Aunt Joe Tells How She Learned To Love
Singing hymns on Sunday evenings,
while snow rubbed against the stained glass windows
of the Parkers Prairie First Baptist Church
I learned Jesus was the man I really loved.
He was the breathing between notes,
the fever rising in my belly,
the space inside the perfect circle
of Ross Thompson's class ring
hanging on a chain around my neck.
Up in heaven, Jesus longed for us so much,
I could sometimes feel him
brush my fingers on the hymn book.
Take my hands and let them move
at the impulse of thy love,
at the impulse of thy love.
Ross sat by his father, their tenor soaring,
Ross's shoulders working above the pew,
and his left hand where he fell
into the corn shredder last summer--
I loved the purple scar anyone could stare at,
and the way Ross held it,
as still as Jesus' wounded hands.
Oh love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee.
I give thee back the life I owe. . .
All our voices joining and ascending.
My soprano burning out my mean pride,
my love of clothes,
my jealousy until I longed
to be a living sacrifice.
Aunt Joe Falls In Love With Wilfred Chappell
When he drove into Parkers Prairie
his eyes demanded a hundred songs,
each one in a different key,
and that's why he played me
in every part of my body--
just made me up as he went along.
I forgot about Ross Thompson,
forgot the boys in overalls.
I wanted this man, who had been around
enough to ask for what he wanted.
With a little stick, Wilfred cleaned
his fingernails white
as the inside of an orange peel.
He could tell by tasting whether a tea
had come from China or Japan. And none of it
satisfied him. He wanted me.
His certainty spread me open wide enough,
after a while, for anything. I expected
children to flock out of me
like hundreds of starlings flying into the sun.
I had been a shy girl who behaved herself.
But I became a camera lens, stuck open
to take a picture of the whole world
if that was what he wanted.
Wilfred and Josephine Arrive in Pittsburgh
After driving three days, I saw it--
Pittsburgh, where Wilfred grew up,
like a picture, in my Bible Story Book, of hell,
with crevices where I could get so lost
even God couldn't find me.
Here tall houses are connected, secret,
letting in no grass or sun. You can see why.
They sit, not flinching among the steel mills,
fires licking them with tongues of soot
until their bricks love darkness.
We rented a room for thirty dollars.
Wilfred turned to me and I unpinned
the warm bills from my corset,
a corset I bought to marry Wilfred in.
Each one I peeled off was a wing
our friends had given us on our wedding day
to fly up to our dreams.
Wilfred's high school friend couldn't
find him a job. In winter
Wilfred sold his car for us to live on. He waited
to grow into himself, circling jobs in want ads.
He came home from interviews smaller
every time, his hopes dwindling
like our bar of Ivory soap.
Next spring, when our bones
were breaking over our empty plates, I crept out
and searched the vacant lots for greens. Boiled,
they tasted like smoke from fires that forge steel.
So I know this now: even grass in Pittsburgh
is a human thing. And that's why I won't go home.
When I take out pictures of Parkers Prairie
I can see what I've escaped. There's
the photo of nothing but grass--
a square of shaggy gray and white,
it looks like, but I know what it is.
It's the empty heart of nature,
which you could eat forever
and it would taste like nothing,
a heart which nobody can change or fill up, ever.
Deciding Not To Go Back Home
Wilfred and I still touch each other
in this fourth floor room
of a Pittsburgh row house, a high box
with crazy stairs and sauerkraut air.
A human thought up this house and built it.
"Why would you want to stay there,"
mother's letters beg me, but
what can she know? She sits on the lawn
without a corset, practicing her Roto Club speech--
The Spirit Of Freedom On The Prairie.
The pictures she sends of Parkers Prairie
show the horizon running straight out to the edge.
My sister is walking under the blank sky.
As though longing were horizontal
and nothing in the way of getting there!
She always wanted to marry Alex Murray,
and have six children. But freedom is nothing.
I wear my corset tighter than any other girl
and when people press against me, I see stars.
Yesterday only a mile from here a millionaire set
himself on fire with an actual five hundred dollar bill.
I saw a woman carrying her baby across town
in a cardboard box with her belongings.
Real things happen. In this city they're mine,
and I love every one.
What Happens Next
And then one day, you find you're falling,
because you can't keep going
the way your mother taught you:
baths twice a week, meat in the ice box
to stop ptomaine poisoning,
tonic every night to keep your weight up,
and scented oil kisses to keep your face
nice like great Aunt Marietta's was
the day she died. Little by little I fed everything
to the smoking fires of Pittsburgh,
and still they wanted more. But was it Pittsburgh
stopped me saying my prayers to God at night?
Tumbling through darkness, I felt like Satan
dwindling down and getting meaner as he fell.
Wilfred and I moved into a rooming house,
five to a room, a cigar box subdivided by a curtain.
Only pride separated us from those other three,
the mother with her teenage children.
Could they hear us loving one another?
What did they do with us? At first
I thought they must have packed our love
in the chambers of their ears like music.
But in the middle of one night the youngest
got up to go to the bathroom in the hall
and when she came back she cast me such a look:
"When I grow up, my man will save me
from this place. You dumb girl, loving such a fellow!
And everyone can hear you two, like dirty water
swishing down the same drain over and over."
Finding Work
I used to think good and evil were big
as a whole door that could suck me through
against my will, but that's not true.
I can stand here and decide.
I open this door. See how small a turning
life depends on? In this cold room,
money dwindling, Wilfred might as well have been
a woman, hugging failure like a pillow in his arms
all day. I'd think of my father, measuring powder
in his drug store for thirty years, counting
out a million pills, one at a time.
I cut down one of Wilfred's coats,
tucked my hair beneath his cap, stepped out
the door, that first good step, the second,
easier. I walked away from being a woman,
from beauty ads on fences, songs on the phonograph,
from Lillian Russell. With a hundred hands reaching out
to stop me, I left my country. I became a boy.
I got a job delivering prescriptions.
Not woman, not man, I handed them the best I had
every time I rang a doorbell, courage from the center of me.
At night I'd go home to our room, climb the stairs
not knowing what kind of thing I was
until I'd find Wilfred in our bed and touch his throat,
that pulse. He'd reach out, his hand closing
on mine, the left ventricle, right
ventricle of one strange heart.
The Rape
So I can never forget, I've kept one small glove.
My husband, Wilfred, had the most delicate hands.
In Pittsburgh during that winter
the wind slipped in like a criminal
to finish us off. I sang hymns,
"Leaning On The Everlasting Arms,"
and lay all night awake in Wilfred's hands.
To stay warm enough to live--that became our religion.
One morning on the doorstep of our rooming house
we saw a frozen baby, a plucked chicken, blue as steel.
The next week Wilfred found work stoking the furnace
in a garment factory--twenty-seven men applied.
I thought they'd chosen Wilfred
because love conquers all,
and I was right. Oh, I was right.
The boss gave Wilfred soft leather gloves
and sent him every night back home
from their hot furnace, florid as a rose.
I could smell the boss in Wilfred's hair.
When we lay down on our narrow bed,
the boss smiled at me out of Wilfred's eyes.
In what part of me did I understand?
I knew it in my arms. I could feel
that man's shadow slip around me
at night when I held Wilfred,
but my tongue had turned to stone.
One Saturday afternoon when I was asleep alone,
I heard boots hammer up our stairs.
The boss wanted me, it turns out. Wilfred
was a corridor between us. As I heard the man
unlock the door with Wilfred's key, I thought,
Wilfred is an opening in both directions!
He was wearing a double breasted suit
and Wilfred's gloves. He laid the gloves
on the radiator. He said, "Be beautiful for me!
Sing."
Slowly I started the old music
he never had a right to hear:
Take my hand and let it move
At the impulse of thy love,
At the impulse of thy love.
That afternoon I thought I hated all of them.
I thought I hated Jesus.
Going Back
Standing alone on the platform
as the iron heart of the Soo line
slides back toward Pittsburgh--empty,
crying out, mad with pain,
I turn towards Parkers Prairie
and scan Main Street,
so empty anything might be written on it.
This is how the town greets me, without him now.
I can only stand in the sun so long,
waiting for my younger sister's husband
to pick me up. Beside me: six leather bags
crammed with my lace dresses.
Lace that once was whole bolts of longing
I unrolled across my mother's rug
and cut to a pattern so convincing
Wilfred Chappell married me for forever.
Didn't everyone who saw us off think:
Here is faithfulness to love?
In this town, the horizon draws its line
so far away I can't pull it in for comfort.
I have to stand here alone, watching
the sun bang down on the blank street.
Dumb nature, who can't tell good from evil,
is worse than a criminal destroying everything.
Parkers Prairie is no place for lace and velvet.
Right here I undo my hat,
sticking the pins back in for warning,
a skull and crossbones,
and leave it on the station platform.
Then one by one I lift my six bags
onto an empty wagon. I harness myself up
and drag my heavy dresses straight across town
to my sister's.
Summer Solstice In Parkers Prairie
At midnight I send my complaints flying
like bats up the chimney:
For years I have been clerking
at my brother-in-law's store,
thirty-five cents an hour,
my feet rising in my shoes like dough.
I have no children. Instead, I have to watch
my sister's children playing on the lawn
like morning sun that shines, but not for me.
No one has asked me to the summer festival.
No one will ever ask me. I am the woman
who is a man. I am the daughter
who is older than her mother.
One by one, my complaints fly,
scaly, louse-ridden, their sharp noses twitching,
to the rim of darkness, where they hit their heads.
They can't get out. I always take them back.
They fold their wings like umbrellas
and breed under my breasts.
But outside I can hear accordions
painting bright pictures in the air
and feet, scraping on the pavement.
Who knows why tonight, after all these years,
I draw in my neighbors' voices like good medicine:
"Come out, Josephine. Come out and dance with us."
I have nourished my complaints so long,
fed them with my blood, my milk,
I am getting tired of their demands.
Maybe it's time for them to fly away.
Maybe I'll fling the door open. Maybe tonight
even my hobble will count as dancing.
Love Again
This morning the tiger lilies bloomed beside the house.
The bleeding hearts are almost ready to start up.
Even though my hair is scribbly and my feet are too big,
time has a feeling in its bones. I am waiting
on the porch swing. I think I'm going to fall in love.
I am like a birch tree turning its seeds loose.
The birch tree doesn't mourn,
even when it's carted off to the lumber mill.
Look how the tree hands over its body.
Something is going to follow.
I know all about how deadly love can be.
The saw bites deep into the wood.
That snarling tooth would annihilate
the birch tree if it could. But it is fashioning
chairs and tables for a house that hasn't yet been built.
Bjorn Larsen comes to haul the junk away on Mondays.
This morning I put out my six valises full of dresses.
I climb up and sit on top of them.
When Bjorn's truck rattles into sight,
he yells, "Ah, Josephine, my beauty, not yet.
No one's going to take you to the junkyard today!"
Learning To Swim in Lake Adley
-for Elaine Terranova
After church I drive in the rain to Lake Adley.
Here I learn how everything is hooked to
everything else. The waves for instance,
each flashing in like another row of teeth.
From their angle I try to guess the way
the sand bars jut beneath the water.
There is more to this than what it looks like
on the surface. Think of everything the Lake
has caught on its sandy bottom and held there
like a memory: coins, old glasses, seaweed.
Any time we could get back the most important
clues. Today the Lake has tossed up
clam shells, whole clams like dark ears
holding their secrets in, and one big stone, white
and polished as the heart of God.
I look up
through the drizzle and see Mrs. Sorensen
in her long skirts riding her bicycle toward me.
She stops right here and pulls me up.
We take off our shoes together, unhook our garters,
unroll our stockings till they hang like doughnuts
around our ankles. We shout and shake our hair out,
bright knives. Then we take our black shoes off
and wade in. We bob beside each other,
letting ourselves be carried anywhere, like gifts.
Deciding Where To Stop
Only half way round; already I am fretting
because each living thing feeds on others.
Mosquitoes swarm around my head. On the Lake,
ohs rise where perch snap mosquitoes
from the air. And on the dock, the Carlson boy
casts out to catch a silvery flash
he'll cook and eat. I try to clear the ledger--
how much I've taken out versus how much
I've put back in. Boxcars of living things
have gone through me. Daily I ask forgiveness.
Or permission. Anyone can feel
how we go around and around, locking tighter
into our debts till they become our faces.
If I kept walking, I would come the whole
circumference of this Lake to where I started
and worry would drive me like its slave around again.
But I choose to stop in Briske's yard.
I sit on crabgrass where Anna's grandson
is flinging crumbs to feed the birds.
The motion is so similar--casting out
to kill and casting out to feed.
In one final shaft of sunlight the boy
shimmers like gold. "Here's bread," he yells
to flickers and nuthatches. "That's what
we call it. You can call it anything
you want to."
Aunt Joe Plays With the Children
Saturday afternoons I get out my tricks.
On the lawn the children gather, wild as dandelions.
They hate law. So I vault over walls for them.
I unlock handcuffs with a stem of grass.
I peel an apple for each girl, making long curls
of skin that spell their names: Louise and Alice.
They are two haughty queens I love.
"Teach us," they beg me. But what's to teach?
Sometimes in unseen hand as strong as water
pulls the ordinary cloth off earth
to let us see the glory underneath.
Sometimes fragments of my past gather
like the petals of a peony
no one would think to question or explain.
Then what could be impossible? Like a skill
already mastered, the future lies safe within me.
Aunt Joe Watches Bjorn Larsen Walking In the Rain
Outside, rain as fine as lace
sprinkles Lake Adley, swelling the water
till it rises like a slow ache in
the throats of reeds and cat-tails.
Gray sky is gathering us all in
like a brood hen. I want to rise to meet it,
whole, alone, huge as a continent.
But who can be huge as a continent?
I can only see so much
through this window: the rows of birches,
cut off at the knees, that patch of grass
slanting down towards sand. I'm
a woman peeping through a hole
in a wood shack. Bjorn is a man
coming up the walk towards me,
his hair streaming, his hands
holding the leash of his mongrel dog.
This is the happiness snapping at my heels.
I get up and open the door to meet it.
Bjorn Larsen And Aunt Joe At the Dump
-For Fleda Jackson and Jerry Beasley
How can a man know which minute the sun
will perch on the shoulder of the dump?
But Bjorn could tell you. We rattle out of town
in his Chevy truck on the dirt road
that picks its careful way through the swamp
--leaves that grow even while we sleep,
whose flowers we beat back twice a year
before they swallow up the town.
At the swamp's mouth, Bjorn pulls the truck
inside a wire fence. This is where everything ends up,
like that old wringer washer, once someone's tubby angel.
We sit on the ripped cloth seats and watch the sun
open its heart. It sends light rolling
like mercy across old boots and tires and bedsprings.
I can hear the whole dump breathing.
It would be easier to lay my future on the butcher's block
and have its head severed with a clean chop.
A decent funeral and afterwards, silence.
But the dump is coming to life. It is pure gold.
Those boots are getting up to walk away.
Any minute the tire might spin above us
like a new planet. Bjorn's hand reaches out for mine.
Against his, I can feel my hand's thick heel,
its bones, and its nails like little stars
that are going to shine forever.
Aunt Joe Learns To Keep Her Balance
Everything I need arrives in time--sunlight,
a little breeze at night, dancing music,
as though a kind Aunt were lending me her things,
so I begin to lend mine too. Now I'm famous for it.
My pie plates turn up at church suppers,
my fishing lures are drying on Briske's grass,
Last week I sent my cat to be someone's mouser
and now her eyes glow like flashlights
from the neighbor's basement windows. Objects blow
back and forth among us in an erratic trade wind.
Sometimes I have too much, sometimes too little.
Sitting on my porch, I count my rain hats.
All afternoon people have returned them.
I look up. The sky lowers and growls.
Here comes Mrs. Sorensen on her bicycle wearing
three rain hats, waving an umbrella for me.
She's old enough to be my mother, but
she still tips dangerously, first to one side
then to the other. I try to memorize it,
how she keeps her balance.
