Poetry Magazine, Ellen Smith, August 2000

Ellen McGrath Smith

USA

Ellen McGrath Smith holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh and has been active in the Pittsburgh poetry community for the past 15 years. Her work has been published in various journals, including "Descant","The Southern Poetry Review","Artful Dodge", "5 a.m." and others. Anthologies in which she appears include "For a Living: The Poetry of Work" (University of Illinois Press) and "Living Inland" (Bennington Press).

Critical publications have appeared in "The Denver Quarterly","The Pittsburgh Quarterly","The American Book Review", "The Pennsylvania Review", and "Small Press Magazine". She has received the "HyperAge" magazine Ascher Montandon Award and the "Zone 3" Rainmaker Award, and has been a finalist in the Marianne Moore Prize, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, the Discovery/"The Nation" Prize and others. She teaches writing in both academic and community settings and is currently working on a dissertation that examines the Protestant roots of current twentieth-century poetic values. She has presented scholarly papers on poetics and social values at the University of Maine/National Poetry Foundation conference and at the Rutgers Poetry and the Public Sphere conference. Smith's article recovering the work of an American woman poet from the 50s as a "lost" precursor for Anne Sexton's "Transformations" is scheduled to appear in a forthcoming special issue of "Sagetrieb" devoted to North American Women Poets of the 1950s.

When Hell Freezes Over

The three Wimmer girls are late, and so Baba -- Mrs. Ochevsky -- stops mid-rosary to chew them out. I keep on praying, ten beads to a decade; that's how long I've lived, plus one; and then a Glory-Be to close the final mystery before the broadcast angels on Baba's stereo sum it all up with a Hail, Holy Queen, the most beautiful poem in the Roman Catholic church. I keep on praying, while Baba curses my best friends. She tells them God is more important than the after-dinner dishes. Mr. Wimmer, if he heard this, would quit doing all those favors, such as weld her metal walker when it bent. I keep on praying, praying for peace in my house six doors down. My friends are near tears; still, I pray with all my fingers and my years. I keep on counting. Then, the broadcast ends, my friends have gone, and Baba is handing a cookie to me. But I keep on walking, past her, to my parka on the couch. She wears a shawl, her hair done up in a stuffed cabbage. I keep on showing my displeasure. I am going home.

My father's rough around the edges. Trench mouth, a nasty temper. I decide that I can take it. I must, I tell her calmly, really must be getting home. At least he knows that God's too good for him. About church, he always says, "If I walked in, the statues would walk out." I'm walking out, past Baba's smitten statues, past her half-Hungarian grumbling we can all go straight to hell. But I'm eleven, I know better. I know hell has frozen over. It's as plain as rustbelt February Q why can't all these people in my winter world see that? Why are they thinking of flames? I keep praying all my grown-ups grow up saints, but they keep disappointing me, keep choking on the line about being the banished children of Eve.

--How about that: "the statues would walk out." This, I'd love to see. I 'd be holding my father's hand and we would wave them all goodbye. On their stuck- together plaster feet, like the Chinese women in my mother's Pearl Buck book, they'd take small steps up the convent hill, over hell, over glaciers, just like penguins! And the church, it would look like Reformation had swept through, empty shelves where a child about my size could stand, watching over the faithful. Baba would leave her gnarled walker at the altar, grab a tea-towel, and run to the Wimmers' to do dishes. My dad has lungs enough to fill a Mack truck innertube. And we'd sled down the hill on that, laughing, like the song says, all the way.

Duck Season

Bedford sits in the valley below,
a squat crown whose floodlights 
shudder and die as the light all around
resurrects.  The sun hacks out
our bluff's edges.  We were acres
of dark, mossy earth until now.

Daylight braces you, and you evolve
on cue, roll your socks into balls,
zip your bag, button your sky-
blue oxford straight up
to the chin so she won't see
the mouthings I've made on the skin

of your throat, traces of my opening,
closing around you, the way a hawk
circles the dream of a carnage
to come.  I should be so heartless,
keep you here, a fresh, damp quarry.
Instead, I stare at orange streaks

in the olive hills of autumn brush.
It's duck season.  These hunters face
what it is they do.  Can you?
How many exits until you step into
your living room, nothing bagged
but shame, no blood to sign the papers in?

Camille's Night Off

I could be an aerial photographer
late at night pulling my bronze self
up above the phone poles to put you
in perspective, an exercise
in minimizing you:

A small rented house
in an alley with street status
near a firehouse that howls
like a dying cow, dogs on their houses
howling with it,

the square window to the yellow kitchen, 
which your broad back
occasionally breaks, a stoop
with a bag full of rotting crab shells,
cheap wine empties sticking
their necks out.

So you are my Abelard,
I, your Eloise, is that
the scenario?  Am I out of order, a jade
in this jade-town, because
you need a muse for your painting,
or booze?  I'm losing sympathy fast,
though I can still feel your hot blood
coursing through that shack,
your disgust at what you've come to,
your chiseling despair.

But my altitude increases.  One night
of sobriety, and already I'm seeing
far bigger structures than your grounded
white cockpit.  Up there is a hospital
full of real suffering; ambulances
throw off the acid of their laughter
as they race past your trivial pain.

The town starts to clump like a matronly hen,
and without even aiming at such a small target,
I drop a feather on your roof.

Written on a Cold Bed, 
Dead of Winter

I want to slosh in it,
swallow it, lose my primordial tail
in protoplasm, all its forms.
I want to pull out the discharge
from my ovulation 
like a clear string of taffy,
rub it through the coils of hair on your chest,
then taste what remains on my fingers.
I want saliva on my chin,
pre-ejaculate on my thigh.
If they do these things in the green wood,
what will happen in the dry?

The Tooth

I have a new talisman now, I think--
a tiny tooth with brittle, jagged roots
and the slightest tint of yellow
on its contours.  It's no bigger than
a beetle.  She was sleeping with it
bundled in a pouch beneath the pillow,
thinking that a fairy
soon would spirit it away.
I'm an adult with fairy roots--vestigial,
nearly rotted through with blunt facts
and straight avenues.  So,
the tooth is in my custody.
The tooth is in my mouth at three a.m.,
rolled up against the inside of my cheek
as I riddle with the queer possibility
of one tooth biting another,
toothhood set on edge,
the biblical injunctions against this
and other desperate acts of intimacy.
It is implacably smooth along the sides,
a stone dislodged too soon to store
anything but nacreous, milky luck,
bald as the first step of anyone
trusting the ground to be there 
underfoot.  I decide to depend
on this shrunken skull that lived
inside the skull that grew inside me,
And what have I to lose?

Mothers often lose their teeth
when the calcium goes
to build skeletons of children.
For every mother's tooth gone bad,
she gathers at least one of these,		
with no defect but diminution.
This one I'd like to bake it in a cake,
or let it salt our weathered roof,
this relic of her suckling me, this 
little chip of speciehood, memento 
mori of the life I'd guard
with my own, if I could.