Jenn Blair
USA

Private History #4

My mother was a dress mender who never
danced, clucking pincushion mouth, measuring
tape thrown over her shoulders, thin boa with
hatches and numbers, feather plucked. She’d drop
three pounds off for a few, five if she liked someone
(the plain girls who could not stand still in front of the
mirror, such was their agitation, at situation and reflection
in equal parts).

My mother never had a wedding photo to show anyone.
She and father wore their pajamas to the priest’s house.
Such was his surprise he lit a candle and gave the rites.
For years she tended a chicken with one bent leg, one
the dogs had left for dust. Father said she loved all
things wounded, and as she ran round the backyard
cooing after it with corn, I would stand by the window
and watch, my pale liver on the silver platter, a
gasping, bladed, fish.

When a Baby Cries on the Train

Hold it up to the window.
Let it see the wheat fields, golden blurs.
Back roads disappearing. The punctual
dots of dogs rounding brackish ponds.

Let it see the towns with dust in their
throats, where the main street sirens
buy cheap powder to cover their
pockmarks. And the shade trees where
widows’ sighs water the sweet grass
once bent down by ardor, as dashing
minnows cling to the shade of the damp
stone overhanging the stream.

Apology for Jonah

When I first heard your story
I thought you a mere
sulk, whiny, flim-flam man
just thrown from the mouth
of the fish sitting out there
as the desert winds
drew the blubber still
hanging from your eyebrows
dry, lips pursed at the loss of
shade, the withered away
gourd that grew for succor.
Wah-wah-wah for your
precious little plant, heart
tendriled out to the vine
but unfeeling for a people.

But yesterday when I was
stooping down in the soil
I felt an odd commiseration
with the green tomatoes,
special anxiousness
over the pumpkin seeds
burrowed down in the dirt,
and I tell you now, looking
out at the long stalks of lilac,
if one of these should be took
from my kingdom, struck down
by an unfeeling heat or insidious
blight, over my face there would
come a shadow, a sudden
and inexplicable majestic
imperious resolve.

Dr. Blackburn

Visitor walking by with your
head down, slow. Here behind
these bars lies a much maligned man.
Some have called me “Dr. Black Bile.”
But I am a doctor, still, regardless
of what has transpired, for that
was my dream from the beginning.
You see, when I was only twelve
my friend fell off the barn roof
and then all was lost until
he came, confident and assured,
his even voice, the way he deftly
set the bone, his commanding
stride—all these left my breath
shaking.

I believe in healing. But let me
stop here and pause to say that I also
believe in a body which is more
made of parts than a whole, and that
no cruel tyrant can command such
disparate legs and arms and sinews
be thrashed together in one swift violent
harvest—that he who in Washington sat
near the half constructed capitol looking out
over the muddy streets was a madman,
intent on bringing us all along on his broken
ship, battering us with the Bible in tones nothing
like my sweet dear mother once to me read.

So I sailed off to Bermuda, my outer guise
(which I must allow connected to at
least one tendon of my shaken spirit)
was as anxious loving Physician
attending those in the last
throes of the dread Yellow Fever.
Just because I stole her quarantined lace
nightgown, and took the sweaty sheets
and linens off the dead servant’s pallet,
does not mean I was insincere when I told
a woman she would soon be walking golden
streets straight into dear mother’s arms,
or assured the rich trader his son would someday
forgive him for being too frail to fess up to his own
part in the young lad’s quite substantial existence.

When my trunks were finally all
stuffed with handkerchiefs, petticoats
and pillow cases, it was time.
I met my agent on board the ship for Halifax,
a man with big ears and an anxious demeanor,
and I told him his job. To work under
the guise of an auctioneer, a high class peddler
if you will, lugging the trunks to large towns,
selling the goods so that misguided abolitionist
zealots would tuck their children in under wraps
of death, and strident bellicose men tug at their
sleeves standing by brocaded draperies
talking hotly of battle, but not quite sure how
to interpret the signs: the sudden one rolled down
drop of sweat, vague feeling of forthcoming doom.

I told him for his protection
to light a large cigar and hence
move about, like God, in a cloud.
I didn’t think much then of the way
he hesitated at the suitcase of frilled
shirts meant for the tyrant himself—
I should have known him right then
for what he was—a scared, sniveling
turncoat and shrill, his words stirring
public opposition and starting rumors
I meant to take all of New York back
down to its Hudson salted planks.

Yesterday a guard walking by
turned around, and came back to
spit on me. Come here closer
so I can lower my voice.
I took it, I tell you, as a compliment,
like Christ, for you heard how the man
died, sweating and delirious in too
small quarters across from the theater.
My oath still forbids me that.
My plan would have allowed him to
cough and gag in the comfort
of his own home, shivering
limbs stretched out on an
accommodatingly large bed.
I even would have, if there was a way,
held his knuckled lump of a hand myself.
 

Copyright, Jenn Blair.
All rights reserved by author.