THE APPLE SPEAKS: RECLAIMING “SELF” WHILE BRIDGING WORLDS

IN CONFESSIONAL MENNONITE POETRY

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Rebecca J. Rossiter

August 2007 2 This thesis entitled

THE APPLE SPEAKS: RECLAIMING “SELF” WHILE BRIDGING WORLDS

IN CONFESSIONAL MENNONITE POETRY

by

REBECCA J. ROSSITER

has been approved

for the Department of English

and the College of Arts and Sciences by

______

Sharmila A. Voorakkara

Assistant Professor of English

______

Benjamin M. Ogles

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 Abstract

ROSSITER, REBECCA J., M.A., August 2007, English

THE APPLE SPEAKS: RECLAIMING “SELF” WHILE BRIDGING WORLDS

IN CONFESSIONAL MENNONITE POETRY (62 pp.)

Director of Thesis: Sharmila A. Voorakkara

This thesis includes a critical introduction outlining the history of creative works

from (female) Mennonite history. It also explores how silence can be both prohibitive and

utilized for an individual writer’s voice. Twenty-nine original poems follow.

Approved: ______

Sharmila A. Voorakkara

Assistant Professor of English

4

Acknowledgments

The ever-ready eyes and energy of Sharmila Voorakkara nurtured this thesis. Other

readers/mentors included Mark Halliday, Janis Butler Holm, Helen Horn, and fellow

Ohio University student writers. Without the hearty encouragement gleaned from the

2006 “Beyond Borders: Mennonite/s Writing” conference at Bluffton University (where

my work was presented to a mostly Anabaptist audience for the first time), this thesis

would not so honestly reflect my present faith and person.

5

Table of Contents

Abstract……..…………………………………………………………………………… 3

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………….. 4

Critical Introduction

I. Breaking the Silence: Reclaiming “Self” in Writing…………………………. 7

II. Silence as Connection: Listening to “the World”………………………….. 17

Works Cited Page……………………………………………………………………… 22

Appendix 1: Poem by Julia Kasdorf…………………………………………………… 23

Appendix 2: Poem by Mary Oliver…………………………………………………….. 24

Creative Thesis: Poems

Method…………………………………………………………………………………. 25

Poem Written Three Hours from Home……………………………………………….. 26

Talking Poetry with the Amish……………………………………………………….. 27

Mennonite Sermon #1: No Stoplight in This Tourist Town…………………………… 28

Mennonite Sermon #2: The World from Up Here…………………………………….. 29

Mennonite Sermon #3: And Yet, and Yet…………….……………………...………. 31

What We Read First…………………………………………………………………… 32

Listen Louder Than You Sing………………………………………………………….. 33

In New Ways………………………………………………………………………….. 34

It’s Like Trying to Remember High School Spanish, Loving You……………………. 36

Icing on the Pillowcase………………………………………………………………… 37

Harvest………………………………………………………………………………….. 38 6 The Pretense of Miniature Dachshunds…………………………………………..…… 40

Hemiola……………………………………………………………………………….. 41

The Apple Speaks……………………………………………………………………. 42

Will There Be Pianos in Africa?...... 44

Ascension……………………………………………………………………………. 45

What Should I Wear for the Journey?...... 47

My Mother as Minister (of Music)…………………………………………………… 48

Ava, German for “Bird”……………………………………………………………… 49

Uprising………………………………………………………………………………. 50

My Father Eats McDonald’s…………………………………..……………………… 51

Liberian Man, Survivor………………………………………………………………. 52

A Hundred Ways to Kill a Rooster…………………………………………………… 53

Humor at the Ends of the Earth………………………………………………………. 55

Girl on Somalia Drive………………………………………………………………… 57

Our Own Kind of Advent…………………………………………………………….. 58

After Watching My Father…………………………………………………………… 60

St. Francis Works at the Columbus Zoo………………………………………………. 61

7 Critical Introduction

The Apple Speaks: Reclaiming “Self” While Bridging Worlds

in Confessional Mennonite Poetry

I. Breaking the Silence: Reclaiming the “Self” in Writing

One of my favorite writing exercises begins with listening to distinct voices vying

for attention in my head, the ones that may hinder or encourage a poem’s crafting. The

child, the parent, the body, the forefather--we all have different creative “company,” and

rarely do we invite them to speak individually. As a female Mennonite “confessional”

poet, I could be called an oxymoron, and I often face an inner cacophony. Though

Mennonite literature continues to blossom, women’s written contributions have a much

shorter and less ingrained history than men’s. Emotional violence still controls the keeping--and breaking--of certain silences within my religious tradition. Thus, “Who sits

at my inner table?” becomes a daily aesthetic labyrinth, one where certain voices are

asked to leave or are finally invited to pull up a chair.

Mennonites and Amish were nicknamed “the quiet in the land” upon immigrating

to North America in the early 1800s. We kept to ourselves, partly to avoid additional

persecution for the practices of adult baptism (and later for our nonviolent resistance).

Our early refusals to vote, to say allegiance to the flag, or to “keep up with the Joneses”

attested to our faith in simplicity and in the separation of earthly and heavenly kingdoms.

Questioning social separation continues to play a key role in my written work, since breaking silences--often by asking questions or challenging a taboo--continues to be the foundation of my poetic voice. But is silence gleaned from a history of religious 8 persecution and strict gender roles unique? How does it simmer within its offspring? An old Amish proverb proclaims, “True humility is neither thinking too highly of one’s self nor thinking too little of one’s self, but rather not thinking of one’s self at all.” My work as a poet is to resurrect this “self,” to convince it of its strength instead of its threat. No longer just an offspring of “Eve, the temptress,” my physical body offers up the empowering apple of its witness. Those who are “tempted” will read my poetry and, I hope, relate to its themes of ever-evolving identity, faith, relationships, and the self’s role in social justice.

For me, the term “confessional” in 2007 represents work willing to publicly record cultural and social taboos alongside deep emotional paradoxes. It is the self’s detailed journey documented on paper. While this type of poetry allows an individual self to surface in all of its challenging and shimmering glory, it requires a certain amount of physical and emotional distance from the familiar, (Cultural and religious expectations are stronger when surrounded by certain family, landmarks, or memories that can interfere with the writing process.) This is certainly true for American Mennonite writers who want to voice dissenting opinions or questions, since we hail from a group that continues to fear the dividing power of individuality. It is difficult to be an outspoken

“peace church” in 2007, and Mennonites struggle with assimilating into a mainstream culture that discourages living simply and without violence.

Because a text in many closed religious communities has immense influence, imaginative writing is naturally mistrusted. Quite simply, in the eyes of my community, fictional writing still has the ability to promote “nontruths,” even in poetry that might offer a personal viewpoint. Only one thing, ultimately, is Truth: the Bible. And since it is 9 written (mostly) by and about men, an unsubmitting woman offering up her

interpretations of its many misogynistic rules, blessings, and warnings could be viewed as

dangerously disrespectful.

Even as a child, I assumed that God needs to be pleased more than praised, that

He is a stern father wanting more from his children. But not everything about my

Mennonite upbringing was stifling or closed-minded. My older sister and I were taught to

live lightly on the earth and that violence is never a form of justice. At the same time, however, we learned by watching others that being a good Mennonite often means denying the self, especially in a culture where community equals identity. Furthermore, we were “special” as Americans, born to give more to a hurting world. Even today, I wrestle with underlying questions tied to my upbringing: Is Christ ultimately the suffering outcast who expects us to be the same? Must we constantly make sacrifices in order to be “good”?

As a creative writer, I frequently break from the religious mantra that “the World”

(the realm of fallen man) should be avoided; after all, my goal is to capture the detail

around me. In the introduction to A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry, editor and

poet Ann Hostetler describes this “tightrope-walking” test:

One of the challenges that Mennonite poets offer to their community is how to be

in the world. Traditionally Mennonites have considered themselves to be “in the

world but not of it.” Poetry, on the other hand, is rooted in the senses. It tends to

connect rather than separate. It privileges individual voice and vision in a context

where mutual accountability and the discipline of the group have been primary.

[Menno] poets [. . .] challenge these separations as they celebrate body and voice, 10 provoking new ways of seeing the world. (xvi)

I privilege connectedness by noticing similarities in unexpected places. This stems from

an underlying struggle in my writing to tie myself to community mores even as I am

straining to pull away from them. As the Canadian poet Di Brandt states in her prose poem memoir Dancing Naked, “I hate having to choose between my inherited identity

and my life: traditional Mennonite versus contemporary [. . .] woman writer, yet how can

I be both and not fly apart?” (qtd. in Kasdorf 93).

How can I “not fly apart” as a female poet drawn to both the vulnerable

underbelly and the beautiful strength of my upbringing? Like Julia Kasdorf (one of the

first American Mennonite-affiliated poets to publish a mostly “confessional” collection),

I often write to “fill in the difference” (The Body and the Book 12). Being pulled

between “two masters”1--city and country, quiet young lady and political activist,

feminist and the woman who longs to “simply” be a mother and wife--is a recurrent

theme in my work.

My generation’s ties to the community are also very different from our grandparents’ great dependence on it; in fact, my decision to attend graduate school was viewed as a rather risky adventure. If I left the community for a non-Mennonite reason or destination, would I return? Would I abandon my faith through higher learning? Julia

Kasdorf also left her Mennonite family to pursue an education at New York University in a city that must have seemed like a different universe:

Now I wonder whether what invigorated me most during the trips between city

and central Pennsylvania was not an arrival at either end but the suspension of the

1 “No man can serve two masters…” Jesus says in Matthew 6.24. 11 demands that either destination placed on me [. . .]. My travel could make a

connection between them [. . .]. As poetry’s power often comes from linking

two unlike things to release new insight [. . .], I continue to both seek and flee the

complicated embrace of landscape, community memory, and family, singing the

drama of loss and desire as I go. (The Body and the Book 8)

“Singing” about real, detailed loss and desire can be freeing and empowering for poets such as Kasdorf and myself, but it also can cause rifts at home, which is the community’s greatest concern. Told not to evangelize publicly as they had in various parts of Europe, our Mennonite ancestors survived by keeping quiet; they stifled tensions and differences and avoided frequent contact with the outside world in order to thrive as a homogenous faith community in a new country. For Kasdorf, writing about identity also means bringing to light private family feuding, abuse, and her sexuality. Appropriating historical or personal events can be a great social risk in any close community. For Kasdorf and for me, the risk is greater if we censor our experiences. The following selection from the poem “Eve’s Striptease” illustrates Kasdorf’s willingness to take this poetic chance:

Lingerie shopping with Mom, I braced myself

for the wedding night advice. Would I seem

curious enough, sufficiently afraid? Yet

when we sat together on their bed, her words

were surprisingly wise:

Whatever happens, remember this--

it keeps getting better and better [. . .]

The tiny bird she set loving in me must 12 keep on, batting the bars of its cage

in a rage only matched by my cravings

for an ample pantry and golden anniversary.

She let me learn for myself all the desires

a body can hold, how they grow stronger

and wilder with age, tugging in every direction

until it feels like my sternum might split

like Adam’s when Eve stepped out,

sloughing off ribs. (1-7 and 24-33)

I admire Kasdorf’s honesty about the needs and expectations of the female body and the way she negotiates the body of a closed community by confronting prohibited issues. She admits to juggling traditional assumptions about virginity before marriage alongside her own sexual experiences. What she is expected to desire as a woman--an “ample pantry and golden anniversary”--joins a mysteriously growing physical and emotional lust that threatens to split her. I find it interesting that in order to talk about sex and desire in such a confessional way, Kasdorf (like many “Menno” female poets) feels the need to include

Biblical allusions (Adam and Eve; the bird, a symbol for the Holy Spirit). While religious symbols make the poem’s sexual tension “taut,” I feel she includes them partly as a kind of content safety net. A poet coming from a religious community who publicly confesses a sexual relationship before marriage and a longing for material things with no mention of a spiritual upbringing might be crossing into an even larger social taboo. Here, she reverses the Adam and Eve creation binary by suggesting that this bodily lust might

create a new, sexualized version of the self (even in her own mother!), also alluding to 13 the birthing expectation put on the female body. Yet, in this poem, the physical self is

one also created for pleasure. Though one connotation of “slough” is deep despair and

disgrace, “Eve’s Striptease” ambiguously reclaims the term, connecting it to her body’s

need to express its desires and history.

Like Canada’s well-known “confessional Menno” poet, Di Brandt, Kasdorf had

already left the denomination by the year her first book was published (though it could be

argued whether a person can fully “leave” the religious upbringing of his/her youth).

Why are the majority of practicing Mennonite women still hesitant to write their deepest

feelings and concerns onto the page, centuries after religious persecution? Is the threat of

breaking from community approval still so painful? I often say “No, of course not!” when

three hours from my home community at graduate school; when surrounded by centuries

of religious and family history, however, I tend to lean towards “Yes, at times it is too painful.”

Like Kasdorf’s, my work can be didactic in an attempt to not only be a cultural and social example, but also a tool of authorization for the self. We both voice personal interpretations of our communities and roles within them. Likewise, we write about a longing for the holy “stillness” and strength taught to us as Anabaptists2, even as the

world outside our communities (and yes, even inside them) threatens to overwhelm it. As

Jeff Gundy reminds us in Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing:

No tradition can survive without those who conserve and transmit it. On the other

hand, no tradition survives for long without change, and sometimes painful story-

2 I would consider listening, plain speech, living “simply,” and prayer to be vital spiritual tools for Mennonites, who attempt to live as examples of heaven’s promise and command, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalms 46.10). 14 telling…and critique are necessary both to healthy change and to discerning

and preserving what is worth nourishing of the past. (99-100)

I have always been drawn to writing about subjects that make my heart beat

faster, though actually putting them to paper is not so automatic. When my parents left

for humanitarian/mission work in the war-torn nation of Liberia, West Africa, I had even more questions about my identity and cultural ties. My parents were able to return home only once during their two-year service, and my reluctance to welcome them back temporarily manifested itself into a poem. “Uprising” is an example of a piece that both frightens and liberates me since its tone is very confrontational:

Mother,

for fourteen months, you have been picked from my bones.

And now, I must welcome you back from the earth. I must do this, knowing

you will return to the thunderclouds and the children and to

streets holding war. Too soon, you will ask

to be that thin, silver place, and I must simply

let you. (30-36)

According to my upbringing, my parents were simply “giving back” to God; they were obeying. But to my immediate family, they were also sacrificing important careers and relationships. “Uprising” skims the surface of doubt and bitterness towards humanity and its Creator: are we really born into America so that we can “go out into the World?” How does anyone write honestly about sending loved ones to a country simmering with violence, where the capital city is still without running water, mailing services, a sewage system, or electricity? How does a child give permission for her parents to give their full 15 attention to other, unrelated children? These questions are not easily explored

concisely on the page. Yet language is powerful because of its continuous unraveling,

and to illustrate this linguistic depth, the poem plays with the various meanings and

connotations of its title.

“Uprising” can refer to a rebellion against authority, bring to mind images of

ascension, and/or speak to a growing inner turmoil. My parents’ emails described a

growing unrest in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital city, as the first presidential election after

fourteen years of civil war approached. “I am preparing for your resurrection,” the first

line of the poem declares, (directed towards someone still living) as the daughter steadies herself for her own “uprising”: saying goodbye to her mother and father for a second

time.

The speaker is also torn between missing and admiring parents who are living out

what they believe, and she wants them back. Her will, not God’s. Having finally grown

accustomed to the mother’s absence, the speaker must “welcome [her] back from the

earth [. . .] / Now, the stone / begins to roll away” (32, 17-18). These Biblical allusions

add to the tension and excitement tied to an almost unimaginable event: resurrection.

It is here, as the poem moves to the next turn, that Eros (or longing) grows into

“Eros-ion.” The reunion of the speaker and the “you” becomes something to dread, an

uprising that will wrest control from the adult speaker and invite her back into the world

of childhood and vulnerability. One answer to this challenge is the tricky use of

containment. Though the poem moves back and forth between Ohio and Liberia,

spanning a long period of fourteen months, it eventually focuses on confronting only the 16 mother, the symbol of the protection and nourishment for which the speaker longs. The radical separation of a daughter and mother generates a unique, tangible loss and tension.

Typically once a week, my parents sent emails describing the people they met or befriended in West Africa. No one escaped Liberia’s civil war without losing a family member, house, or business, and sometimes the stories were almost unbelievable. I wanted to put some of these oral histories into persona poems, not only to give Liberians a voice but also to feel connected to my parents’ service. “Liberian Man, Survivor” was

inspired by a description of one of Monrovia’s bloodiest massacres inside a Lutheran

church. A neighbor told my parents how he hid inside the steeple bell to escape from

approaching soldiers. Because of his hiding place, he was the only survivor. Like my

parents, I was fascinated and moved by this man’s claim. How could someone heal from

such an event? Did he ever question whether his survival was ultimately a mistake?

And if I break with the quiet,

will the ringing start? Will I find

the bell empty?

The silence

is what saved me. After the last bullet,

it was only mine to hear. (22-27)

Here, the man’s fear of breaking with the silence takes precedence since hiding in perfect

silence preserved his life and continues to preserve his sanity. Scariest of all, if he

answers the dead who now haunt him in the marketplace and at his own home, does that

mean he is also dead? Will he find “the bell empty” (25)? While I cannot compare my

experiences to those of this Liberian man, his silence ultimately becomes ambiguously 17 powerful, a tool for self-protection but also social separation. Thus, we can both ask ourselves, “Who can I be after I have been ‘saved’ by silence?”

II. Silence as Connection: Listening to “the World”

Several of my poems use silence as a way of connecting the self both to nature and a greater community, to promote a calm and centered existence that seems impossible to grasp because of the everyday life in our culture. In “Talking Poetry with the Amish,” the speaker wonders:

Can we really write out

how this world aches, how the heart

will never stop asking its questions?

why we are born into stillness, spend

the rest of our days filling it in with

anything, anyone, really? (17-22)

The speaker has just spent an afternoon with an Amish farmer/writer/renegade whose lifestyle makes her ask herself whether she could ever truly know herself and her surroundings. Can she simplify her life enough to be content?

Have I paused long enough to gather myself

up from calling highways, appointments, the poems

yet to be written? to glean myself back

into the stillness, the quiet in the land? (28-31)

Silence for this speaker means a special observation of the world, a spiritual relationship with nature and others. Again, there is a split between identity and purpose. The speaker 18 is pulled towards exciting busyness but acknowledges that we forget the joy and purpose of life in the world’s white noise.

I am constantly in a struggle with the world outside of my closed community; I ask it to be quiet and content with me, just for a minute, a day. I ache for a simple stillness that may never come to fruition in my American society, so I gravitate towards

writers who are engaged in the same social tug-of-war, such as Mary Oliver. Here is an

excerpt from her poem “Daisies” from Why I Wake Early:

It is possible, I suppose, that sometime

we will learn everything

there is to learn: what the world is, for example,

and what it means. I think this as I am crossing

from one field to another, in summer, and the

mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either

knows enough already or knows enough to be

perfectly content not knowing. Song being born

of quest he knows this: he must turn silent

were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead

oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly

unanswered (1-12).

As in “Talking Poetry with the Amish,” form and armature play important roles in the

interpretation and purpose of Oliver’s poem. The slight indentation of every other line

adds unevenness to the flowing of thought and could even be seen as a pattern of

footsteps echoing the speaker’s. “Song being born / of quest” (8-9) means sometimes not 19 finding the exact answers or reactions for which we search; we continue to be

“ceaselessly unanswered” even if we break with the silence. “What the world is [. . .] /

and what it means” for Oliver can usually be found only by interacting with it, not

necessarily for answers but for questions (1-2). I think every poet presents the

intersection of “world” and “self” differently. “I am crossing / from one field to another”

Oliver writes (4-5). Perhaps I am crossing from one “master” to the next and back again,

poetically mingling parts of my identity.

Oliver has been blatantly honest about preferring the natural world to the human.

And yet I recognize her craving for another type of conversation and company; she is far

from quiet. The natural world is a buzzing/singing/birthing/dying/nonstop cacophony. It

waits for no one. She is listening to and recording natural conversations most others

would ignore; this is also one of my writing goals. Like this poetic mentor, I look for

ways to communicate using a quiet strength rather than a forceful one (a delicate tightrope to walk in confessional writing).

One way my work reclaims the goodness of “the World” is in its attention to detail. In “Method,” for example, the speaker encourages other writers to view their surroundings differently when revising their work:

So often the heart (of it) reveals itself quite

accidentally, when we try

to explain, talk about something else other

than what’s actually on paper. And (do I

even have to say it?) talk

only after listening. See beauty, even 20 in Cleveland alleys, muddy Ohio rivers, fields

of alfalfa. Teach beauty, teach

holding words + letting them go (please note: this

takes time. First, go and find them, dry them as leaves

under wax paper, then hold them to the light at various

times of the day [. . .] (15-26).

“First, go and find them” (24)--the words that make up a writer’s voice--is the most important advice in this section. “Method” reminds its readers that listening is most

important (part of our still, strong center), and that being able to put true thoughts down

on paper takes time and introspection. The poem’s speaker is modeled after one of my

teachers, David Citino, the first writer to convince me of the beauty in Ohio (“Cleveland alleys, muddy Ohio rivers, fields / of alfalfa” [21-22]). The poem earlier instructs its

“students”:

Kiss the world

hard; the hard world hides

children and Italy, long

embraces, fight songs, powerful

chatter. Find them. Find time to write

what you want from this world (5-10).

Here, my speaker brings together an eclectic assortment of things life has to offer poets.

Writing down what I “want from this world” sometimes means being painfully honest

and vulnerable, but I like to describe this ambiguous “World” using great specificity,

often in lists. The last stanza of “Method” urges, “Write what you live but also / long for. 21 Finally, write nothing / [. . .] until / you feel that you are willing / to write them [your

descriptions of life] down for good” (27-28, 33-35). Coming from my tradition, writing

anything “down for good” is sometimes threatening, an act of the self’s blatant authority.

But it is also an act of faith. If text truly does “equal” truth to many, then poetry can serve

as a powerful resource, a way to start dialogues and pose integral questions. The speaker

in “Method” also alludes to facing death in these last lines, doubting that a poet can ever

be content with what and how much he or she has written.

“The world knows your quiet; I know / your harvest of words,” begins “Talking

Poetry with the Amish” (1-2). Though some part of me will always cling to and celebrate

the core beliefs of my home community, I want the world--and my denomination--to

know my “harvest of words.” My shelves these days are filled with writers--Charles

Simic, H. D., Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry--who notice the tensions and confrontations

that so often drive the human and natural worlds forward. Listening to creative impulses,

these writers interact with internal and external conflict and resolution; they listen for

“revivals” and spiritual/physical renewals of all kinds. Yes, I am yoked to “the quiet in

the land.” But the still, strong center Mennonites urge me to follow also gives me the strength to unveil my “self;” to clear my throat, unlatch my tongue, and write.

22 Works Cited

Brandt, Di. Dancing Naked: Narrative Strategies for Writing across Centuries. Stratford,

ON: Mercury, 1996.

Gundy, Jeff. Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing. Scottdale: Herald, 2005.

Hostetler, Ann, ed. A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry. Iowa City: U of Iowa P,

2003.

Kasdorf, Julia. The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins UP, 2001.

---. “Eve’s Striptease.” Eve’s Striptease. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. 21-22.

Oliver, Mary. “Daisies.” Why I Wake Early. Boston: Beacon, 2004. 65.

23 Appendix 1: “Eve’s Striptease” by Julia Kasdorf

Lingerie shopping with Mom, I braced myself for the wedding night advice. Would I seem curious enough, sufficiently afraid? Yet when we sat together on their bed, her words were surprising wise: Whatever happens, remember this-- it keeps getting better and better. She had to be telling the truth. At ten, I found a jar of Vaseline in her nightstand, its creamy grease gouged deep, and dusting their room each week, I marked the decline of bedside candles. But she didn’t say lust is a bird of prey or tell me the passion she passed on to me is no protector of borders. She’d warned me only about the urges men get and how to save myself from them. Though she’d flirt with any greenhouse man for the best cabbage flats, any grease monkey under the hood, she never kissed anyone but Dad. How could she guess that with Jesus Loves Me on my tongue, constantly suffering crushes on uncles, I would come to find that almost everything gets better and better? The tiny bird she set loving in me must keep on, battling the bars of its cage in a rage only matched by my cravings for an ample pantry and golden anniversary. She let me learn from myself all the desires a body can hold, how they grow stronger and wilder with age, tugging in every direction until it feels my sternum might split like Adam’s when Eve stepped out, sloughing off ribs.

24 Appendix 2: “Daisies” by Mary Oliver

It is possible, I suppose, that sometime we will learn everything there is to learn: what the world is, for example, and what it means. I think this as I am crossing from one field to another, in summer, and the mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either knows enough already or knows enough to be perfectly content not knowing. Song being born of quest he knows this: he must turn silent were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead, oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly unanswered. At my feet the white-petaled daisies display the small suns of their center-piece--their, if you don’t mind my saying so--their hearts. Of course I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know. But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given, to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly; for example--I think this as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch-- the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the daisies for the field.

25 METHOD

(or, on a long drive to Athens--not knowing you’ve left us-- I think of you, not as teacher, but as a former student once driving this same route)

-For David Citino (1947- October, 2005)

Always use the stairs. Eat chocolate when analyzing poetry. Memorize a favorite verse, the bite of syllables, heaviness and lightness left in shoes or back pockets. Kiss the world hard. The hard world hides children and Italy, long embraces, fight songs, powerful chatter. Find them. Find time to write what you want from this world over and over. Over coffee or in 5 a.m. emails, repeat aloud that line--Do you really want the break just there?--and surprise yourself. Embarrass the day with what you’ve been thinking.

So often the heart (of it) reveals itself quite accidentally, when we try to explain, talk about something else other than what’s actually on paper. And (do I even have to say it?) talk only after listening. See beauty, even in Cleveland alleys, muddy Ohio rivers, fields of alfalfa. Teach beauty, teach holding words + letting them go (please note: this takes time. First, go and find them, dry them as leaves under wax paper, then hold them to the light at various times of day). Teach only what you know or think

you have loved. Write what you live but also long for. Finally, write nothing on a bright October morning. Follow the Appalachian Highway, the Hocking River, follow them until you feel you are now ready to claim that line break, a description of the trees, until you feel that you are willing to write them down for good. 26 POEM WRITTEN THREE HOURS FROM HOME Cleave 1. to split with a sharp instrument…along a natural line of division 2. to pierce or penetrate 3. to make one’s way 4. to be faithful American Heritage Dictionary

What dreams are ploughed under when we cleave ourselves to the land of our fathers, mothers, martyred soil wealthy with roots! *** Twenty years ago now we stumbled across the dumping ground of our ancestors: bits of blue china accidentally dropped, glass insulators split down the middle; rusted shovel heads, hammers, wire- rimmed frames at the bottom of a creek bank. For two sisters, it was Egypt, this watery unearthing. Pieces of people we’d never meet but could hold, rub clean in our hands. *** For centuries, the Amish have built their daudies--houses that birth houses to keep parents close and safe, part of the journey. From the road, it’s often obvious where new planks have sprung: sudden porches, chimneys, back screen doors. New rooms for new roles. *** How emptying it must sometimes feel for the aging, living so near to their home, not truly in it. Do they grope for the past all the more loudly because of its proximity, because of its sudden forbidden fruit? *** To keep his only daughter near, my grandfather gave open fields and breathing forest as wedding gifts. A piece of the farm. Such a generous father, such a quiet yoke. Our daudy was fashioned from trees, streams, the path through high corn to Grandma’s kitchen. *** Now, I do not know where to start my own building, when to pound the first nails--onto what, onto whom *** do I cleave?

TALKING POETRY WITH THE AMISH -For David Kline

The world knows your quiet; I know your harvest of words. It has been a year

since we stood in your back field, recited bits of Berry and Frost. You have no doubt

harnessed the draft horses hundreds of times, sat on front porches with libraries of books

after long seasons of talking, listening, arguing with the earth. I remember

your feet--it sounds silly, yes--but I’d never seen an Amishman in sandals.

I remember, too, the swift June rain chasing us under two maples. You gave me your barn coat, and the sky threw its body down--we almost had to shout--What do you think of the president these days? How is the market

for soybeans, Jerseys? Water gathered in the rows you’d been plowing, spilled from your hat brim. I looked down at mud-flecked ankles.

Can we really write out how this world aches, how the heart will never stop planting its questions? why we are born into stillness, spend the rest of our days filling it in with anything, anyone, really?

The team horses stood, steaming statues--I remember their quiet presence, too. Have you changed that stanza, the one where you’re out picking blackberries? Have I changed my life, after that day in your field, since running to dodge lightning, waving to your sons, then backing my car down the drive? Have I paused long enough to gather myself up from summoning highways, appointments, the poems yet to be written? to glean myself back into the stillness, the quiet in the land? 28 MENNONITE SERMON (#1): NO STOPLIGHT IN THIS TOURIST TOWN

Those who are not among us bring their cameras and their children. They leave what’s heavy on their hearts for a morning, a day.

Those who are not among us bring ready billfolds, pay for bentwood rockers and log cabin quilts. So easy to buy an hour of quiet. It is not surprising on Sunday mornings to see a car with windows open

stopped where the road dips between Salem and Sonnenberg. God is a cappella on the seventh day of the week. Hymn crosses hymn between these two churches, and music carries off their centuries of feuding (this the visitors don’t know; it is rarely talked of now).

What does our martyr family think as we sit back, barter our quiet to the world, pretend that we are holy, different? Six friends ended their lives in great joy, and those that saw them burn went and penned a hymn, the first letter of each verse replacing the names of the dead.3

Do we ever feel warm when breathing deep to offer up our harmony? Do we think of them as verses change? And what would they say, after watching us join the frontlines, deadlines?

Burn us, bake us, drown us, World, and in the end, make us yours?

3 From The Martyr’s Mirror (1660) (also known as The Bloody Theatre), a compilation of more than four thousand accounts of people who were baptized as adults, practiced nonresistance, and died for their faith.

29 MENNONITE SERMON #2: THE WORLD FROM UP HERE

From the pulpit, congregations mimic those Kansas fields, the ones I am supposed to have visited already: wind-swept- predictable, they wait for the coming of a crop they’re sure to recognize.

* * *

For years, I have carried my body like something I couldn’t quite shake, like someone I dreaded meeting in public.

For I’ve never known what to say to her in private, have never sat--just the two of us-- on front porches before a storm or a bleeding winter sunset, because she’s not the kind you’re taught to want to bring home.

* * *

Finally, I am loving what I carry. On paper, the world drips off of shoulders. Body, I need you! Body, I sing you onto the page! 30 From the pulpit, the World spreads its legs. And I open my mouth to tell it you’re beautiful.

31 MENNONITE SERMON #3: AND YET, AND YET…

I forget often that the balm can be quiet, left to the unspoken coils. Our wounds can heal by something louder than speech or prayer or singing. Things that could so easily rend, forgiven instead by simple action: rhubarb pie, a touch on the shoulder, the verse of some prodigal hymn relearning the breathy shape of soul.

Come, just listen to the soil and the root on a walk that lets us, too, be holy.

Some would call this uncomfortable, ever-healing grace, that lavender hummingbird nesting in ribcages, no matter if we welcome it or not. Sometimes we think it’s just a tremble of the heart or a deep catch of involuntary breath. Birds remember flight, try to hover above something, even when in cages, even cages of rib. Maybe that is why we are taught (not by any spoken lesson or binding

book) by watching those before us how to breathe in private as if welcoming the world, as if taking it

inside us, though we feel all that wants to escape us, too. Because we remember

things and places we’ve never known, our mouths can shut; they can and still be beautiful. 32 WHAT YOU READ FIRST in this small town is usually the headline, what part of the world is aching most. On Thursdays, the engagements; anniversaries on Tuesdays. You hold your breath like canning jars. Your husband shuffles past the slap of new winter mornings to open the barn- shaped mailbox. Something to do.

Each day he takes longer to maneuver the lane. When he breaches the door, silence means a good thing. For at least once a week, the latch falls behind him, and Two today, or I think we know this one.

Such a neat little list of strangers we all end up as; in black ink, our names shed our bodies.

No wonder you eat death for breakfast when it has its fingers in your cinnamon rolls. No wonder your collection of artificial plants begins to take over, every room a dusty conservatory: they cannot wilt, you can keep them whole. The phone becomes just the messenger, especially in winter, when you are crusted in the farmhouse, spend your days putting up the Christmas decorations and taking them down again. You greet me for our weekly family dinner only to say you’ve just picked out your best friend’s coffin--pink interior because it suited her--and even the flowers have been handled, though she is still breathing. Both of yours are taken care of, too--the funerals, that is--they have been paid in full. All day, you have cleaned and baked and hovered, and when night arrives, just can’t understand why your best friend hasn’t given in, why she waits in a body that is not her own, why, when everything’s been arranged and expected, death itself disappoints you.

33 Listen Louder Than You Sing -For Alice Parker (composer, arranger, conductor, teacher b.1925- )

We so often sing through, taking shallow breaths at predictable places, sticking to harmonies safe and thick as jam.

But this is where we lose the listening.

The same with life: content, it seems, to survive its rhythms. When really, we must learn to shape a phrase as delicate as Queen Anne’s lace, to demonstrate different, pulling lines. We must live the whole notes--fat, slow embraces--with pure and grateful tones, must laugh and cry out with music everywhere, flinging it to pinewood paths, cupping it in early morning. We must eat it with fresh pie and black coffee, lie down with its verses, and even waken, weighted by wrong notes. This is how I want you to remember me: that I more than read the psalms, I sang them. And when I am gone, go-- find me at white country churches, tingling in a new tenor line. Find me in concert halls still exhaling amens, in the pitches within the pitches. With the time you have left--please-- let me know what you have heard.

34 IN NEW WAYS

I. The next time, I will scream.

There will be no yellowing bruises on knees or the delicate skin of wrists. There will be more time to study the shape of his nose, the curve of an Adam’s apple instead of merely his back, the getaway car, both smaller and smaller as they eat into New Mexican canyons, and I am shrinking into that Banshee who betrayed me. But next time, I will scream. You don’t fuck with a soprano, one whose vocal chords have been trained, braced for high a’s. The next time, his ears will be ringing.

II. His words wake with me, the unwanted milk of morning. The stomach takes hours to let go of its fist, to allow the ritualistic cup of coffee or to welcome anything, really. His words are too comfortable alone, digesting themselves over and over until they grow into that growl-- THE VIOLENCE THAT MUST MAKE WAY FOR THE VIOLENCE-- until they are unevenly, deeply exhaled when waiting in the bus stop shelter, I am wondering if raised umbrellas around me can see this fear like chickenpox, if people sense that I am watching them in new ways.

III. At the police station, a wall to separate us, we stood close together for a second time. But still, no chance to study the face, the hands, the things that I will need to create whenever I am frightened. Since then, he meets me 35 in emptying hallways at the office, when walking anytime the sun goes down. I wonder where he finds me, too. Of course, he doesn’t really come, but oh! how I expect him to. I hope that I find him in the middle of the day, when his fingers skim the small of a woman’s back, when he goes to walk around her after saying softly, Excuse me. Or maybe I am selfish to think he’ll be reminded of me in any number of years when he passes a blonde woman on the street, snapping a random photograph. I still have the picture. He let me take it first: bright lines of chilies strung like misplaced fingers, desert Christmas lights, or the fire in my mouth, my throat the color of a scream.

36 IT’S LIKE TRYING TO REMEMBER HIGH SCHOOL SPANISH, LOVING YOU

I pocket words and phrases I’ll somehow always know--cancion, azul, and donde esta…?--just like some of your edges never smudge, furrowed safely into memory. Centered sweetly, simply learned: mesas of collarbone, cues for when to take a walk or start chopping the vegetables, catches in high laughter when joy is real.

But I will never be fluent in you--I must remind myself on nights such as this, when I let the day’s end take the blunt of disappointment. Deep down, you like it like this: having layers that cannot be translated, having the dictionary all to yourself. Funny how loving-and-not-leaving can grow to be like passing two strangers on the street talking in a language I know I should know. Catching only

snippets of their chatter, I suddenly wish I could summon again how to conjugate verbs, roll stubborn r’s, to say more than Hello and Good-bye, How are you today? and Excuse me, where is the restroom?

Come se dice, I feel like a foreigner? Come se dice distance o silence o frustrate exactamente? And what punctuation do I use for an ending sentence?

I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to relearn all that sticky, heavy grammar or to speak easily of colors and holidays while picking out a favorite word (melacaton or Septiembre). I would be lying if I told you I speak your native tongue wholeheartedly and daily. But you must let me know when you’ve forgotten the root of so many adjectives. Please pull me aside when I’m about to ask our waiter for something I would never think of eating. We must keep the simple sentences coming, don’t you think? Or, we could listen and nod, claim to value everything

that’s already been said.

37 ICING ON THE PILLOWCASE

I. My love there are days when you can have my left elbow nothing more nothing less it is what i feel like giving just yesterday my bottom lip my smallest toe were willed in your direction but today i remember my self completely not joined or sewn or falling to any other thing so here: my elbow to tide you over a funny bone from which to swing lips would be too risky collarbone earlobe out of the question

II. it is like this: i went out walking today just to take in sudden sun in January and discovered the river not ten minutes from my porch i have been here more than two full seasons could have had the glint of water long walks next to something running faster you told me last week of a dream a dream in which i baked you a chocolate cake with six perfect cupcakes put them neatly in the trunk of your car on them was spelled out in frosting just why i was leaving in white cursive letters handwriting you’d never seen how can I not at least think on endings sweet and baking now when riding next to you in measured silence back to bedrooms where i will lie for more than minutes after your breathing makes soft warm bass lines on my neck how can i not try to name those six inner messages the explanations why i turn and cup my elbows with my hands like they hinge together something terrible breakable like i could ever hold thinking of the biggest reason the one that can’t be eaten in one sitting the one that keeps me from finding any river anywhere again.

38 THE PRETENSE OF MINIATURE DACHSHUNDS

My dog is an exaggeration of me. Bred to Bark, to hunt in uncomfortable spaces. Acutely aware of being alone, she whines like she’ll dissolve outside the shower curtain. There is nothing like the smell of anything from The Big Table! There is nothing like physical Love coming through a door. Octobered leaves drop toward soggy, red-yellow sidewalks, and she takes them in as holiness. That first experience with sudden color moving: there are Barks for each rattle-landing, confusion when butterflies don’t come to the same Still halt. But when all is said and done, she is wary of the world, mistrusts the great loom--twigs in the yard, lit houses in the night. She cannot Jump from high places. And yet, and yet--she wants to own wherever her feet scramble, belly inches from the ground. On second visits to Parks or sidewalks, they are hers. Simply hers. Beware! all innocent bicyclists. Listen-up, joggers, lunch break-takers: you will hear her out! All seven pounds is up for anything. Because. In the face of the big, bleak hollow, the threat that keeps us checking for its face--even beside the hairy ones that tower over her-- she believes she can protect what she has learned to love, believes that her small body can do some Good.

39 HARVEST

The night of our fourth harvest moon, I am out in the yard, glowing in orange-pocked pearl light, wishing from a place that’s finally caught up with me that we’d somehow met in the ‘50s.

Across the street, it almost could be true: partners learn to dance in the studio we spy on from your kitchen’s bay window. They stumble then glide on wooden floors the color of my childhood hair.

A velvet-seated movie theatre’s just let out. The ice cream shop is bright and busy, all chrome and ready sugar. Lines of people think that summer cannot bend.

Forgive me, but sometimes I long for the apron. To be held in the same arms every night. To know my place is firmly planted. Sometimes

all I ask is for someone else to tell me who I must be, what I can want. To catch the world’s face briskly in my hands, say “I cannot be… I cannot be…”

With harvest moons come the dances of almost-couples everywhere planning out their slow, inevitable mergings, believing in lifetimes that go on and on. Now, there is nothing too big to withhold. (What cure did you get from your virgin? What balm did I get from mine? No urgent pull, no fear of fallow). Instead, these almost-couples waiting for the bloom in bank accounts, promotions. The white procession can wait; the left side of the bed is already warm. And tell me, can the self be joined to any other thing?

40

You see, aprons. You see, O needy crescent? They are all right on their own. They are asking for nothing.

41 HE•MI•O•LA -a rhythmic alternation of two notes

At the first meeting of the community choir, I find myself eyeing other men.

Perhaps the warm-up session invites it, all of us blowing hot air in and out of chests, diaphragms. We are strangers making strange noises, and we are not ashamed. Or maybe it’s the fact that women always face the men in cramped, cluttered choral rooms, and so

I have no choice. I want the girl sitting behind me to start listening to voices besides her own. I want a woman two chairs down to stop humming all the other parts. And I want the baritone in the back row.

He could very well be a wanting singer, his vowels wide, his vibrato strained. Perhaps he has never heard of Faure, has never felt how grudges or sadness or doom can unlodge themselves from shoulder blades at the end of a perfect cadence.

But from my row, he could be better than you. At singing, yes, but other things. Maybe he knows he has something he can’t miss out on, someone he has to tell. Now. So he does. Before he lets the decrescendos have their neat collapsing.

You’ve never understood why sometimes I crave the stacked harmonies of old hymns unaccompanied, their familiar numbers called, no notation needed. I cannot switch parts with you standing beside me or make up my own--you ask only for the melody--that straight white arrow.

I have been waiting for you to catch up with my changing, upbeat tempos, have been asking to be held with the same fierceness as any hushed movement. Really, you should know by now that I’m not built for long silences. This past weekend, I drove to see you, took my own toothpaste, slept well on the couch. And the whole drive back, I sat with one hand on the wheel, my ears listening to nothing but summer sliding past windows and one held note-- 42 THE APPLE SPEAKS

True humility is neither thinking too highly of one’s self nor thinking too little of one’s self, but rather not thinking of one’s self at all. –Amish proverb

“What does a woman want?” –Sigmund Freud

I am reclaiming the stairwell; I thought you should know. I no longer think I’ll see you there, changed or ready. My jewelry box will take some time. Even the refrigerator cold- kisses my face to yours sometimes when my stomach rumbles. Cheesecake, Pike Place, the color green--they will all be rescued soon. And it is not wrong to be gluttonous in healing, for the heart is such a porous thing. I have moved every piece of furniture, sorted through photographs, cursing. I want no proof of not being needed, mostly of not choosing my own passing. You see, I come from a long line of martyrs, those who gave up their lives but chose their own deaths, though some women were drowned in secret and at night, their testimonies grown too powerful. Even with tongues screwed tightly down, a mother’s body dragged pity from a crowd, still begged for an audience to admire and fear its faith.

Burned, baked, stretched and smothered, these bodies made their highly public offerings, turned back on splitting ice to save their executioners in order to sit at some heavenly banquet. Or to follow a man across the country, raise his children, cook his potatoes just the way he likes them. I come from persecution set ghosting in lungs and feet so heavy black- 43 purple, it’s impossible to boil it completely out of us. Look at the way some tongues are still missing.

I carry these two apples with me daily: cheeks that still expect me to stand in ready flames for all that is said or asking for it-- or, even worse--unsaid, since I might be taken as prideful or clinging or my mother’s mother or Eve’s ready hand when the red rushes up. All these things and more fly to my face like furnaced fire. Shameful ripening. Ripening, rare and mirrored. You are there; you will always be the silence that asks my heart to beat its body against the morning, beat red. Red. Red. You will always be the silence for which I’m piling up the stones.

44 Will there be pianos in Africa?

I come home late to mother singing with her fingers, the tune loud and running--not even perfect--but the song itself hasn’t changed. Finally, I am reminded of things that last as father belts high notes beside her, throws back his head, mouth wide--a baby bird calling to each lyric like flight. The scales are sour, giving in to summer damp, but the piano will not be tuned again.

Soon they will eat their supper cooked over coals, lay down to rest in a pyramid of mosquito netting. Africa calls to them, away from this well-lit living room, from my mother’s mahogany baby grand. Will her fingers trill in her sleep? Upon her sheets, will they drum out ragtime, hymns, or Mozart?

Tonight, my parents sing fiercely without tears, without knowing they have an audience. I listen, make them a promise: that I will stay and do what they have taught-- how to sing a line like a silver circle, how to end a phrase like coming home. When I can no longer talk to life, mother, don’t you worry--I will sing.

45 ASCENSION

Of Course—I prayed— And did God Care? He cared as much as on the Air A Bird—had stamped her foot— And cried “Give Me”— -Dickinson

I. I have seen a bird tremble in hands almost praying, its perfect, wild winging captured and cupped. I have seen it crescendo out of the hands, free into trees but knew--and know now-- it would never be the same (nothing ever is when it’s seen its own heart flutter.)

II. Why do you stand looking into the sky?4becomes the voice in the trees, folding and unfolding the hands, the wings. The bird somewhere shudders. My head is always bowed. See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands,5 the voice comes and goes. But this is no comfort: heaven’s hand pressing down always--heaven’s fist squeezing both the holy and the World right out of us.

There was a time I thought trees were the oldest parts of God, growing both down and upwards, keeping the earth so wholly together. I believed in my body that could climb God’s hands, believed in the birds who swooped from barn rafter to branches, their language as delicate

4 Acts 1.11 5 Isaiah 49.15-16

46 as their bones. I believed in them because I knew that in heaven, I would also crescendo. Now, now the body wants home.

III. Branches hang suspended before thunderstorms and snowfall. There were things the sky told the bird, the girl, the trees and their beautiful reaching.

But now, by the end of the day, the girl stands under trees, her face tipped towards sky. Swallows crouch in the hands of God, while the grip whispers again and again just how far down the ground really is.

And by the end of the day, they believe.

47 WHAT SHOULD I WEAR FOR THE JOURNEY?

I. Ridiculous, really, to fear these miles soon to divide what is known and loved, the maps that are so hoped for. We live a growing distance whether we know it or not. Change will come in deep, rich furrows, in the way every living thing defies stillness, reaches for something, anything to lead it forward: a root for its thirst, a stem for its sky, thread for the very top of a loom.

II. Drape your love around me like a sari. You pick the colors--green for my eyes, gold thread for my hair?--the pattern, even the length. Drape it tightly; I know it will hold, even with no pins, with no strings or fancy buttons. I trust your love, am comforted, emboldened by the way it conforms to curves. Look at the beauty. Look at the flowing steps! Cloth that holds such grace, once stitched by needles of bone.

III. Children are made to outgrow their child bones, but mine refuse to be forgotten. They carry me; they are hot and blue as stars. Sitting at the loom. Together, the pattern comes faster. Spool. Needle. Thread. Daughter. Hands. Open daughter. Thread. When you are gone, I will try to remember.

48 MY MOTHER AS MINISTER (OF MUSIC)

Sometimes I think that African music was planted like an acorn in the heart of my white mother. Gourd-bellied Sahsahs, thumb pianos, and djembes had always sat in the corners of our two-story house. In the farmlands of Ohio, the need was always there for a loud and pulsing rhythm that would drag her from straight Protestant benches and into church aisles 6,000 miles from head coverings, pursed lips, and elders. Dancing joy-filled to the pulpit, she would sing out in languages she’d never known. Before

Africa wooed her, her white church choir belted out spirituals but always sounded bored or desperate, singing with as much movement as they could muster without offending, accustomed to a cappella harmonies, the tender blending of human voices.

In Africa, God is deaf--the singers must shout louder! One voice over another! And my mother wails. My mother juts her arms into the rafters. From that acorn in her heart, she grows winding tiara branches, white and sharp and sun-bleached, longing for sky.

The Kisii choir swells. She teaches them Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” by rote, one part at a time. They teach her how to sing loud and long from the very beginning of the self, from the part that God heard long before we ever felt its sprouting.

49 AVA, GERMAN FOR “BIRD” “Lit-tle red-bird in da tree, in da tree, in da tree. Lit-tle red-bird in da tree, sing a song for meeee…” -chorus from my sister’s favorite childhood song I. A memory comes to me: We are four and seven, sisters playing hospital. We are singing nurses, (just as they should be). It is right after breakfast; the whole day shimmers. Dolls are tucked into opposite couch corners. How easily we switch from playing nurse to playing mother. Our plastic children are perfect and tender. We name their illnesses, then take them away.

II. Men are crying in the waiting room; a priest and minister sit with them, wait. I think one of you has died. Our parents are finally reached in Africa (in four days, they would have stood here), and while being prepped for the birthing surgery, you are handed a phone: mother to daughter, daughter to mother, mothers and daughters all a flutter, trying to get out--you are all there, listening.

50 UPRISING -for my missionary mother

I am preparing for your resurrection. On my twenty-fifth birthday, you call from your continent to mine, just to tell me of the lopsided cupcakes made in my honor, baked in a new, outside oven (really, a spent refrigerator that now houses flame).

For fourteen months, you have been this same voice: a repeated four-minute conversation; a soft, silver place I keep in my belly. There are people in the streets, you tell me over emails, people coming to the city to hold their rallies, marches; you can no longer drive anywhere. Monrovia’s pulsing; its sky now smells constantly of storm. Here in Ohio, I, too,

wait for the uprising: your fingers in my hair, your breath in the room. For fourteen months I have regrown myself, rethought my routines. I have shaken dirt from spidery, bony roots, gotten through sometimes--quite frankly--by not remembering you. Now, the stone

begins to roll away. Over coffee and toast, walking to work, my stomach twists into your names. Just yesterday, you wrote of neighbor children snatched in the night for sacrifice. It is too hard to believe-- the witch coming to your door, then sensing holy armor. It is too much to be given--these bodies filled with war, even after back roads have absorbed their dead. Today, I passed what must have been one hundred turkey vultures, circling over State Street, and I thought of you in your rainy season. I’m already packed, you warbled a month ago, wanted to pretend we were out together: We have potato chips, glasses of white zinfandel. We can talk for hours, can see and touch our smiles. Mother, for fourteen months, you have been picked from my bones. And now, I must welcome you back from the earth. I must do this, knowing you will return to the thunderclouds and the children and to streets holding war. Too soon, you will ask to be that thin, silver place, and I must simply let you.

51 MY FATHER EATS MCDONALD’S

Again and again the hand (gold-banded) dips into perfectly salted fries. The other grasps vanilla shake like it’s all that is left in the world. This happy meal, this reunion with sweet catsup often filled your Ohio-dreaming-into-humid-West-African- waking (the dogs and roosters fight early). How tender! your wife whispers, holding up the half-moon of a burger like it’s a secret you mustn’t let on that you know. There is silent, worshipful swallowing. Nodding. The rescue of more fries.

On long trips into the bush, your team of medics would have no choice but to buy dinner from the side of the road. Personally, you’d hope for pineapple eaten like candy, or peanut bread and roasted corn, hot pepper sauce to burn down louder hunger. But now (even now) you cannot forget a certain future dinner sitting with you in the back seat for hours of smelly meditation. “Bush meat” means any number of things, and the monkey stills stares at you, unblinking, even here in your red plastic booth. Its hand refuses to stay at the bottom of the soup bowl. And yet, a careful swig of strawberry shake can wash the memory cold and fictional. Laugh-worthy.

After the stomach finally settles (two Big Macs and shakes in one sitting), you remember where you’ve been. How will you show your family a photograph, say This is a woman we met only once. She has five children. She made us rice. “What’s wrong with her baby?” you know they will ask. This one--you’ll tell them, pointing to the blank-eyed girl perched upon hip, hair white, mouth open--this one has been chosen by her parents. “Chosen for what?” (You cannot stop this question). To die, you will say after swallowing, fidgeting with the long crease in your shirt, so that the others live.6 You have taught it all your life, this clunking guilt. That to serve a suffering Christ, those who have the most must give up the most--bite by bite, spoonful by spoonful. To your own little girls, you have stressed that it’s the way we starve ourselves that is important.

6 Adapted from a missionary’s story in Extending the Table cookbook (commissioned by Mennonite Central Committee). 52 LIBERIAN MAN, SURVIVOR

The bell was safe, the bell was there when the troops started firing. Come, crawl back into this womb, it called, and so I hid, curled my body high into its palm, my screams against the thick of its throat. Below, the bodies dropped, first heavy like falling boughs, then softer as layers grew thick, sweet with life still trying hard to linger.

Life pried me out: my body still breathing, my wife outside scratching for my arms. The doors were opened, the church was silent, sun-filled. On any other morning, it would have meant prayer.

Now, I go to the market and see them. Risen from the sanctuary floor, they sell me pineapple and peppers, ask about my daughters, jabber on and on. They follow me home, smoke after dinner. They argue and bicker, then expect me to talk.

I want to tell them something--anything, really. But nothing can be said, not to death. And if I break with the quiet, will the ringing start? Will I find the bell empty?

The silence is what saved me. After the last bullet, it was only mine to hear.

53 A HUNDRED WAYS TO KILL A ROOSTER

Just wait, they will get hungry, my mother says at breakfast, after I complain. Your luxury is to be annoyed by little things. In early morning, when our neighbors rise at four to make sweet, soft foolah bread to sell on Tubman Boulevard, only rainy season at its worst can keep him from prying open the world.

I’ve watched him closely outside the screened window of the room where I take my bucket bath: he runs stiffly through puddles, green-gold feathers ducking through legs of children to escape the sudden, mean downpours, to crow happily inside instead.

Across the street, the Nancy Doe market slowly spurts to life, its war-damaged buildings still housing dried fish and fufu, children selling mayonnaise jars of gasoline, pushing wheelbarrows of flip-flops who shake their shy heads “no” when we ask them for a picture. No one needs another soul stolen here. Even from the market, I make out the rooster’s cackle.

I get to know him well; by the end of a month, I am sure that he sounds different when announcing a storm blowing in off ELWA beach (like a trumpet that’s been trampled). As he becomes a grandfather clock villain-laughing-out each quarter hour, I wish for him instead a slow death by fire ants. Even the over-sized avocado pits at lunch begin to seem like the perfect artillery.

I think of other weapons I could hurl over the compound wall, past the highest layer 54 of broken glass and curlicued barbed wire. Always the generous American, I try to think of ammunition his struggling owners could use: two shoes? a dictionary? a pot or a pan?

Liberia’s Independence Day--a morning that brings loud singing and strangers to our door who smile and ask for the gifts they know we can give, and my last sweaty morning in Africa--I wait in bed for his usual green-and-gold boasting to send me off, into this day that will later ask for much digestion. How fitting that silence is all that comes over the compound walls. Thick and smoke-filled, it drifts beneath my pink mosquito net; it means a fuller thing.

55 HUMOR AT THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

I. At first, it was hard to smile here. Visitors like us couldn’t figure out what to say to people living on garbage mountains, living on top of so much dying. Even villages named SmellNoTaste had the saddest and longest of histories.

Soon, even we needed to escape the one-eyed beggars, the barefoot girls who came in early morning. Wanting, wanting. And “what can we give them that will really last”?

II. Life still laughs here in bright yellow hibiscus, in trees along dirt highways that don drooping blooms resembling old women’s purple hats.

Soon, our longing for hope and humor makes us notice the painted taxi slogans: “No food for lazy man,” “Maybe,” “City Boss.” The same dilapidated taxis--anything painted yellow--display bold stickers: the face of “California Jesus”--blonde-haired, blue-eyed-- right beside rock stars like Madonna clad in scant leather, almost on top of each other. Almost a sin.

Soon, we can’t help but heehaw about it afterwards when a neighbor woman, Macdilla, whose accent cannot enunciate American “t’s,” invites us to visit the lush “pea-nuS fields.”

We begin to giggle at whatever we can. To lift us up even higher, perhaps to keep us feeling human. In Monrovia, we live directly behind the PMS Gas Station--I am really not joking-- and the Always Gas Station continuously runs 56 out of fuel. “Oh, Liberia!” my parents learn to say, rolling their eyes and smiling, claiming, “it’s just different.” Trying not to judge.

III. But I have to wonder what the barefoot girls, the one-eyed beggars, and Macdilla would say if they came to our touristy streets lined with air-conditioned houses big enough to keep whole villages safe, to our fields of lawn green as Sinoe County rainforests.

Would they go back to their families, say with disbelieving giggles how not one person walks to the corner store, how we dance and sing filled with the nursing home version of the Holy Spirit? How our food is as bland and white as our faces?

IV. The day we start packing for home, rainy season shakes out her long wet hair like a posing model in a dirty magazine. And she just won’t stop.

Because she won’t stop, it’s impossible to burn the mountain of documents and business cards with our telephone numbers and addresses in the States (things we don’t necessarily want to leave in West Africa). So Dad finds a garbage bag and an armload of condiments.

“If they want to find us that badly, they’ll have to sort through this:” a layer of paper, followed by thick running reds, creams, greens. The process repeats again and again. We fold our clothes to the tang of relish. Soon, we are quiet and thoughtful, keeping busy. The rains pound down, our minds clench and unclench, ascend toward planes rising up, up, over, and home. I look up. But not one of us is smiling.

57 GIRL ON SOMALIA DRIVE

I am not prepared to see her on Somalia Drive. We have the car windows closed, partly so that no arm can reach in, see what white skin has to offer, partly to block out the loudest fumes.

Diesel trucks and busloads in front of us mimic slowly rolling waves (children have been lost in the mahogany floods of rainy season potholes.) Roads pulse with people, dogs with teats dragging, lines of goats. We crawl past a slaughterhouse, a Coca Cola factory, a trailer packed with workers singing of the Promised Land.

We are some sort of horrible royalty.

After all, we are from America, the Promised Land that sent its freed slaves here to start Liberia, to enslave the indigenous populations and plant its rubber trees and God. We are tied to these people outside our car windows by blood and sweat and quiet greed. Men suck their teeth at my mother and me, their way of getting our unnerved attention. Looks of longing, money signs, and awe. Babies often cry-- to them, we are ghosts.

I have learned to be overly interested in my shoes.

When I do glance up this day, I see a flash of white, and there she is: her blue-black body all treble clef curves, a bucket of bananas cocked on her head. We look at one another, five seconds at the most.

I am becoming numb to seeing more and more young men with missing limbs or hands, the sickening artwork of civil war. But meeting eyes with a faceless girl--where cheeks and nose should be, only white, only white— who can ever get used to that? 58 OUR OWN KIND OF ADVENT -for your first Christmas home

Five months after Africa, my father finally digs out the familiar music for the familiar version of himself to play on his recorders from Heidelberg.

Growing up, there were endless nights like this: me finishing the day’s dishes, my mother with sore feet in a bath, father drawn to what can be answered only by pitch and rhythm. “Wexford Carol,” “What Child is This?” spin into rooms now settling into the recognizable. Tonight, the prodigals, the fatted calf. Tonight, the longest night of the year.

Earlier, in the car my mother cried at the sight of electric candles in windows, even at giant inflatable Santas, confesses,

“You will never know how homesick we were a year ago.” Now, “home” is not that shunned idea, banned to an African apartment closet, in boxes of letters, photos, a curl of your first granddaughter’s hair, German recorders swelling with heat-- all hidden to protect you there, in your giving. So you would not turn back. So you would stay.

And yet, when do you get to stop? Giving oceans by the spoonfuls. Open hands become the things that leave you restless. In the rooms of your house, and the Ohio you love (that also drove you away), your family still waits for you--the people known before “The Call.” 59

Instead, you appear daily, burning like that star above Bethlehem or the seraphs in the Old Testament, tangible signs of something glorious and horrible that God is about to do…

60 AFTER WATCHING MY FATHER “Inside each of lies the secret of our parents…” -Jean Janzen

The walking stick my father had tailor made by woodcarvers on the beach leans against our fireplace bricks, longing for African sand.

It is used now to relearn the farm’s thick skin of fields and forest. My father grips it like a rifle, a marker of his past, controls where it lands, parts multiflora rose. This is the walking stick’s purpose: to gouge with each step, “I am far, far away,” to linger in sweet spots of shade, recalling a jungle’s siren edge. Places can swallow us like the Great

Whale. I know this now, after watching my father. Yes, Jonah, we can all be prophetable snacks for God, can stand and touch rib-rafters in the growling bellies of foreign lands before He spits us out. My father is a gypsy, content with neither poverty nor wealth. Displaced, he walks and walks. He parts the weeds. He listens, then takes in the difference. Here, there are no mango trees for neighbor children to spy from, no snake-like traffic to cross or markets where pineapples drop into old cloth bags for less than ten American cents. Here, vendors do not demand to know why they were born into Liberia and not into such bounty. No banana harvest waits to be shaken free of spiders. Fufu is not beaten to a slippery pulp to the rhythm of tribal dances. Instead, under leaves that will sing scarlet in September, my father knows the walking stick can be used. With Progress. In peace. Here, it is not so obvious that white Jonah is a blessed man; even Americans cry out like Job. But sometimes, God is silent among these trees, and the branches themselves must hold up my father. This is when I watch his walking from a distance, when I whisper in God’s place--“You are enough.”

61 ST. FRANCIS WORKS AT THE COLUMBUS ZOO

At night, I take off my shoes. We pretend we’re in West Africa. Together, we talk of rubber trees, how you miss the warm throats of antelope, a sun so hot the earth smells of distant fires. We imagine our feet calloused from heat, away from the patches of night- silver snows in Ohio. Mostly, I am here to listen, then remind you of your role. Isn’t that what we all need: from time to time, for someone else to notice, say, Yes--you are living what you’re made for?

The other night-guards play poker in the aquarium lobby or sleep near the gift shop after feeding the nocturnals. They only suspect me once, the night two high school boys dared one another to sneak into the polar bears’ pool just before dawn. One boy’s hand was already missing by the time they all got there, having heard the screams. I was already down in the water, talking. Not to the boys, to the bears. Later, the other guards tell reporters they saw the bears nod in unison, that I had reached out, placed my hands on their yellow-white foreheads like some kind of anointing. Tonight, the same bears are teaching two cubs another ancient story, one that will find its way to others who will never see that hungry wall of ice but will imagine its cold comfort as people who pray imagine a vast and listening god.

Remembering only a land of heat, you want to hear this story too, so we follow paw and hoof prints in the sidewalk (a path made for your visitors) to the other side of the world. On the way, animals come out to pay their respects to our royal parade. Some reach beyond cages, put small leaves and flowers 62 in your mane: bush deer and elephant, pepper bird, baboon. Cool cement beneath our feet, distant highways for rivers, streetlamps for giraffes remind us we are only something pretending to be something else. Or are we? Does our soul really change when we cannot see its beginning?