Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
I
Elegy
II
Miracle of the Black Leg
On Captivity
Taxonomy
Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or, The Mulata
Knowledge
III
The Americans
Mano Prieta
De Español y Negra; Mulata
Mythology
Geography
Torna Atrás
Bird in the House
Artifact
Fouled
Rotation
IV
Thrall
Calling
Enlightenment
How the Past Comes Back
On Happiness
Vespertina Cognitio
Illumination
V
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright © 2012 by Natasha Trethewey
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Trethewey, Natasha D., date.
Thrall : poems / Natasha Trethewey.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-57160-7
I. Title.
PS3570.R433T47 2012
811'.54—dc23
2012017321
eISBN 978-0-547-84042-0
v1.0812
To my father
What is love?
One name for it is knowledge.
—Robert Penn Warren
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
—T. S. Eliot
I
Elegy
For my father
I think by now the river must be thick
with salmon. Late August, I imagine it
as it was that morning: drizzle needling
the surface, mist at the banks like a net
settling around us—everything damp
and shining. That morning, awkward
and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked
into the current and found our places—
you upstream a few yards and out
far deeper. You must remember how
the river seeped in over your boots
and you grew heavier with that defeat.
All day I kept turning to watch you, how
first you mimed our guide’s casting
then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky
between us; and later, rod in hand, how
you tried—again and again—to find
that perfect arc, flight of an insect
skimming the river’s surface. Perhaps
you recall I cast my line and reeled in
two small trout we could not keep.
Because I had to release them, I confess,
I thought about the past—working
the hooks loose, the fish writhing
in my hands, each one slipping away
before I could let go. I can tell you now
that I tried to take it all in, record it
for an elegy I’d write—one day—
when the time came. Your daughter,
I was that ruthless. What does it matter
if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting
your line, and when it did not come back
empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights,
dreaming, I step again into the small boat
that carried us out and watch the bank receding—
my back to where I know we are headed.
II
Miracle of the Black Leg
Pictorial representations of the physician-saints Cosmas and Damian and the myth of the miracle transplant—black donor, white recipient—date back to the mid-fourteenth century, appearing much later than written versions of the story.
1.
Always, the dark body hewn asunder; always
one man is healed, his sick limb replaced,
placed in the other man’s grave: the white leg
buried beside the corpse or attached as if
it were always there. If not for the dark appendage
you might miss the story beneath this story—
what remains each time the myth changes: how,
in one version, the doctors harvest the leg
from a man, four days dead, in his tomb at the church
of a martyr, or—in another—desecrate a body
fresh in the graveyard at Saint Peter in Chains:
there was buried just today an Ethiopian.
Even now, it stays with us: when we mean to uncover
the truth, we dig, say unearth.
2.
Emblematic in paint, a signifier of the body’s lacuna,
the black leg is at once a grafted narrative,
a redacted line of text, and in this scene a dark stocking
pulled above the knee. Here the patient is sleeping,
his head at rest in his hand. Beatific, he looks as if
he’ll wake from a dream. On the floor
beside the bed, a dead Moor—hands crossed at the groin,
the swapped limb white and rotting, fused in place.
And in the corner, a question: poised as if to speak
the syntax of sloughing, a snake’s curved form.
It emerges from the mouth of a boy like a tongue—slippery
and rooted in the body as knowledge. For centuries
this is how the myth repeats: the miracle—in words
or wood or paint—is a record of thought.
3.
See how the story changes: in one painting
the Ethiop is merely a body, featureless in a coffin,
so black he has no face. In another, the patient—
at the top of the frame—seems to writhe in pain,
the black leg grafted to his thigh. Below him
a mirror of suffering: the blackamoor—
his body a fragment—arched across the doctor’s lap
as if dying from his wound. If not immanence,
the soul’s bright anchor—blood passed from one
to the other—what knowledge haunts each body,
what history, what phantom ache? One man always
low, in a grave or on the ground, the other
up high, closer to heaven; one man always diseased,
the other a body in service, plundered.
4.
Both men are alive in Villoldo’s carving.
In twinned relief, they hold the same posture,
the same pained face, each man reaching to touch
his left leg. The black man, on the floor,
holds his stump. Above him, the doctor restrains
the patient’s arm as if to prevent him touching
the dark amendment of flesh. How not to see it—
the men bound one to the other, symbiotic—
one man rendered expendable, the other worthy
of this sacrifice? In version after version, even
when the Ethiopian isn’t there, the leg is a stand-in,
a black modifier against the white body,
a piece cut off—as in the origin of the word comma:
caesura in a story that’s still being written.
On Captivity
Being all Stripped as Naked as We were Born, and endeavoring to hide our Nakedness, these Cannaballs t
ook [our] Books, and tearing out the Leaves would give each of us a Leaf to cover us . . .
—Jonathan Dickinson, 1699
At the hands now
of their captors, those
they’ve named savages,
do they say the word itself
savagely—hissing
that first letter,
the serpent’s image
releasing
thought into speech?
For them now
everything is flesh
as if their thoughts, made
suddenly corporeal,
reveal even more
their nakedness—
the shame of it:
their bodies rendered
plain as the natives’—
homely and pale,
their ordinary sex,
the secret illicit hairs
that do not (cannot)
cover enough.
Naked as newborns,
this is how they are brought
to knowledge. Adam and Eve
in the New World,
they have only the Bible
to cover them. Think of it:
a woman holding before her
the torn leaves of Genesis,
and a man covering himself
with the Good Book’s
frontispiece—his own name
inscribed on the page.
Taxonomy
After a series of casta paintings by Juan Rodríguez Juárez, c. 1715
1. DE ESPAÑOL Y DE INDIA PRODUCE MESTISO
The canvas is a leaden sky
behind them, heavy
with words, gold letters inscribing
an equation of blood—
this plus this equals this—as if
a contract with nature, or
a museum label,
ethnographic, precise. See
how the father’s hand, beneath
its crown of lace,
curls around his daughter’s head;
she’s nearly fair
as he is—calidad. See it
in the brooch at her collar,
the lace framing her face.
An infant, she is borne
over the servant’s left shoulder,
bound to him
by a sling, the plain blue cloth
knotted at his throat.
If the father, his hand
on her skull, divines—
as the physiognomist does—
the mysteries
of her character, discursive,
legible on her light flesh,
in the soft curl of her hair,
we cannot know it: so gentle
the eye he turns toward her.
sideways toward him—
the scarf on her head
white as his face,
his powdered wig—gestures
with one hand a shape
like the letter C. See,
she seems to say,
what we have made.
The servant, still a child, cranes
his neck, turns his face
up toward all of them. He is dark
as history, origin of the word
native: the weight of blood,
a pale mistress on his back,
heavier every year.
2. DE ESPAÑOL Y NEGRA PRODUCE MULATO
Still, the centuries have not dulled
the sullenness of the child’s expression.
If there is light inside him, it does not shine
through the paint that holds his face
in profile—his domed forehead, eyes
nearly closed beneath a heavy brow.
Though inside, the boy’s father stands
in his cloak and hat. It’s as if he’s just come in,
or that he’s leaving. We see him
transient, rolling a cigarette, myopic—
his eyelids drawn against the child
passing before him. At the stove,
the boy’s mother contorts, watchful,
her neck twisting on its spine, red beads
yoked at her throat like a necklace of blood,
her face so black she nearly disappears
into the canvas, the dark wall upon which
we see the words that name them.
What should we make of any of this?
Remove the words above their heads,
put something else in place of the child—
a table, perhaps, upon which the man might set
his hat, or a dog upon which to bestow
the blessing of his touch—and the story
changes. The boy is a palimpsest of paint—
layers of color, history rendering him
that precise shade of in-between.
Before this he was nothing: blank
canvas—before image or word, before
a last brush stroke fixed him in his place.
3. DE ESPAÑOL Y MESTIZA PRODUCE CASTIZA
How not to see
in this gesture
the mind
of the colony?
In the mother’s arms,
the child, hinged
at her womb—
dark cradle
of mixed blood
(call it Mexico)—
turns toward the father,
reaching to him
as if back to Spain,
to the promise of blood
alchemy—three easy steps
to purity:
from a Spaniard and an Indian,
a mestizo;
from a mestizo and a Spaniard,
a castizo;
from a castizo and a Spaniard,
a Spaniard.
We see her here—
one generation away—
nearly slipping
her mother’s careful grip.
4. THE BOOK OF CASTAS