USA
| Len Roberts, who endorsed Marilyn Bates' book, Mixed
Blood said of her: "Marilyn Bates doesn't flinch from her and
our frail human condition, and I love the gutsy way she dares to
confront these frailties with wonderfully surprising images and
rhythmical word mastery. Seeming ordinary domestic scenes, like
cooking or waiting in line at the grocery store, suddenly explode
with the extraordinary facts of our lives, such as heart surgery or
trying to speak with a voice box--and she weaves the two together
with seamless art. I applaud her emotional courage and I applaud
even more her balanced rhythms and jolting images, her fine poetry,
which express her deeply human condition."
Marilyn Bates, author of Mixed Blood, is a graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University and teacher-consultant with the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project at the University of Pittsburgh. An invited reader at the James Wright Poetry Festival, her poetry has been anthologized in And What Great Beast: Poems at the End of the Century. She was appointed by Sam Hazo, Director of the International Poetry Forum, as a "Poet in Person" in the Pittsburgh schools and serves on the Forum's Advisory Board. Her work has appeared in The Pennsylvania Review, Pembroke Magazine, the Palo Alto Review, Plainsongs, Poets-On, Verve and Iris, with work forthcoming in SUNY's Via,. Essays have appeared in The Journal of Poetry Therapy, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Carnegie Mellon Magazine. She has read her poetry on NPR's Prosody, a production of WYEP, as well as Grace Cavaleri's The Poet and the Poem, APR. Marilyn Bates attributes her love for the outdoors, with which she begins this collection, to those quiet afternoons of shelling peas under the sage orange trees with her grandmother or digging in her own small patch next to her father's garden. Their psyches, delicately connected like roots beneath the soil, bear fruit in this poetry. Most painful of all experiences is the illness which linked her to her father. As she speaks to those with whom her blood is mixed, the writer depicts a woman in all phases of life--lover, wife, mother--one who emerges as tough-minded and independent. |
Departure
Patient on
Outing Leaps to His Death
James Corrigan, 27, of River Grove, Il
an administrative consultant with the Mars
Candy Co., was killed yesterday while on an
outing with the Illinios Psychiatric Institute
when he jumped in front of a Loop-bound
El at Polk and Paulina.
The obituary curls inside the yellowed paper
in my palm like a small boat launching Jim
Corrigan from years ago when he was 27
and leapt to his death, the el dragging his body
along the tracks until there was nothing left,
nothing left to say to his young wife or the son
growing in her stomach who would never see
his father leap the hoops in the asphalt drive,
nothing left of the morning tunes he whistled
as he stropped his razor. Just as there's nothing
left of my son who has leapt out my life
and into his own, promising, I'll always be there.
Weeks ago he coated a glass with cabernet,
pursed his lips at the aftertaste, ground garlic
into gazpacho, packed peppers with sweetmeats
like small, burdened skiffs sinking on my plate.
Nothing's left of the chambray shirt he wore then,
bragging about its bargain price at Wallmart, the clients
he wooed on the cell phone with practiced please
and thank-yous.. I need him now, amid Van Goghs
in the museum, as I commit to memory every brush
stroke, recall how at ten he turned from Dali to dinosaurs.
Need to see tomatoes he rooted, basil sprouts babied,
his fingers cross-hatching elm clippings on a compost pile,
where all that's left now, is a barren garden going to seed.
Speaking in Tongues
In that early April graying, just before dawn,
fog lies in the furrow between two hills,
the lace of locust brushing at the balcony,
where I stand writing
about the sky leadening overhead.
Then the wind catches my sheet of poems,
whips it to rooftops in the valley below,
to nights' lights blinking out one by one
and firethorn blazing daybreak.
Then all at once, all busy, birds jabber.
They whee and pwerp
to the stumble of my own rhythm on a page.
How like human voice they seem,
their little mournful cries,
a sudden starling's cheet.
Even a crow's tay tay tut
becomes a poem on a sheet
I want to loosen in the wind,
send aloft on a swallow's tail,
to that place where words learn
to speak this truth, called birds.
War Zone of the Heart
Everyone knew
the boys paid Terry to dance with Mary Agnes.
Her buckteeth opened in shock that such a hunk
tapped her on the shoulder of the yellow dress
her mother made, one that couldn't
mask the craters on her face.
At intermission
Mary Agnes in the bathroom stall listened for news
of sudden popularity. We smirked in crinoline skirts,
talked a little too loud, let her know it was all a ruse.
We never knew that moment would set her
in a minefield where, for the rest of her days, she'd tread
lightly on invitations, searching for the trip wire.
We never knew
that mortars would rain on our hearts--JoJo at the mirror
powdering her nose never guessed she'd be flopping tin
in the rolling mill, Wheeling Steel spilling her in a row
house by the river. Nancy, smothering in the stench
of cabbage and onions, would forget those nights
when Bobby Vinton crooned Blue Velvet.. Rita, in a cage,
shook her booty to The Monkey for dollar tips at after-
hours clubs. Terry crawled through the nightsoil of Nam;
Danny, into a knife outside the VFW. AIDS shortsheeted
Elaine, her name in the obits at thirty-three. Names
that later showed up on The Wall never mentioned
Lena's, nailed to her own in Wayne's pay-day drunk.
At the feast of Tet
elephant grass ran with blood. Concertina wire shredded
kneecaps. Bouncing Betties aimed for the heart. Terry
took an arrow in the chest, a Flechette, on Valentine's Day.
Claymores cracked overhead with the thunder
of night's laughter crashing on the dance floor.
The Pathology of Discovery
Together in the hospital, we watch
the surgeon light up the x-ray
of my toe, a nubbed end,
severed from its other half.
The infection's gone,
a tide rushed out of the body.
Like a lost limb, you too are cut
from me. No way to grow you back,
no way to make you understand
a mother's connection to a son.
You float, half-child, half-
husband, in the expectation
of my life unbirthed, your life
making up for all that mine
has not become. Your mind's
made up to marry an imperfect
woman, a cracked shell, who
took you into the river forest
of her body, into the narcosis
of blood and sweat.
My toe will heal the surgeon says
but not my heart. Unlike a starfish
ground under the stone of accident,
it will never grow into a whole.
It is a stub, an imperfect end
to all we have become.
© Copyright, 2000, Marilyn Bates.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.