Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath
Domestic Work
Limen
Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky
Family Portrait
Flounder
White Lies
Gathering
Picture Gallery
Domestic Work
1. Domestic Work, 1937
2. Speculation, 1939
3. Secular
4. Signs, Oakvale, Mississippi, 1941
5. Expectant
6. Tableau
7. At the Station
8. Naola Beauty Academy, New Orleans, 1945
9. Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956
10. His Hands
11. Self-Employment, 1970
Gesture of a Woman in Process
Bellocq’s Ophelia
Bellocq’s Ophelia
Letter Home
Countess P—’s Advice for New Girls
Storyville Diary
Native Guard
Theories of Time and Space
I
The Southern Crescent
Genus Narcissus
Graveyard Blues
What the Body Can Say
Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971
What Is Evidence
Letter
After Your Death
Myth
At Dusk
II
Pilgrimage
Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi
1. King Cotton, 1907
2. Glyph, Aberdeen, 1913
3. Flood
4. You Are Late
Native Guard
Again, the Fields
III
Pastoral
Miscegenation
My Mother Dreams Another Country
Southern History
Blond
Southern Gothic
Incident
Providence
Monument
Elegy for the Native Guards
South
Congregation
Invocation, 1926
Congregation
1. Witness
2. Watcher
3. Believer
4. Kin
5. Exegesis
6. Prodigal
7. Benediction
Liturgy
Thrall
Illumination
Knowledge
Miracle of the Black Leg
The Americans
Taxonomy
Thrall
Calling
Bird in the House
Torna Atrás
Enlightenment
Elegy
Articulation
Repentance
My Father as Cartographer
Duty
Reach
Waterborne
Shooting Wild
Letter to Inmate #271847, Convicted of Murder, 1985
Meditation at Decatur Square
Transfiguration
Articulation
Notes
Acknowledgments
Read More from Natasha Trethewey
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2018 by Natasha Trethewey
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhco.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Trethewey, Natasha D., 1966– author.
Title: Monument : poems : new and selected / Natasha Trethewey.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018012255 (print) | LCCN 2018016439 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328508690 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328507846 (hardcover)
Classification: LCC PS3570.R433 (ebook) | LCC PS3570.R433 A6 2018 (print) |
DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012255
Cover design by Mark R. Robinson
Cover photograph © Vincent Ruddy
Author photograph © Matt Valentine
v1.1018
“Invocation, 1926” by Natasha Trethewey, and “Congregation” and “Liturgy” from Beyond Katrina by Natasha Trethewey, copyright © 2010 by Natasha Trethewey, reprinted by permission of University of Georgia Press.
“Limen,” “Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky,” “Family Portrait,” “Flounder,” “White Lies,” “Gathering,” “Picture Gallery,” “Domestic Work, 1937,” “Speculation, 1939,” “Secular,” “Signs, Oakvale, Mississippi, 1941,” “Expectant,” “Tableau,” “At the Station,” “Naola Beauty Academy, New Orleans, 1945,” “Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956,” “His Hands,” “Self-Employment, 1970,” and “Gesture of a Woman-in-Process” copyright © 2000 by Natasha Trethewey. Reprinted from Domestic Work with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Excerpt from “Meditation on Form and Measure” from Black Zodiac by Charles Wright. Copyright © 1997 by Charles Wright. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
For my parents—
Gwen and Rick
and
for Brett
Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds . . .
—from “The Great City,” Walt Whitman
Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath
Do not hang your head or clench your fists
when even your friend, after hearing the story,
says, My mother would never put up with that.
Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that,
more often, a woman who chooses to leave
is then murdered. The hundredth time
your father says, But she hated violence,
why would she marry a guy like that?—
don’t waste your breath explaining, again,
how abusers wait, are patient, that they
don’t beat you on the first date, sometimes
not even the first few years of a marriage.
Keep an impassive face whenever you hear
Stand By Your Man, and let go your rage
when you recall those words were advice
given your mother. Try to forget the first
trial, before she was dead, when the charge
was only attempted murder; don’t belabor
the thinking or the sentence that allowed
her ex-husband’s release a year later, or
the juror who said, It’s a domestic issue—
they should work it out themselves. Just
breathe when, after you read your poems
about grief, a woman asks, Do you think
your mother was weak for men? Learn
to ignore subtext. Imagine a thought-
cloud above your head, dark and heavy
with the words you cannot say; let silence
rain down. Remember you were told,
by your famous professor, that you should
write about something else, unburden
yourself of the death of your mother and
just pour your heart out in the poems.
Ask yourself what’s in your heart, that
reliquary—blood locket and seedbed—and
contend with what it means, the folk saying
you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul:
that one does not bury the mother’s body
in th
e ground but in the chest, or—like you—
you carry her corpse on your back.
I
from
Domestic Work
Limen
All day I’ve listened to the industry
of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree
just outside my window. Hard at his task,
his body is a hinge, a door knocker
to the cluttered house of memory in which
I can almost see my mother’s face.
She is there, again, beyond the tree,
its slender pods and heart-shaped leaves,
hanging wet sheets on the line—each one
a thin white screen between us. So insistent
is this woodpecker, I’m sure he must be
looking for something else—not simply
the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift
the tree might hold. All day he’s been at work,
tireless, making the green hearts flutter.
Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky
It is 1965. I am not yet born, only
a fullness beneath the Empire waist
The ruffles at her neck are waves
of light in my father’s eyes. He carries
a slim volume, leather-bound, poems
to read as they walk. The long road
past the college, through town,
rises and falls before them,
the blue hills shimmering at twilight.
The stacks at the distillery exhale,
and my parents breathe evening air
heady and sweet as Kentucky bourbon.
They are young and full of laughter,
the sounds in my mother’s throat
rippling down into my blood.
My mother, who will not reach
forty-one, steps into the middle
of a field, lies down among clover
and sweet grass, right here, right now—
dead center of her life.
Family Portrait
Before the picture man comes
Mama and I spend the morning
cleaning the family room. She hums
Motown, doles out chores, a warning—
He has no legs, she says. Don’t stare.
I’m first to the door when he rings.
My father and uncle lift his chair
onto the porch, arrange his things
near the place his feet would be.
He poses our only portrait—my father
sitting, Mama beside him, and me
in between. I watch him bother
the space for knees, shins, scratching air
as—years later—I’d itch for what’s not there.
Flounder
Here, she said, put this on your head.
She handed me a hat.
You ’bout as white as your dad,
and you gone stay like that.
Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down
around each bony ankle,
and I rolled down my white knee socks
letting my thin legs dangle,
circling them just above water
and silver backs of minnows
flitting here then there between
the sunspots and the shadows.
This is how you hold the pole
to cast the line out straight.
Now put that worm on your hook,
throw it out, and wait.
She sat spitting tobacco juice
into a coffee cup.
Hunkered down when she felt the bite,
jerked the pole straight up
reeling and tugging hard at the fish
that wriggled and tried to fight back.
A flounder, she said, and you can tell
’cause one of its sides is black.
The other side is white, she said.
It landed with a thump.
I stood there watching that fish flip-flop,
switch sides with every jump.
White Lies
The lies I could tell,
when I was growing up
light-bright, near-white,
high-yellow, red-boned
in a black place,
were just white lies.
I could easily tell the white folks
that we lived uptown,
not in that pink and green
shanty-fied shotgun section
along the tracks. I could act
like my homemade dresses
came straight out the window
of Maison Blanche. I could even
keep quiet, quiet as kept,
like the time a white girl said
(squeezing my hand), Now
we have three of us in this class.
But I paid for it every time
Mama found out.
She laid her hands on me,
then washed out my mouth
with Ivory soap. This
is to purify, she said,
and cleanse your lying tongue.
Believing her, I swallowed suds
thinking they’d work
from the inside out.
Gathering
FOR SUGAR
Through tall grass, heavy
from rain, my aunt and I wade
into cool fruit trees.
Near us, dragonflies
rippling to the next.
Green-black beetles swarm
the fruit, wings droning motion,
wet figs glistening.
We sigh, click our tongues,
our fingers reaching in, then
plucking what is left.
Underripe figs, green,
hard as jewels—these we save,
hold in deep white bowls.
She puts them to light
on the windowsill, tells me
to wait, learn patience.
I touch them each day,
watch them turn gold, grow sweet,
and give sweetness back.
I begin to see
our lives are like this—we take
what we need of light.
We glisten, preserve
handpicked days in memory,
our minds’ dark pantry.
Picture Gallery
In a tight corner of the house, we’d kept
the light-up portraits of Kennedy and King,
side by side, long after the bulbs burned out—
cords tangling on the floor, and the patina
of rust slowly taking the filigreed frames.
Then, my grandmother wanted more Art—
something beautiful to look at, she said.
At the fabric store she bought bolts of cloth
printed with natural scenes—far-off views
of mountains, owls on snowy boughs.
I donated the scenic backdrop that came
with a model horse—a yellowed vista
of wheat fields, a wagon, and one long road.
Back home, we gathered pinecones
and branches, staples and glue, then hung
the fabric, big as windows, in the dark
hallway. The fresh boughs we stapled on
stuck out in relief. We breathed green air,
and the owls—instead—peered in at us,
our lives suddenly beautiful, then.
Domestic Work
FOR LERETTA DIXON TURNBOUGH (LEE)
JUNE 22, 1916–JULY 28, 2008
I shirk not. I long for work. I pant for a life full of striving.
—W.E.B. Du Bois
1. Domestic Work, 1937
All week she’s cleaned
someone else’s house,
stared down her own face
in the shine of copper-
bottomed pots, polished
wood, toilets she’d pull
the lid to—that look saying
Let’s make a change, girl.
But Sunday mornings are hers—
church clothes starched
and hanging, a record spinning
on the console, the whole house
dancing. She raises the shades,
washes the rooms in light,
buckets of water, Octagon soap.
Cleanliness is next to godliness . . .
Windows and doors flung wide,
curtains two-stepping
forward and back, neck bones
bumping in the pot, a choir
of clothes clapping on the line.
Nearer my God to Thee . . .
She beats time on the rugs,
blows dust from the broom
like dandelion spores, each one
a wish for something better.
2. Speculation, 1939
First, the moles on each hand—
That’s money by the pan—
and always the New Year’s cabbage
and black-eyed peas. Now this,
another remembered adage,
her palms itching with promise,
she swears by the signs—Money coming soon.
But from where? Her left-eye twitch
says she’ll see the boon.
Good—she’s tired of the elevator switch,
those closed-in spaces, white men’s
sideways stares. Nothing but
time to think, make plans
each time the doors slide shut.
What’s to be gained from this New Deal?
Something finer like beauty school
or a milliner’s shop—she loves the feel
of marcelled hair, felt and tulle,