Listen Here (44 page)

from
where i'm from: where poems come from
(1999)

I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride,
I am from the dirt under the back porch.
(Black, glistening,
it tasted like beets.)
I am from the forsythia bush
the Dutch elm
whose long-gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.

I'm from fudge and eyeglasses,

from Imogene and Alafair.

I'm from the know-it-alls

and the pass-it-ons,

from Perk up! And Pipe down!

I'm from He restoreth my soul

with a cottonball lamb
and ten verses I can say myself.

I'm from Artemus and Billie's Branch,
fried corn and strong coffee.
From the finger my grandfather lost

to the auger,

the eye my father shut to keep his sight.

Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
I am from those moments—
snapped before I budded—
leaf-fall from the family tree.

from
where i'm from: where poems come from
(1999)

This poem began one day when I sat down to write and began studying my hands. (In addition to exercises for writing, I have lots of techniques for Writing Prevention!) It happens that I wear three wedding rings: one from each of my grandmothers and one from my great-grandmother, Ella, whose name I share. I chose to wear these, of course, but until that day I had never really thought about what it meant. Sitting on the tawny rug in my mother-in-law's Hialeah Townhouse, it suddenly hit me: I am married to my grandmothers!

Adrienne Rich said, “The moment of change is the only poem,” and this realization was such a moment for me. It was as if, hiking a familiar trail, I spotted a cave I'd never noticed before. The writing that followed was like spelunking: I had no idea what I would find, and I often got lost or stuck. The poem wasn't finished for a long time—months, as I recall. But it started that afternoon with the gleam of Florida sunshine off magic objects: rings.

I married with my grandmother's wedding ring

and wear my great-grandmother's on the other hand,

both too large—the jeweller cut them down.

Mother and daughter bore seven children,

seven times met death inside out.

Each time they rose and grew larger

like trees, ring on ring, thick with time.

Not all the children lived.

Some were put to bed in iron ground

uncovering the bone-ring of the eye.

Death is its hook—together they close the gap.

At my grandmother's house we drank from a dipper

long after the backporch pump was gone,

bent and came face to face with water

mouth to metal rim, ring on ring.

from
where i'm from: where poems come from
(1999)

What does the Lord want with Virgil's heart?

And what is Virgil going to do without one?

O Lord, spare him the Call.

You're looking for bass

in a pond stocked with catfish.

Pass him by.

You got our best.

You took Mammy and the truck and the second hay.

What do You want with Virgil's heart?

Virgil, he comes in of a night

so wore out he can hardly chew

blacked with dust that don't come off at the bathhouse.

He washes again

eats onions and beans with the rest of us

then gives the least one a shoulder ride to bed

slow and singing

Down in some lone valley

in some lonesome places

where the wild birds do whistle…

After that, he sags like a full feed sack

on a couch alongside the TV

and watches whatever news Your waves are giving.

His soul lifts out

like feed from a slit in that sack

and he's gone

wore out and give out and plumb used up, Lord.

What do you want with his heart?

from
where i'm from: where poems come from
(1999)

I write this poem

out of darkness

to you

who are also in darkness

because our lives demand it.

This poem is a hand on your shoulder

a bone touch to go with you

through the hard birth of vision.

In other words, love

shapes this poem

is the fist that holds the chisel

muscle that drags marble

and burns with the weight

of believing a face

lives in the stone

a breathing word in the body.

I tell you

though the darkness

has been ours

words will give us

give our eyes, opened in promise

a growing light.

(February 5, 1953–)

A Tennessee native who grew up in Nashville and has lived in Knoxville for nearly three decades, Linda Marion fondly remembers her maternal grandmother's pivotal role in her early years that were punctuated with frequent moves and an unsettled home life. “I always felt I was in the calm eye of the storm when I was with her.”

Marion completed her B.A. (1988) and M.A. (1991) in English at the University of Tennessee, where she works as an editor and policy coordinator for the University of Tennessee's internal audit department. “Although editing provides my bread and butter and occasionally concert tickets,” she says, “writing poetry provides something less tangible in my life—but nourishment and music all the same.”

She is the mother of two daughters, served as poetry editor of
Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine
, co-editor of the anthology
All Around Us: Poems from the Valley
(1996), and remains active in the Knoxville Writers' Guild. The recipient of the Associated Writing Program's 1990 Intro Award, she has also been awarded two literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, the 1995 Tennessee Poetry Prize, and the Tennessee Writers Alliance Award in Poetry in 1996, 2000, and 2001. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies.

Poetry:
Home Fires
(1997).
Nonfiction:
“Listening for the Hello of Home: A Conversation Between Linda Parsons Marion and Jeff Daniel Marion,” in
Her Words
(2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 178–90. “The Writing Well,”
New Millennium Writings
(1995–2000), “Rescue from Within,”
Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival
(1999).

Gina Herring, “‘Approaching the Altar': Aesthetic Homecoming in the Poetry of Linda Marion and Lynn Powell,”
Appalachian Heritage
30:2 (spring 2002), 20–30. Linda Lange, “Kindling ‘Home Fires,'”
Knoxville News-Sentinel
(17 May 1997), B1.

from
Home Fires
(1997)

They fruit themselves into early June

somewhere between the abelias and

the blue-balled hydrangeas. In the backyard

I'm crushing grapes with my skirts held

high, squishing and purpled, the air rife

with ferment. I stand in this kitchen

of smells, the loaded tree a Bordeaux drunk

slowly, burning all the way to my toes.

People say cut it down, it doesn't bloom,

it stains the sidewalk, the rugs, your shoes.

What's a stain but the mark of memory

you hope never fades—a spot of red-eye gravy

from Grandmama's table every Sunday of my life,

the flow of woman's wine telling my age

season after season, as sharp as the yellowing

bouquet I saved from her grave, as delicious

as the first long day when the bikes come out

and kids count off streetlights coming on

from the corner to the bridge, their hands

and mouths black from berry-eating, believing

their wheels can take them anywhere.

from
Home Fires
(1997)

One day it will not be enough
to make perfect pesto, cinnamon coffee,
and know every little club on Jackson Avenue.
All this you've learned in secret, striking out
on your own. I've said the usual mother things:
There are men downtown who would crack
you open, leave you drying on the curb.
Where will your pearl be then?
I've said,
One day you'll see
,
as you counted your bus tokens.

One day you'll look in the mirror and see
only furniture. You'll feel a great hole
in your heart, a weight in your pocket.
You'll take these crumbs, drop them
by an ancient moon and, in your darkest hour,
find yourself at my door.

I'll take you to the clock on the mantel.
My grandfather used to scavenge the alley
for his clocks. That one's made of bedposts.
He drank, people called him weak.
I watched him work, a carpenter's hands
hiding his bottle when I came too close.
Four daughters, no sons, something less
than a man. As a girl, my mother must've heard
him stumbling in, the raucous chiming
greeting him like children.

Now light the eye of the stove and smell
my grandmother's kitchen. I'd stand shivering
till she struck the long wooden match.
On Saturdays she bought gladiolus
for the altar, for the quick and the dead.
We walked through the hothouse, our palms
brushed yellow for forgiveness.
In the dense geranium air
I clung to her dress like a bud
at the moment of birth.

All week she cut buttonholes
at the Allen Garment Factory.
Thirty years of service,
the diamond pin says.
Up at five, lighting the flame,
her hands planed smooth by the zig
and zag of broadcloth.
I have her hands, people say,
a woman who lived her faith.
She believed in the diamond pin,
in the thirty years. She believed in
his clocks after he died. She forgot
the man who sang to his shadow
and bragged on him finally being saved.

Sometimes I'll turn on the gas, a smell
so sweet I'll turn to hold her dress.
One day all this will be yours:
You'll sit at a vanity, her milk-glass lamps
on either side. You'll take her diamond pin
from the drawer and rub it like a token.
The moon will look new, you'll get up
while your daughter is asleep
to hear the soft ticking.
And with your whole heart
you'll know where you've come.

from
Home Fires
(1997)

This Christmas you came all the way
over. You left the living room minefield
of tissue paper, indestructible playhouse,
Obi-Wan reruns, spilled drinks. With plates
in hand, you crossed over surely as if to another
country. You're with us now, the women
of the kitchen, preparers of bread and bandages,
showers of scars and casseroles, savers
of foil and string. This summer you'll be married,
and while you say no children, no children
for awhile, you'll take what life hands you, a glass
empty or full. You say I'm yin to your yang—
my towels straight, yours crooked—whatever is
opposite or contrary. Still, I see a house
not too far from here. The woman has learned
to put raisins on the baby's tray while she vaccuums.
She gives out the lion's share, but hides
the Swiss chocolate. She dries mittens
on the register, wool scenting the air like soup.
Your hand is in every room, stirring, mending,
shining, coming closer to the words I have folded
in hospital corners all these years. Words
you can pick up like a doll saying
mama
,
whole sentences you never thought possible,
yours from this day forward, to have
and to hold.

from
Home Fires
(1997)

Our hike all done this perfect morning,
the trail extending its hand to receive us,
the mist in slow descent to our shoulders
like the smoke rings I begged from my grandfather
and his pack of Camels. We went the whole way up
Greenbrier, past the swept floor under hemlocks,
the feathery maidenhairs under poplar, past
the little graveyard, its stones as crusted as moles
on a stooped back—the babies
borned and died
on the same day in 1890, in 1903, in 1910,
and the women who joined them
the next day in heaven.

Driving down from the trailhead, you saw them:
the orange hulls of buckeye broken by squirrel
or groundhog on a river rock.
We need all the luck
we can get
, you said and stopped the car.
We overturned beds of moss and oak for our
lucky charm, the shiny meat with its dimple
of brown that just fits in your palm. But the bank
was picked clean of its sweetness. We found
no buckeyes to carry home in our pockets,
to ward off rheumatism and old age and keep
the dark nights away.

Over the years we've walked this trail, at times
the exhaustions of love weighed down our pockets.
Though once you peeled back a nest of trillium
to show me Indian pipes, pale and shy in their beauty.
And once I showed you a white mushroom hiding
in the paper roots of birch. It rose as simply as this
perfect morning, beautiful in its maleness, fitting
like you in my palm when you take away
the dark night, bringing me
all the luck I need.