Week Three

Let's start off week three with an excerpt on truth in storytelling: 

From Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried: 

I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier.

Almost everything else is invented.

But it's not a game. It's a form. Right here, now, as I invent myself, I'm thinking of all I want to tell you about why this book is written as it is. For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present you see, and my presence was guilt enough. I remember his face, which was not a pretty face, because his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present.

But listen. Even that story is made up.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, , almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

"Daddy, tell the truth," Kathleen can say, "did you ever kill anybody?" And I can say, honestly, "Of course not."

Or I can say, honestly, "Yes."


- - - - -

If you haven't already read Tim O'Brien's book, I suggest you pick it up. It delivered new poems to my hands once I read it. So much of us struggle with emotional truth vs factual truth, and O'Brien gives us permission to tell our stories, to write our poems as we FEEL they should happen. Below are some of my favorite poems that straddle the line between emotional truth and factual truth. Dig in, writers!

Refugio's Hair

by Alberto Ríos

In the old days of our family,

My grandmother was a young woman

Whose hair was as long as the river.

She lived with her sisters on the ranch

La Calera--The Land of the Lime--

And her days were happy.

But her uncle Carlos lived there too,

Carlos whose soul had the edge of a knife.

One day, to teach her to ride a horse,

He made her climb on the fastest one,

Bareback, and sit there

As he held its long face in his arms.

And then he did the unspeakable deed 

For which he would always be remembered:

He called for the handsome baby Pirrín

And he placed the child in her arms.

With that picture of a Madonna on horseback

He slapped the shank of the horse's rear leg.

The horse did what a horse must,

Racing full toward the bright horizon.

But first he ran under the álamo trees

To rid his back of this unfair weight:

This woman full of tears

And this baby full of love.

When they reached the trees and went under,

Her hair, which had trailed her,

Equal in its magnificence to the tail of the horse,

That hair rose up and flew into the branches

As if it were a thousand arms,

All of them trying to save her.

The horse ran off and left her,

The baby still in her arms,

The two of them hanging from her hair.

The baby looked only at her

And did not cry, so steady was her cradle.

Her sisters came running to save them.

But the hair would not let go.

From its fear it held on and had to be cut,

All of it, from her head.

From that day on, my grandmother 

Wore her hair short like a scream,

But it was long like a river in her sleep.


* * *

The Greatest Show on Earth 

by Nikky Finney

For Saartjie Baartman, Joice Heth, Anarcha of Alabama, Truuginini, and Us All.

Under glass and tent

floating in formaldehyde jelly

curled in a deadman’s float

live the split spread

unanesthetized legs

of Black women

broken like the stirrups

of a wishbone

somebody got their wish

and somebody didn’t.

The lilac plumage

of our petaled genitalia

in all its royal mauve

and plum rose

with matching eggplant hips

that pull the ocean

across itself each night

boats of peanut skin

folded and rolled

like the new fur

all proof of our pathology

all cut away

by pornographic hands

fascinated with difference

and the spectacle

of being a Black woman

and the normal pay their fifty cents

to see what makes a freak a freak

     Go ahead

     walk around her

     she won’t bite

     see her protruding mass

     steatopygia.

We don’t have to be dead first

to be cut into a manageable size,

one that fits their measuring rods

their medicine chests will not rest

until we are properly pried

it has always been about

opening us up

experimenting on Black women

but never dissecting their own desires.

The side show

was pitched on our backs

the speculum hammered

out between our legs

modern medicine was founded

on the operation of our hips

we were the standard patterned girth

of every bustle ever made

Black women as spectacle

wanting to but afraid to die

knowing death would never quench

such sterling silver lust.

Bodies quake whole lifetimes

in a national geographic tremble

until the obituary arrives:

Please. Bury me behind the mountains

So they will never find me again.

But they do find us

Do dig us back up,

retrieving the last

swatches of soft skin

the last twig of curved brown bone.

Our opened pirouetting vaginas,

our African music boxes

are whittled down to perfect

change purse size,

For the normal

who will always pay

their fifty cents

to be sure and see

what makes a freak

a freak.

* * *

 The Routine Things Around the House 
by Stephen Dunn
  

When Mother died
I thought: now I’ll have a death poem.
That was unforgivable

yet I’ve since forgiven myself
as sons are able to do
who’ve been loved by their mothers.

I stared into the coffin
knowing how long she’d live,
how many lifetimes there are

in the sweet revisions of memory.
It’s hard to know exactly
how we ease ourselves back from sadness,

but I remembered when I was twelve,
1951, before the world
unbuttoned its blouse.

I had asked my mother (I was trembling)
if I could see her breasts
and she took me into her room

without embarrassment or coyness
and I stared at them,
afraid to ask for more.

Now, years later, someone tells me
Cancers who’ve never had mother love
are doomed and I, a Cancer,

feel blessed again. What luck
to have had a mother
who showed me her breasts

when girls my age were developing
their separate countries,
what luck

she didn’t doom me
with too much or too little.
Had I asked to touch,

perhaps to suck them,
what would she have done?
Mother, dead woman

who I think permits me
to love women easily,
this poem

is dedicated to where
we stopped, to the incompleteness
that was sufficient

and to how you buttoned up,
began doing the routine things
around the house.


* * *

For my mother, with ellipses 

by Sam Cha

—My mother has a brain tumor. She is far away. Thirty years ago she held me over her head and smiled. Sometimes I hold my daughters over my head. 

—My mother has a brain tumor. I think of her when I hold my daughters. When I was three, I didn't know who she was. When I was eight, I couldn't sleep without telling her good night. When I was ten, I lied to her. She slapped my glassesoff. There were dust motes in the air, catching light. A red marble in the center of my skull was spinning. The marble 

was motionless; the world was spinning. My mother said sorry. I lied again. She beat me with a croquet mallet stripedwhite, red, yellow, green, white. I looked at the marks. I touched them and said I.d never lie. 

—My mother has a brain tumor. Most of the planet is between us. I think of her when I hold my daughters. Sometimes I didn't know her. Sometimes the world was spinning. Sometimes I avoid her calls. I was eleven, reading Freud. She changed her shirt at the dinner table. I worried about Oedipus. I decided not to worry. When I was twelve I never wanted to hold her hand. At crosswalks she clutched me to her as I gritted my teeth. That was the year she had people over for dinner and I went to the bathroom and tried to suck my own cock. Complete honesty is hard. Complete honesty is an erection in your eighth grade classroom. I wrote a diary that was not completely honest. I wrote it because I wanted to fuck Anne Frank I wanted to fuck Sylvia Plath. I wrote it because some of the erections in my eighth grade classroom pointed at a girl named Kezia Baxter. My mother read my diary in which I wanted to fuck but had no way of saying so and so completely left out erections and trying to suck my own cock and instead moved in words in circles which is like trying to suck your own cock. I was being elliptical. Sometimes I am still elliptical. I am trying to be honest. Sometimes you tie a hungry animal to a stake. Next to the stake there is a bowl of food. The bowl is wired to a car battery. Scientists track 

the animal as it moves. The line goes taut then slack then taut. The animal is hungry. The animal is afraid. Because it is hungry it moves towards the food. Because it is afraid of being shocked it moves away. The animal is suspended between the pain of hunger and the pain of electricity. It can move only in a direction tangent to both pains. Thus it orbits the food, drawn towards it and moving away. The sun moves, and the other stars, in orbits, ellipses. Dante thought what moved them was God was love. Is love a vector perpendicular to a leash between pain and pain? Some love is. 

—My mother has a brain tumor. If she dies in Seoul it will take us thirteen hours to catch up to the hour of her death. I think of her when I hold my daughters. Sometimes I didn't know her. Sometimes the world was spinning. Freud's theory of sexuality has been discredited. Complete honesty is difficult. When I was twenty-five, I told her not to come to my wedding. Some kinds of love are leashed to pain. We are animals who avoid in circles. I was sixteen, my mother found a poem I'd written. It said my father was a cutlass my mother a rapier I a dagger. It said we dueled. I mean I said. I mean I said that and she thought I wanted to stab her. Later I practiced throwing butter knives at the door. Later there was a murder case where a young man stabbed his parents fifty six times and burned them. My father mentioned him. I mean he said don't turn out like him. I mean he said you're killing us. I mean my mother got headaches when I shouted at her. I mean I snarled. I mean they were afraid. I mean they were mistaken to be afraid but I think they didn't think so. I mean he thought her heart would break. I mean I think I broke their hearts sometimes. I mean the world spinning red for them. I mean the pain and pain and leash. I mean I was the pain and I was the leash and I was the dog and I was the food and I was the orbit. I mean I shouted words that were. I mean red. 

—My mother has a brain tumor. When I got divorced I didn't call her for six months. The last time I saw her she looked so much older. I don't know how to write this. Hey that's no way to say goodbye. I think of her when I hold my daughters. Someday they might look at me and feel red. Sometimes love is an avoidance. Sometimes there is a sharp edge. Sometimes there are murders. There aren.t always bodies. I think I gave my mother cancer. There is a sphinx and she moves in circles riddling each point on the circumference. I think I will die with cancer riddling me. I think I am being honest. This kind of honesty moves in circles. The sun moves like this. I am a son. 

—My mother has a brain tumor. I am not lying. There are things I am leaving out. There is almost nothing you can include in writing. "I," for instance, and adjectives, and a hand on your shoulder as you cross the street. I can only say I because I am not just an I I am many and I am the mother's only son and I am thinking of her when I hold my daughters and she was, is, many mothers, each with adjectives, and each with her hand on her son's shoulder and each son shaking the hand off. 

—My mother has a brain tumor. I knew her, sometimes. These words are trying to avoid something. 

—My mother has a brain tumor. I think of her.