Monument Read online

  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 [email protected] 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

  of my mother’s blue dress.

  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

  light on the clothesline, each touch

  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,