When Someone Says a Poem is Masterful
It is arrow after arrow in the still-pumping heart
who is the master of art? no one
who wants to master the body of a poem? no one should
I have a master in my family tree
Jack Allums: he will always be there
the male head of a household
a person licensed to command
teacher and enslaver: Jack
the original from which copies were made
his word was writ on bodies
–
Even in Amherst, Dickinson’s imagination
runs to mastery, to master
in her third “Master letter,” she crosses out the line
but I knew you had altered me.
when Emily crosses a line
she revises, she helms herself
she circumnavigates
–
The mythos of mastery is this — a canvas sail
is said to master the wind
and a wooden rudder the sea
but the wind can shred the sail, and the ocean
dissolve a human tongue
so that it cannot say a single word
to make will always be better
than to master
better than salt and sugar, fields
of someone else’s labor
[Note: John “Jack” Allums (1810-1870) is my matrilineal third great-grandfather. A third lieutenant in the Confederate Army, he submitted a Confederate Application for Pardon to President Andrew Johnson after the Civil War — which is how, against the narratives of poverty and white innocence, there is documentation of enslavement in my Southern family tree.]
* * * * *
Isabel
When Isabel blew the oaks around
us sideways — no light. No water
pumped from our well. We carried
five-gallon buckets from the pond
to the house, filled the toilet bowls.
I wore overalls. My hair in braids.
For nine days, home was a dark
dream and hurricane lamps.
Silence around a kitchen table.
Reading in a distempered light.
Those dark, Dantean days were
my first in community college.
I bought a hardback of The Divine
Comedy. Didn’t understand
the title’s joke. What was comedy.
Once that week, I washed myself
in a neighbor’s shower. The water
was sweet, like something
you touch in secret. Didn’t know
the tale of Paolo and Francesca.
What words could do to a person
as the winds picked up and the dead
oaks dropped their arms around us.