| Transcript |
Teresa Anderson
Our People
For more years than I can remember,
the crops have failed
in this land where rain is a fugitive;
and the people in my blood have
lived in houses cut from the earth.
In summer children here have
always made music from the
rhythm of the long days,
and the women in my veins
have learned to make banquets
from meagre tables.,
More than once in spring blizzards
the cattle have been lost,
and more than once the winter-born
child, in a room with no stove,
has died at the breast.
Yet we have been more than survivors;
all the best I will ever be
lies rooted in the earth
' where my grandmother sleeps,
on a prairie swept clean of trees,
under harsh, cloudless sky,
where wheat flows in waves
over the first sod houses,
and the dust of the dead
sings under the blade of the plow.
For the Woman in My Lover's Soul
for Steve
/ watch the swallows tracing
circular patterns across
the vault of this dream,
my eyes full of the mist
that falls here long before dark
gathering together these hills
closing around us.
For such a long time now
I have lived in this world
of women whose voices are
the tender closing of your hand
around my shattered heart.
And I know that
the hearty man's laugh,
his swaggering, steady gait
are alien to this place
I have shared only with
these soft round shapes.
But I have seen in your
darkest time and place
the one I have been,
the same famished child
who searches his barren house
for the woman waiting
so long suspended in
the chrysalis of her cell.
I have found her in
the fragile corners of your smile,
heard her, a pale brown bird,
singing inside the smooth bones
of your chest.
And as she comes to us now
across so many years
and miles of pain
gathering in her cupped hands
the melting fire of your tears.
Woman, Dance
It is a cold clear night
lit by a half-moon;
don't praise me for my pout,
don't reduce my size
by calling me lovely;
I have wasted too many years
in that disguise.
Make my heels wings,
my pulse light;
give my bone-chilling
laugh and black hair
power to destroy the
simpering old husk.
Let me be as strong
as my sisters at the plow,
fearless as my sisters
at the front;
Let us sing and dance
on our way,
we who are pathfinders
and warriors, map makers
and sowers of green
new worlds.
Let us sail out,
always together,
forging our own
fiery roads
through the night.
The Secret Room
Tonight I feel the scars
of your body cut deeply
into mine, because you too
have listened for the cry
and risen in the dark to
answer the nursing child
for whom you were first lover.
And each of us knows
what it is to look for
meaning in the tasks at hand;
the house with its relentless pulse
and its eternal oven once
covered us over with its
heavy air and the treadmill
of our cleaning, polishing
and beginning again.
But now while our men
wait for us upstairs
wondering at the number
of jobs we find to do
down here so late at night,
together our bodies
make a new shelter
hidden in the high grass
along the river where
we create life, and
hands that have served
the will of the house,
lips that have smiled for
happiness defined as duty,
breasts that have fed
many outsiders can now
be joined for primal joy,
for the glory in the dance,
and in celebration of
our perfect silence.
July
In memory of Virginia Tromblay Fesler
I have dreamed of you
every night for a week,
having almost forgotten
and then remembering
in my burning throat
how we buried you last summer
at the end of the dusty road
where sixty years before
you were married.
Our house is old and white
and wears the layers of
the lives it knew with the
same pride you showed
when recounting your
immigrant years and the
long winter when
you bore my mother.
Your hand-tatted sheets
cover our bed and
the quilt you made
for my crib now
covers my son;
photos of you peer
down at us as we
fill this house with
the voices of our joy.
Sometimes early on
mornings long before
the others wake,
I open my eyes, and
through the window
streams the same
pure light I saw
as a child not yet
able to speak,
hungry for your face
suspended over mine;
and I still hear you
singing the old French tunes,
rocking me back to peace
in that yellow room
I will never find again.
But tonight I walked along
quiet streets fragrant
with sycamores in
the still summer air,
and the man I love
touched me with his
low rambling voice
while locusts droned,
and the soft outlines
of ca ts leap t Ugh tly
out of the dark.
Teresa Anderson, Speaking in Sign, West End Press, 1979,
Cambridge, MA. 32 pages, $1.50 and $.25 postage from
Blue Heron Books, 2114 Mason, Houston, Texas 77006.
My first and last mother is the Midwest with her endless dry seas and harsh wind and
her small, fragile towns that somehow manage to cling to life after every emergence from
her howling winters. I have been saved from the narrow, smothering confinement of these
places by the rising of women all over the land. Our growing strength and collective voice
have been my refuge for an end to the oppression of all people everywhere. Poetry is just
one of the tools we have forged for this struggle we will win. — Teresa Anderson
There is a new breed of poets thriving on the
plains of the Great Midwest/Southwest and they
are the West End Poets. Teresa Anderson is one of
them, and her songs course through the dust bowl
air like pollen, fertile and fair.
This poet has come of age in the Aquarian age,
when she can write freely now of the years of
"trying in maidenly despair to create or falsify
curves and later smoothing over bumps and hating
the irregular face with its flaws." She has confronted the shadow and transformed it. "Yes,"
she says, "we are all afraid,/but when fear is
shared,/it is changed. Now you and I here are/
talking without masks/in this darkening room,/and
when we join hands,/we burst into flame." (Talking
With A New Woman).
Her love poems are so delicately sensual that one
feels the flesh quiver reading them: "touch me, yes,
in the thicket/and let the wood thrust be our judge;/
never mind the lunatic wind/roaring through pines/
listen to locusts,/close your eyes,/feel the* grass
with your toes;/that is so good!" (Breaking Out)
Her lovers are legion: men, women, children; and
she is true to them all.
But most of all, she is true to her blood. Her fragile great-aunt Delphine, prairie woman from Damar,
Kansas, is breathed alive again in Delphine
they come back, the man
with his bawdy laugh,
hands reaching for
sweet, home-made wine
and eyes following the
woman, a diminutive,
green-eyed girl now,
just come from the wedding dance,
who stands uncertainly at
the parlor door, wondering
at the crude sound of his English,
picturing a cradle by the stove
and wishing he would remove
the pins from her heavy dark hair.
In Alone After Sixty Years, three months after
her grandmother's death, her grandfather catches
himself late at night "preparing her morning tray,
turning.back/in the dark closet to touch again/the
dusty jersey of her Sunday dress."
These people are soil and salt, whose lives were
"lived in houses cut from the earth." Anderson's
poems reincarnate them from the soil, where "the
dust of the dead/sings under the blade of the
plow." (Our People) They are dignified by their
work, by the labor of their hands, and by the
songs sung to them in these poems.
We are reminded of lusty men and women,
"wrapped in blankets of corn liquor and smoke,/
who played harmonica and danced through the
thirties,/drove Model T's 'til they broke down near
Gallup,/who thumbed their way West and jumped
freighters/whistling out-bound so far from home."
(Woman's Blues Okie Style) History is alive and
well in these poems, and work is honest and hard.
Anderson says on the cover that she "has been
saved from the narrow, smothering confinement
of these places by the rising of woman all over the
land." There is no sense of confinement here.
These poems are free as the Kansas-Oklahoma-Texas
air where they and Anderson pulse their lifeblood,
and endless as the earth that spawned them.
Mary McAnally
Cardinal Press
Houston Breakthrough
14
May 1979
Houston Breakthrough
15
May 1979 |
