"Love Song for the Impossible Him," "Binghamton," "On Being Erroneously Called a New
"Love Song for the Impossible Him," "Binghamton," "On Being Erroneously Called a New
chuck campbell
-
Fri Sep 09, 2011 @ 03:27PM
Comments: 0
"Love Song for the Impossible Him," "Binghamton," "On Being Erroneously Called a New Yorker Again" Poetry by Erin Elizabeth Smith
Love Song for the Impossible Him
after Millay
It was when he held me
on the street corner
as we broke for our separate homes
in late November –
that same month I always fall
in love. There wasn’t the itching
of cold in Mississippi
as there had been
in all those other states,
just the strange warm promise
of my cheek on his chest
and the quick cling of hands
before we crossed that street.
This sounds like another poem
about a man I used to know,
engaged now
while I am married
to neither,
those two hard-backed men
I could never turn to more
than brief stanzas, fleeting night
dreams of rabbit holes and
shabby ladders.
Drunk in his car, one night,
I tell him to follow me
up the dark stairs.
I broke somewhere
when he said No. The simplicity
of denial and the small-hearted
rage of skin
that needs bedsheets and the tossing
sleep that follows.
That New York love made over
again in the Deep South,
where the cicadas are nothing
like the upstate thistle
but sometimes they are promises
made in heat, enough
to break the loneliness
of coffee and morning television.
How easy it is to remember – him
on a stool in the windowless dark
of afternoon bars
while the bourbon carmelized in ice,
and my knee kept brushing his
again and again
in that improbable space
between us.
Binghamton
On April 6, 2009, a gunman opened fire on a center
where immigrants were taking a citizenship exam
in downtown Binghamton, killing thirteen.
It’s not hard to remember
her through the television
snapshots – the congressional
church on Main looking out
along the strip of chicken
joints and the red brick high school.
Everything needing
a good scrub from the salty
winters, industrial closings,
her sad desire to be reborn.
A thousand miles away,
and everyone’s saying her name
like I never left, like she is sitting
on my porch again,
fingering the mimosa she killed
in its clay pot. I can almost touch her
even here, in this Southern city,
where the bushes turn twenty
shades of pink in February
and the deafening grey
of the rainy season is but a bluster
of winter and then the pirouetting spring.
It’s as blue today in Mississippi
as it was that September in New York
when the great cats of those buildings
skinned themselves to ash.
I stared out my window that day too,
looking at her in the backyard,
the thistle crinkling violet on the green.
A cat rolled and rolled in my garden,
turned up its newly brown body
and hopped the fence.
That’s most of what I remember of that day,
and I look at my own cats,
chasing each other in and out
of my car’s tires and wonder if this
is how I’ll see her now—
the vested police with their long guns,
a blockade of lights and firearms.
My one loved city reduced
to headlines, her proximity
from New York. And me so useless
and distant, wanting nothing
but a home to cradle her in.
On Being Erroneously Called a New Yorker Again
It’s not that I don't want
your palate of hill, roughed up
autumn color. I would take it all –
the stones in the dried Susquehanna,
the candy sunsets and all the slow turns
on the dark drive to Ithaca.
I would take the closed summer rinks,
the children clung
on the necks of carousel mares.
Stretches of surprising cows
and corn and the barns
long sunk into themselves.
Take the imploding
shoe factory, the starving doors
of IBM, the remains of the Art
Theater, its five years of ash.
I’d take the terrible pink
of that retirement home
and scrape it to its bergamot beginnings.
Wash the arena windows
until they shone like dimes,
dress all the bandages
on the heels of you, my city, and lullaby
the mounded snow to spring.
But I inherited another story –
dimpled palmetto forts, the dignity
of Southern dead, songs about cars,
cornbread and cast iron. Where I’m from,
we do not believe in New York,
but still, I’m Wendy,
sometimes, in her bed,
staring into the sad black
of a story that is no longer mine.
Erin Elizabeth Smith is the author of the books The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press 2011). Her poetry has previously appeared in 32 Poems, The Yalobusha Review, New Delta Review, Water~Stone Review, Third Coast, Crab Orchard, and Willow Springs among others. Erin holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi and is currently a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee.
Comments: 0
Post a Comment