Listen Here (56 page)

When Kate woke, the bed tray was gone. Her mother was gone, and the house was perfectly quiet. She remembered finishing the food and leaning back in bed, and then she'd fallen asleep, dreamlessly, as though she had only to close her eyes to move away, small and weightless, skimming the reflective surface of something deep.

She heard a small sound. Alexander lay in the bassinette, his eyes open, looking at her. His swaddling blankets had come loose. Propped on his side by pillows, he raised one arm and moved his delicate hand. Kate sat up to lean near him and touched her forefinger to his palm; immediately, he grasped her hard and his gaze widened. “They're your fingers,” she told him. “You don't know them yet, but I do.” Everyone had told her to leave him be when he was happy, she'd be holding him and caring for him so ceaselessly, but she took him in her arms, propped up the pillows, and put him in her lap. He kicked excitedly and frowned. She bent her knees to bring him closer and regarded him as he lay on her raised thighs; the frown disappeared. “You're like me,” Kate said softly. “You frown when you think. By the time you're twenty-five, you'll have two little lines between your eyes. Such a serious guy.” He raised his downy brows. He had a watchful, observing look and a more excited look—he would open his eyes wider, compress his lips, strain with his limbs as though he was concentrating on moving, on touching or grasping. He could feel his body but he couldn't command it to move or do; his focus was entirely in his eyes. And he did focus. Kate was sure he saw her. He wasn't a newborn any longer; today he was one week old. Perhaps his vision was still blurry, and that was why he peered at her so intently. His eyes were big and dark blue, like those of a baby seal. One eye was always moist and teary; his tear duct was blocked, they'd said at the hospital, it would clear up.

Now Kate wiped his cheek carefully with the edge of a cloth diaper, then drew her finger across his forehead, along his jaw, across his flattened, broad little nose. “Mister man,” she whispered, “mighty mouse, here's your face. Here are your nose, your ears, your widow's peak. Old widower, here are your bones…” She touched his collarbone and the line along his shoulder, under his gown. His skin was like warm silk and his names were too big for him; she called him Tatie, for his middle name was Tateman, after her family, her divided parents. She cleaned him with warm water, not alcohol wipes, and used a powder that contained no talc. The powder was fine as rice flour and smelled as Kate thought rice fields might smell, in the sun, when the plants bloomed. Like clean food, pure as flowers. Across the world and in the South, those young shoots grew and moved in the breeze like grass. “Rice fields are like grass in water,” she said to him. “We haven't seen them yet. Even in India, I didn't see them.” Outside the wind moved along the house; Kate heard it circling and testing. Suddenly a gust slammed against the windows and Tatie startled, looked toward the sound. “You can't see the wind,” Kate murmured, “just what it moves.” The wind would bring snow again, Kate knew; already she heard snow approach like a whining in the air. Absently she traced the baby's lips, and he yawned and began to whimper. You're hungry, Kate thought, and he moved his arms as though to gather her closer. Her milk let down with a flush and surge, and she held a clean diaper to one breast as she put him to the other. Now she breathed, exhaling slowly. The intense pain began to ebb; he drank the cells of her blood, Kate knew, and the crust that formed on her nipples where the cuts were deepest. He was her blood. When she held him he was inside her; always, he was near her, like an atmosphere, in his sleep, in his being. She would not be alone again for many years, even if she wanted to, even if she tried. In her deepest thoughts, she would approach him, move around and through him, make room for him. In nursing there would be a still, spiral peace, an energy in which she felt herself, her needs and wants, slough away like useless debris. It seemed less important to talk or think; like a nesting animal, she took on camouflage, layers of protective awareness that were almost spatial in dimension. The awareness had dark edges, shadows that rose and fell. Kate imagined terrible things. That he might stop breathing. That she dropped him, or someone had. That someone or something took him from her. That she forgot about him or misplaced him. There were no words; the thoughts occurred to her in starkly precise images, like the unmistakable images of dreams, as though her waking and sleeping lives had met in him. Truly, she was sleeping; the days and nights were fluid, beautiful and discolored; everything in her was available to her, as though she'd become someone else, someone with a similar past history in whom that history was acknowledged rather than felt, someone who didn't need to make amends or understand, someone beyond language. She was shattered. Something new would come of her. Moments in which she crossed from consciousness to sleep, from sleep to awareness, there was a lag of an instant in which she couldn't remember her name, and she didn't care. She remembered him. Now his gaze met hers and his eyelids fluttered; she could see him falling away, back into his infant swoon. His sleep closed around him like an ocean shell and rocked him within it. In this they were alike, Kate thought, though he had no name known to him, no name to forget. He was pure need. She took him from the breast and held him to her shoulder, patting and rubbing him, softly, a caress and a heartbeat.

(October 11, 1955–)

Poet Lynn Powell grew up in Jefferson City, Tennessee, graduated from Carson-Newman College in 1977 and earned her M.F.A. at Cornell University in 1980. Her first collection of poetry,
Old & New Testaments
, won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. She is also recipient of the 1996 Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Award.

She has worked as a writer in the schools for twenty years, in Tennessee, New Jersey, and Ohio, in rural, urban, and suburban schools, with residencies ranging from seminars with auditioned high school students to collaborations with a modern dancer in her neighborhood primary school. She and her husband, Dan Stinebring, have two children.

Powell describes the Appalachian influences on her work in this way: “Family, lush landscape, and the Baptist church: those were the defining experiences of my East Tennessee childhood, and they are the preoccupations now of my poetry.” She says, “I grew up going to church every Sunday morning for Sunday School; every Sunday evening for Baptist Training Union; every Wednesday night for Fellowship Supper, G.A.'s, and Prayer Meeting; and every night of the week during revivals, helping to pack the pews. So, the Broadman Hymnal, the King James Bible, and Baptist evangelists gave me my native tongue. I am fluent in other cultural languages now, but find myself as a poet often slipping into the language most fragrant with connection and meaning for me.”

Poetry:
The Zones of Paradise
(2003),
Old & New Testaments
(1995).

Fred Chappell, “Five New Southern Women Poets,”
Georgia Review
50:1 (spring 1996), 174–84. Gina Herring, “‘Approaching the Altar': Aesthetic Homecoming in the Poetry of Linda Marion and Lynn Powell,”
Appalachian Heritage
30:2 (spring 2002), 20–30. F.B. Jackson, “Temples of the Holy Ghost: Recent Poetry by Kathleen Norris, Lynn Powell, and Julia Kasdorf,”
Shenandoah
46:4 (winter 1996), 118–29. William Jolliff, review of
Old & New Testaments, Appalachian Heritage
24:3 (summer 1996), 71–73. John Lang, “‘Slowly the Heart Revises': Lynn Powell's
Old & New Testaments,”
in
Her Words
(2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 209–17.

from
Old & New Testaments
(1995)

Some parents shy away from the body,
but we hush up about the cross—
rereading our daughter the story about Jesus
we must believe in: mother
and father kneeling after the hard birth,
humbled by the exhaustions of love.

She studies the illustration, loves
the halos wide-brimmed on everybody's
heads. Five pages later, though, it's death
that rivets her—Herod, jealous and cross,
ordering the slaughter. The unnamed mothers
are left out of this version of the Christ,

but our daughter worries if God
warned them in time, too. She senses love,
though fierce, is not omnipotent.
Mommy,
what's the baddest thing that can happen to somebody?
she asks, remembering the museum, the crosses
hung a step away from the joyful births,

stark scripture plain enough to a child: death
looks back at every birth, even God's.
She punishes the sentries at the cross
in her own drawings, coloring their unloved
faces blue, grinding green into their bodies.
Once I whispered to my mother,

I think God would have picked me as Mother
Mary if He'd sent His Son right now
—though birth
and the other secrets of the body
still eluded me. Now my daughter calls,
Jesus!
to her baby brother, a prop, lovingly
swaddled in blue dish towels, his head criss-crossed
with paisley scarves. As Mary, she crosses
the room regally, diaphanous in her mother's
hemmed-up nightgown. Outside, the snow loves
everything it touches. Suffering and death
keep their distance from the warm house. Jesus
laughs as Mary tickles his brand-new body.

You be the manger, Mom
, Mary says. I cross
my legs, sit the baby, fat with love, on the throne of my body,
done with the hard births, the beginnings of God.

from
Old & New Testaments
(1995)

An occasional turbulence of the heart—
of no consequence
, said the first doctor who heard it,
listening, eyes closed, like a god to a conch.
But the doctor I visit for a sore throat
is less sanguine:
You could drop dead tomorrow.
He sends me right over to a specialist.

The specialist sits beside me on the narrow bed
and asks about my family.
I tell him of my mother's murmur,
and how my father's father, sick with pneumonia,
slumped as his wife rubbed his head.
I turn away, stretch out on my side, open my shirt.
He circles his arm round my chest, and with cold steel
he roots for my heart.

His electronics amplify the sound of an earnest
washing machine, not the African drum
of the heart I walked through as a child
at the Museum of Science and Industry,
a maze of plush vestibules I lingered in, peering
down the corridors of blood.

And, supposedly, my mother's real mother
died young
, I add.
“She grieved herself to death.”
His eyes stay fixed on the craggy sierra
my heart is etching on the screen:
Hold still.
I stiffen, stare at the smooth, green, cement block wall.

Its best not to hold a baby you must give away
, her
doctor must have said, wrapping it quickly in a white blanket—
though later the nurse brought her a wet, black lock.
Down the hall she could hear a baby crying, crying.
In her own room the radiator ticked its heat
like a trapped cicada.

A slight prolapse,
a valve that lets the blood seep
a little backwards
, he says, measuring peak
and ravine, calculating volume per second.
Perfectly innocent.
You can button up your blouse.

Back home, I lift my daughter's shirt and press
my ear to her chest, her pale nipples
small as chamomile—until she giggles.
No murmur
, the doctor said when she was born.
No murmur, no murmur
, I repeat above her,
her little heart churning out its clear lub
dubs, her valves snapping shut
without a whisper back.

For weeks I browse encyclopedias, unearth old
anatomy texts, then decide to visit
the Philadelphia copy of The Heart.
Inside the Institute, I coax my daughter past
the spinning discs of Optical Illusion,
the button-ready syntheses of Sound.
We round a corner and, just as I've promised,
it's there: tall as our house, a winter clutch
of blue ivy snaking the smooth outside, God's
fist inside pounding the table…

Too scary
, she cries, clinging to me—
then runs out for comfort toward
the birth of tornados,
the measurement of earthquakes.

from
Old & New Testaments
(1995)

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt…

—Matthew 6:20

Retired missionaries taught us Arts & Crafts each July at Bible Camp:
how to glue the kidney, navy, and pinto beans into mosaics,
and how to tool the stenciled butterfly
on copper sheets they'd cut for us.
At night, after hymns, they'd cut the lights and show us slides:
wide-spread trees, studded with corsage;
saved women tucking T-shirts into wrap-around batiks;
a thatched church whitewashed in the equator's light.
Above the hum of the projector I could hear the insects flick
their heads against the window screens, aiming
for the brightness of that Africa.

If Jesus knocks on your heart, be ready to say,
“Send me, O Lord, send me,”
a teacher told us
confidentially, doling out her baggies of dried corn.
I bent my head, concentrating hard on my tweezers
as I glued each colored kernel into a rooster for Mother's kitchen wall.

But Jesus noticed me and started to knock. Already saved,
I looked for signs to show me what else He would require.
At rest hour, I closed my eyes and flipped my Bible open, slid
my finger, ouija-like, down the page, and there was His command:
Go and do ye likewise—
Let the earth and all it contains hear—
Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut
down and thrown into the fire—.

Thursday night, at revival service, I held out through
Trust and Obey,
Standing on the Promises, Nothing But the Blood
, but crumpled
on
Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling
,
promising God, cross my heart, I'd witness to Rhodesia.
Down the makeshift aisle I walked with the other weeping girls
and stood before the little bit of congregation left
singing in their metal chairs.

The bathhouse that night was silent,
young Baptists moving from shower to sink
with the stricken look of nuns.
Inside a stall, I stripped, slipped my clothes outside the curtain,
and turned for the faucet—
but there, splayed on the shower's wall,
was a luna moth, the eyes of its wings fixed on me.
It shimmered against the cement block:
sherbet-green, plumed, a flamboyant verse
lodged in a page of drab ink.
I waved my hands to scare it out,
but, blinkless, it stayed latched on.
It let me move so close my breath
stroked the fur on its animal back.

One by one the showers cranked dry.
The bathhouse door slammed a final time.
I pulled my clothes back over my sweat, drew
the curtain shut, and walked into a dark
pricked by the lightning bugs' inscrutable morse.