to her wish? Unlike Alice Walker‟s mother, in “In

Search of Our Mothers‟ Gardens,” in which Walker writes of the realization of how her mother‟s artistic energies surfaced in the flower gardens cultivated in the midst of poverty and squalor, Jordan‟s mother was unable to locate joy or color in the daily. She could only imagine it in:

. . .“the little room” adjoined the kitchen, the kitchen where no mystery

survived, except for the mystery of you: . . . woman who tied a headrag

around the waving, kinky, well-washed braids, or lengthy, fat curls of her

hair while she moved, without particular grace or light, between the table

and the stove, between the sink and the table, around and around and

around in the spacious, ugly kitchen where she, where you, never dreamed

about what you were doing or what you might do instead, and where you

taught me to set down plates and silverware, and even fresh-cut flowers

from the garden, without appetite, without excitement, without

expectation.26

It was not until Jordan entered “the little room” that she discovered her mother‟s costume jewelry, the pictures of a boyfriend she did not marry, and the photographs she did not share. Here, the prose form allows Jordan not only to explore this expanded, complicated-by-desire world in more depth, but it also illustrates the largesse of the small room as the lines stretch to fill up and push against the margins of the page.

Ah, Momma,

It was where I found you, hidden away, in your “little room,” where your life

and the power, the rhythms of your sacrifice, the ritual of your bowed head,

and your laughter always partly concealed, where all of you, womanly,

reverberated big as the whole house, it was there that I came, humbly, into

an angry, an absolute determination that I would, prove myself to be, in

fact, your daughter

Ah, Momma, I am still trying.27

This poem‟s prose form, then, has provided Jordan with a format that allows her to delve into the details of her mother‟s life in a way not possible within the constrictions of a stanza. It allows the mother to step out of herself in a way that she could not if she were confined by metaphor or line breaks. Even more than the details, it is the subject that forces Jordan into prose. The poem is about her mother‟s “little room,” the little room where Mildred Jordan goes to pray when the life that she is given is too much to bear. Inside this little room there is a life larger than the family. In fact, the life inside this room is larger even than the heaven that Jordan‟s mother aspires to, and in exploring it, the mother‟s world opens to

Jordan in a way that was impossible in the other poems. The “little room” grows until it not only fills the page to its margins but also then expands beyond them.

The prose poem is the best form to illustrate this.

“Ah Momma” is not about resistance or subversion or struggling with one‟s racial identity. This poem is about exploring a particular geographical, spiritual, and metaphorical space that cannot be contained within the stanza. It is no more subversive than the poems written in standard verse form which surround it. It is not about exploring June‟s racial identity or bucking against the margins that are created because of her race. Yes, the experience of her parents has been shaped by race – they are immigrants with dark skin and so subject to all forms of racism and prejudice, but this poem is not about that. This poem is about

Jordan‟s mother as an “other” whose life and experiences were foreign from those who were supposed to really know her – her family.

The next prose poem in the collection further illustrates how subject matter and purpose lead the writer to the prose form. “Roman Poem Number 5” follows the structure of several other Roman Poems most likely composed while Jordan was in Rome after having been awarded the Prix de Rome Environmental Design in 1970. Spanning ten long pages and taking on the form of a paragraph for only sixteen lines, it begins and ends as a verse poem. The poem reflects on a visit

Jordan made to Mt. Vesuvius, a volcano often included as a part of tours for vacationers to Italy. The skeletal remains of the victims of a 79 A.D. eruption can be seen from the site, as Jordan informs us before crafting this section of the poem with the following announcement. The announcement is made in all upper case letters to indicate its significance:

VISITING DISASTER IS A WEIRD IDEA/WHETHER YOU THINK

ABOUT IT OR/ NOT.

for example limestone the façade the statues the limestone

statues of the everyone of them dead and dead and dead and

no more face among the buried under twenty-seven feet of

limestone other various in general all kinds of dust covering the

dead the finally comfortable statues of the dusty smell today

the nectar fragrance the sun knocks down my meter taking

notes the wheel ruts gutter drains the overhanging upperstories

the timber super structure the dead the very dead the very very

dead dead farmland pasture dead potato chip dead rooms of

the dead the no longer turbulent blazing the no longer glorious

inglorious the finish of the limestone building limestone statues . . .

.28

By pulling the lines to the margins, Jordan illustrates the multi-layered disaster that she is experiencing. The dead lie in piles in front of her, one on top of the other, just as they do in these lines piled one on top of each other on this page.

Again, Jordan is not rebelling against the preferred use of a poetic device or against racial attitudes, nor is she exploring how her race complicates her identity; instead, she uses the prose section here to illustrate the aftermath of Vesuvius blowing her top. This prose section acts as a form poem providing a physical rendering of a scene while making a statement about it.

The last prose selection, which also happens to be the last poem in the collection, returns to the subject of the mother. Like “Roman Poem Number Five,”

“Fragments from a Parable” begins in a verse stanza, but unlike “Roman Poem

Number Five,” once it falls into prose, it stays in prose. The poem returns to the theme of familial relationships; specifically, the poem is about the pain that Jordan experienced because of her family. It begins with an epitaph:

Paul was Saul. Saul got on the road and the road

and somebody else changed him into somebody else

on the road.29

The use of the epitaph indicates that this poem is about transformation, how the act of living renders change and how that change is augmented when along the way someone else joins the journey. In Paul‟s case, it was Ananias who accompanied him. In Jordan‟s poem, the journey begins with her own story, but in order to understand her own experiences, she must understand her mother‟s, and in order to understand her mother, she must understand how her father influenced her mother. Although understanding her father is not Jordan‟s purpose in the poems that appear in Things That I Do in the Dark, background documentation of her father is necessary to understand the dynamics that Jordan is recreating in these poems.

Jordan‟s father was a Jamaican immigrant. He came to New York in the

1930‟s, met and married Jordan‟s mother, also a Jamaican immigrant, and spent all of his life in pursuit of a better life for his family. His intentions were noble: he worked hard as a postal employee and took it as his sacred duty to ensure that

Jordan had the best education available, and it is to these things that Jordan is indebted to her father. Nonetheless, his drive for success in America was thwarted and by the time that June was born, her father was an angry and frustrated man. He took his frustration out first on June‟s mother, but as June

68 learned to redirect his blows away from her mother toward herself, she became a victim of his tirades.

Escaping victimization was one of the driving forces behind Jordan‟s work and life. She wrote not only to escape her father, but as her consciousness and awareness of the world grew, her purpose for writing expanded to include the defense of any person anywhere fighting oppression. “Fragments of a Parable” is just one of many poems that demonstrate how Jordan‟s writing was a form of protest. It is just one of many poems that illustrate how Jordan‟s struggle with her father taught her how to fight against an unjust, racist world.

The first fourteen lines of “Fragments from a Parable” are written in free verse and are complete with poetic devices to evoke meaning: metaphors, strong imagery, repetition, and alliteration all join to weave a poetic voice. While

Jordan‟s poetic prowess is obvious in this poem, even more obvious and significant is how her themes influence genre:

The worst is not knowing if I do take somebody‟s

word on it means I don‟t know and you have to believe

if you just don‟t know. How do I dare to stand as

still as I am still standing? Arrows create me.30

“The worst is not knowing” is about faith. Jordan must learn to trust what someone else tells her. The reference to Paul seems to indicate that this is about a religious faith, but as the poem progresses it becomes clear that this faith is

69 connected to her father and his view of the world as a place where the only sensible stance is the warrior stance. To Jordan‟s father everything was a threat.

Granville pushed his distrustful view of the world upon, first, Jordan‟s mother and then Jordan herself. In this poem, as in many of her poems, Jordan tries to untwist the warped view of things pressed on her by her father in order to locate the axis of her own pain and sense of being.

And I despise directions. I am no wish.

After all the lunging still

myself no sanctuary

birds feed and fly inside me shattering

the sullen spell of my desiring and the

accidental conquest.31

Here she rejects what she has been told -- “I despise directions” – and although she has a long way to go to find her own interpretation, she recognizes the limitations of what she has been given. Birds, those innocent little creatures, feed and fly inside her, but innocence is shattered by desire and an accidental conquest that I will talk about in relation to the next line.

Eyeless wings will twist and sting

the tree of my remaining

like wind.32

The eyeless wings result from the accidental conquest, and based on Jordan‟s memoir, which discusses her relationship with her father in great detail, I believe it is safe to assume that the accidental conqueror is her father. His abuse of

Jordan‟s mother and then of June still twists and stings her – vast understatements in many ways. But Jordan, like her mother, is strong, and like her mother, she is also easily confounded, rearranged, disheveled, and thrown off track. She is the tree of her remaining, but the tree is like wind.

Here the poem changes from verse to prose, and the story shifts to include

Her – her mother – and here we also see how her mother and she are so closely connected as to be the same person. The last few lines in the first segment of this poem indicate this interconnection:

Always there is not knowing, not knowing everything

of myself and having to take whoever you are at your

word. About me.

I am she.33

In the next verse, a prose paragraph is directed to a “you.” It is not clear if the “you” is her father or some other omniscient being or a combination of the two.

The father in this poem often seems to take the role assigned to a supreme being, one who is in control of much of what is created and how everyone behaves. As has been indicated in interviews with Jordan and in her memoir, he, the father, the authority figure, was in control of both Jordan and her mother, and he gained his

71 control through fear. “Like a growling beast, the roll-away mahogany doors rumble open, and the light snaps on and a fist smashes into the side of my head,” recalls Jordan in her memoir. “And I am trying to cover my face and he tears away the blankets and I can barely recognize this man, my father.”34 In

“Fragments of a Parable” she directs this toward her father:

And this is my story of Her. The story is properly yours to tell. You

have created Her, but carelessly. As large as a person, she

nevertheless learns why she walks and the aim of her gaze and the

force of her breath from you who coax her to solve independently

the mystery of your making: Her self.34

By capitalizing Her, Jordan indicates that the mother too is an omniscient being, that she too has the potential to create, but as indicated here, her ability to create is frustrated by her careless creator, Jordan‟s father. Jordan‟s mother is blocked from making a life she can call her own, all the while she exudes strength and beauty, because the threat of abuse from Jordan‟s father overtakes everything that she might try to do, to cultivate: “She nevertheless learns why she walks and the aim of her gaze and the force of her breath from you . . . .”36 In order to avoid her husband‟s rage, she must “solve independently the mystery” of his making.

She must figure how to keep him at bay.

In this next paragraph, and it is a paragraph, even though this is a poem,

Jordan scolds her parents: “Your patterns deny parenthood; deny every connection suggesting a connection . . . .”37 Jordan is angry that her mother was not allowed to become who she was without this twisted aspect of trying please the father. Jordan herself learned this early and became adept at redirecting her father‟s blows from her mother to herself. “Your approval matters like life and death. She is who I am.” And yet, Jordan tells us, “I am. My name is me.”38 From here, Jordan goes into a stream-of-consciousness diatribe that looks for meaning for what it means to be me – “between/beyond/beneath/illusions.” In the rest of the poem, Jordan attempts to extract herself from her father‟s influence, from the way he pushed her into language, the way he captured her and her mother inside

“The Wall,” that Jordan knew as her home. Jordan wants to reject everything that her father gave her in order to understand who she is without the context of the abuse that she endured because of him.

Another poem in which Jordan struggles with her family‟s dysfunctional dynamics is ”War and Memory,” and while in that poem Jordan is exploring the same issues, she does not use a prose format. I believe the reason for the different genres can be traced to different purposes for each of the poems. In

“War and Memory,” Jordan makes use of a three-way conversation between herself, her mother, and her father to explore family dynamics. Again, we see that the form germinates organically – a conversation written in prose would still look like a verse poem. The conversation creates the poetic line just as the layers of dead form the prose lines in “Roman Poem Number Five,” just as the prose form

73 creates the “little room” in “Ah, Momma.” Further, the poem is about her father.

The mother shows up in the poem, but as a recipient of the father‟s abusive words, and there is no attempt in the poem to understand the psychological make- up of the father. In “Fragments from a Parable,” as in “Ah, Momma,” Jordan attempts to transverse to a deeper level of understanding, one that cannot be represented with short lines. These two differing approaches to the subject matter lead Jordan into different forms, different line breaks, and rhyme schemes among other things.

“Fragments of a Parable” begins by evoking the story of how Saul transforms into Paul. It evokes one of the most radical conversions recorded.

Jordan is most interested in this conversion as a psychological occurrence rather than a spiritual occurrence or Christian benchmark. This is not to say that the spiritual doesn‟t concern Jordan, but rather that she is trying to understand on another level how a person can be so completely transformed as to become someone else. Saul‟s conversion carries two meanings in this poem. First, it is a metaphor for her mother. What Jordan seems to be asking in this poem is how did the “most beautiful woman in the world,” the woman who gave birth to me, become a victim of suicide? Here she blames her father:

My father loved the delusion he sired. The fundamental dream of my

mother, her unnatural ignorance refreshed him and he surrounded her with

new unnecessaries; things that do not matter, have no matter like The

Wall. He gave to her. He gave of himself to her. He gave gold to her. He

told her stories of herself. He told her the myth of the mirror. He made her

the mirror of myth. He said to my mother many nouns. He said face and

sky and ear and emerald and eye, but then he said grass. He said she

was grass.39

Additionally, Jordan is looking for a similar conversion for herself so that she might find a way to save her mother after the mother has already committed suicide. Jordan has indicated in other writings, as she does here, that by living her own life in a way that her mother would have liked to live hers (if it were not for the circumstances of her life, if it were not for her husband) that she can transform her mother‟s life. But the poem does not end well. Similar to Paul who was ostracized and punished for his conversion, Jordan discovers that even as she lives her life to its fullest, even as she comes to know that she must do this for her mother, she also realizes that her father‟s abuse will continue to haunt her.

I have heard the rope in your throat ready to squeeze

me into the syntax of stone

The sound of my life is a name you may not remember

I am losing the touch of the world to a word 40

Again, “Fragments” is not a poem written in order to make a statement about race or to explore Jordan‟s resistance to the race problem. It is not a poem that rebels against traditional rhyme schemes or metrical approaches.

“Fragments,” like the other poems discussed here, was written on the road to self-

75 knowledge. For Jordan, the prose in the poems came from a specific need. In

“Ah, Momma” it was to expand the dimensions of her mother‟s “little room,” in

“Roman Poem Number 5,” prose is used to reiterate the piles of the dead that

Jordan is witnessing, in “Fragments,” the prose part of the poem illustrates the stream-of-consciousness thinking that is needed to dive beneath the surface of her mother‟s life to a greater insight into her own. By breaking down the barriers of the line or the verse, Jordan also is able to break down the barriers of self. 25

Much has changed for black women writers writing in the new century, and as critics and scholars, our work must reflect that change, and it must reflect the need for more original approaches to the writing of black women writers. I hope this essay will provide a springboard for other scholars writing about the prose poem. In light of Lehman‟s new anthology, there is much more to be said about the prose poem, especially about how it is more than a simple act of subversion.

For Jordan, and for other black writers, the prose poems spring from a source based on the purpose or subject matter of the poem. As purposes and subject matter alter, so must our knowledge of this genre.

Notes

1. Smith, Barbara, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Black Feminist

Cultural Criticism (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2001), 1-7.

2. Murphy, Marguerite S., A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in

English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,

1992)

3. Delville, Michel, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the

Boundaries of Genre (Gainesville: University of Florida, 1998)

4. Monroe, Jonathan, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the

Politics of Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1987)

5. Fredman, Stephen, Poet’s Prose: The crisis in American verse

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)

6. Monte, Steven, Invisible Fences: Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska, 2000)

7. Lehman, David, Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to Present

(New York: Scribner, 2003)

8. Lehman, 13.

9. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, “Black Margins: African-American Prose Poems.

Reading Race in American Poetry: “An Area of Act.” (Chicago: University of

Illinois Press, 2000)

10. Rainey, Lawrence quoted in Nielsen, 117.

11. Nielsen, 154.

12. Nielsen, 155.

13. Nielsen, 156.

14. Lehman, 231.

15. Lehman, 256.

16. Lehman, 245.

17. Nielsen, 150.

18. Jordan, June, Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems (New

York: Random House, 1977)

19. Jordan, June, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, (New York: Basic Civitas

Books, 2000)

20. Barsamian, David, “June Jordan: Childhood Memories, Poetry &

Palestine,” interview by author, 11 October 2000.

21. Jordan, June, Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems (New

York: Random House, 1977), 25.

22. Jordan, 26.

23. Jordan, 27.

24. Jordan, 37.

25. Jordan,38.

26. Jordan, 38

27. Jordan, 38.

28. Jordan, 170.

30. Jordan, 196.

31. Jordan, 196.

32. Jordan, 196.

33. Jordan, 196.

34. Jordan, June, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, (New York: Basic Civitas

Books, 2000), 38.

35. Jordan, June, Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems (New

York: Random House, 1977), 196.

36. Jordan, 196.

37. Jordan, 196.

38. Jordan, 197.

39. Jordan, 201.

40. Jordan, 203.

Works Cited

Barsamian, David. “June Jordan: Childhood Memories, Poetry &

Palestine.” Interview. 11 October 2000.

Delville, Michel. The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the

Boundaries of Genre. Gainesville: University of Florida, 1998.

Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s Prose: The crisis in American verse.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Jordan, June. Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems. New York:

Random House, 1977. ibid. Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2000.

Lehman, David. Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to Present. New

York: Scribner, 2003.

Monroe, Jonathan. A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the

Politics of Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1987.

Monte, Steven. Invisible Fences: Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and

American Literature. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska,

2000.

Murphy, Marguerite S. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in

English from Wilde to Ashbery. Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. “Black Margins: African-American Prose Poems.

Reading Race in American Poetry: “An Area of Act.” Chicago:

University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” Black Feminist

Cultural Criticism. Randall Curren, Ed. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell-

Wiley, 2001. 7-23.