PoetryMagazine.com Since 1996 Volume XXI Carolyne Wright
Carolyne Wright's
new book is the ground-breaking anthology,
Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women
Poets Occupy the Workspace, co-edited by Wright and published in
Lost Horse Press's Human Rights Series (2015). Her poetry
collections include Mania
Klepto: the Book of Eulene (Turning Point); A Change of Maps
(Lost Horse); and Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Eastern
Washington UP/Lynx House Books), which won the Blue Lynx Prize and
American Book Award. Also published are four volumes of poetry
translated from Spanish and Bengali, and a collection of essays.
The Cosmic Scholar I grow, each night, to be the tenured
scholar of all galaxies.
I gaze out at the ancient history of stars--lights, years old and centuries apart. Anywhere we are, my text tells me, is the center of a universe on the exhale.
Stars hurtle out from every other star, like trees felled by a meteor.
They speed up as they go--locomotives on an incline or small boys sneaking out of school to
fish. If we caught up, the novas we've chased would be old suns, ulcered with spots. . .
. By now I'm lost:
the Horsehead Nebula's nostrils quiver, I race Ferraris around Saturn's
rings. Before sleep, I shift down-spectrum-- blue to gold to red--and gather, soberly, my scattered notes.
Assembling once again a face, like a chart of the periodic elements, I leave it for the morning, --the ditto sheets and cold white stares-- and follow the receding pulsars of the
heart, the stellar vapors reeling as I go. . . .
Publication Credits:
Copyright © 1978, 1992 by Carolyne Wright. Spokane Reservation
School Teacher:
Wellpinit, Washington Thursday.
Now, you wait three months or hitch to Spokane when the root's ache breaks your stoicism down.
Sharp operators still cut Indians open at the B.I.A. To live here, stay on automatic, keep emergency systems on all night, miss your lover only once a week. When the bookmobile wheels in, hide there, read how missionaries staked conversion claims on tribes, worried at each others' like tribe terriers over buffalo scraps. Your school's an old God-trap of theirs, earthed up now like a sod-sided council
lodge. Teenagers pass furtive peace pipes through the fence at recess.
If you weren't the boss, brought from outside like a Jesus
book, you'd join them.
Instead, you skirt the rules like the obscene Salish scribbled on latrine walls, follow the pretense of coincidence, catch the braves
red-handed. Alright peace
chiefs, back inside. Finally Friday.
You close the grade book in the late light slanting over empty
desks, catch the last rush-hour rattletrap to
town. Your lover got the letter, thought it over, lounges for you by the baggage counter. All weekend you try to intersect with something worth saying. Sunday evening, it's like your blood's run
thin, your language dying, buffalo gone north. Nowhere left but the reservation. The white man leaves you at the depot; one quick kiss and he's gone, remote as a black robe, council fires smoking on far bluffs, a leaf spinning into the
night. Now you know how they felt. Publication Credit:
Stealing the Children,
Ahsahta Press, 4th printing 1992. The Conjure Woman tells me I can
have anything.
Hibiscus flowers. Jacarandá-wood
charms. A powder from the Mercado Modelo that drives men wild. In the waiting room, the man I want drums his fingers, makes eyes at the honey-colored woman stirring something in the kitchen. Strands of blue pearls, passion-flower
lenço
on her head. A little
samba
on the red floor tiles. Yemanjá, sea goddess, smiles and waves her fish tail from the poster on the wall. The conjure woman turns her wedding rings around a long story about the sea. Bahia dialect--the hushed syllables, palm trees reflecting on the water, whole sentences I want to understand. Samba
school drums at the corners, cachaça
bottles passed around. Women singing the Carnaval tune Não se esqueça de
mim. Don't leave me, don't forget. My future--full of missing words, eavesdropping at the tables of the deaf, late afternoon smell of exhaustion.
in the room above the kitchen. I cross the conjure woman's palm and go out.
The whole town is in the streets, masked dancers drumming their true names from continents that still would fit together--embracing face to face like lovers in the salt and sweat of their sea-displacing passion. Fishermen drag in their nets and fall to their knees between the silver thighs of women. First published in
Kayak. Poets of the New
Century, ed. Roger Weingarten
(David R. Godine, 2001). Copyright © 2000, 2005 by Carolyne Wright. Aymara Woman on
Socabaya Street a cud of
coca
wadded in one cheek. Whatever the inside of a stone thinks must shine in her as she spins a spool of wool in and out of her fingers, the center in a wheel of skirts. Onions in baskets and bowls filled with corn gruel at her feet. Shrug of her shawl to ward off my eye and she's
faceless.
A padded alpaca hump. Faint bulbs strung in a mine glow on hands sorting over the moving belts. Fingers blink across the tin. Bulbs swing as a rumble dawns deep in the rock. The glow on fingers stutters as the roof falls in, dark as shawls pitched over the sun. She speaks to me in a tongue guttural as lead. A creased hand paws my pocket. I gesture, I have nothing. Her eyes flint hard against mine, she spits out her name for me with a curse and laughs. What she invokes turns the corner with me. That night, my dreams file like miners from their shafts, carrying the old words knotted in
sisal,
gold masks from faces with no memories.
In abandoned cities, five-hundred-year-old echoes catch up to their cries. Over the high ranges, axes go up and down. Strange hands loosen on the stone. Copyright © 2000, 2005 by Carolyne Wright. Eulene Stays the
Course
Not yet wise to the disaster imperative, Eulene teaches her eyes to blur for self-protection.
No visions no regrets.
Always at the cable station some worst-case scenario scrolls out of the control-room fax machine, defying all final solutions. Meanwhile, out in the Real World Eulene keeps on overdoing it, jostling through the rush-hour subway tunnels of the baby boom, a salmon to spawning.
Each year she adds a whole page to her résumé, waits her turn on the search committee's fish ladder. She eyes the other candidates' briefcases and prep-school scarves in the ice-cream parlor waiting room. She can finger her take-a-number as anxiously as the best of them, watch the forward march of digits on the wall counter like the Dow Jones closing average. In these inflationary times even Eulene's stocks are on the rise. But she's not taking any chances. She's put away her love beads, signed up for courses in computer programming and lowered expectations. She knows the Big Boys watch her glance from right to left before punching in, her party membership obvious as cholo-writing on the housing project walls. They've got a whole microchip on her at the National Bank of Intrigue, and they're not afraid to deploy it.
Eighty million more where she came from.
Survival's the name of the game for the rat bulge in the gopher snake. Why didn't Eulene's parents think of this before they filled up America with subdivisions?
Publication Credits:
First published in
Willow Springs.Mania
Klepto: the Book of Eulene
(Turning Point Books, 2011). PoetryMagazine.com is published by Gilford Multimedia LLC www.nycny.net |
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