Vivian Shipley
USA

Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor and Editor of Connecticut Review, Vivian Shipley has taught at Southern Connecticut State University since 1969. She was named Faculty Scholar in 2000, 2005, and 2008. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize five times, she has published eight books of poetry and six chapbooks. All of Your Message Have Been Erased, published in 2010 by Southeastern Louisiana University, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, won the 2011 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, the Sheila Motton Book Award from New England Poetry Club, and the CT Press Club Prize for Best Creative Writing.  She has received the Library of Congress’s Connecticut Lifetime Achievement Award for Service to the Literary Community and the Connecticut Book Award for Poetry from the Center for the Book. Other poetry awards include the Lucille Medwick Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Prize, the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize from the University of Southern California, the Marble Faun Poetry Prize from the William Faulkner Society, the Daniel Varoujan Prize from the New England Poetry Club, and the Hart Crane Prize from Kent State. Raised in Kentucky, with a PhD from Vanderbilt, she was inducted into the University of Kentucky Hall of Distinguished Alumni in 2010. In 2011, she was awarded The Paterson Review Prize for Service to the Literary Community from the Poetry Center at PCCC and was awarded a CT Arts Grant for Poetry in 2011. She lives in North Haven, CT with her husband, Ed Harris. www.vivianshipley.com
 

A Daughter Is Not Enough

 
Stringbean is what I call my father as he sands walnut
he had cut, hauled to Lexington from the farm before
 
it was put up for auction. Translucent as shell cupped
on my ear, he won’t bandanna his mouth, breathes
 
in dust as if inhaling his father, his youth. My talks
with my mother are best while we are chopping onions,
 
arguing about leaving red potato peels on or off for salad.
For my father, I rehash our road trips, my two sisters
 
in the Chevy’s backseat drawing a line on vinyl I dared
not cross, flashlighted road maps; banging pots to scare
 
bears away from our tent in the Smoky Mountains.
Rambling on about burning slash piles, my father will not
 
speak of cancer blacklining bones, only smell of chainsaws,
of clearcuts in Kentucky, Tennessee. Whorls in the wood
 
he planes are the color of old honey in a saucer magnolia
hollowed by insects, but there’s not a sliver, not a splinter
 
of sweetness there from him for me. Fingering the grain
as if he were taking the wood’s pulse, my father lectures
 
me about tongue and groove, oil, how not one drop of stain
is needed for wood darkened by one hundred years that link
 
generations I can’t dovetail. Looping around my mother,
his body didn’t lasso a boy. My sons ferry my father’s blood
 
but cannot hook an ID tag from his flesh onto a new century.
Seeing his name above my poem gives him no comfort.
 
With my father, I am still just a girl. I can’t create a word
to keep him from the dark, the cold, from what has no name.

 

 

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© Copyright, 2012, Vivian Shipley.
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