Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
Keeping Company Today I want this poem to lie down and keep me company like the childhood friends I had Grandma's House Her spirit is ploughed under with the ashes of her home; who were not really there. In the veil of quiet self-absorption, now I name imagination, we kept witnesses away, and like the cattle who lie down under trees before a storm their energies are joined again. She never knew the house was gone, kept it inviolate in her mind, did not see the consuming fire. But the order was wrong; the house should have died after she did, we could always sense a change in weather. I'd take us out to fall on soft wet grasses, to feel the turning of the earth not with her thoughts still in it. beneath our bodies. I told them The new grass is too green, all the shapes I saw in clouds and taught them to sing with me in rounds. They'd come in on cue, making sweet high harmony, like syncopated dance steps or the silence in a poem its lush growth the only sign that anything else ever lived here. I want to mark this passage for her with Gabriel's trumpet, but maybe the wind in the grass is enough. --Bonnie Michael Pratt when someone working all alone --Maggie Anderson stops and listens for whoever else is going to sing. Widow Morning arrives like an uninvited guest. I sit at the kitchen table, wordless, She clatters dishes, watching my mother fidget from table to stove. listens for the shuffle of newspapers, the scoot of houseshoes on linoleum rug, counts out three cups;-- her eyes apologize. Let's end mid-sentence I press her hands in mine and remember smooth hands, flesh-filled, like prospering writers do, leave the stanzas gaping like old farm gates, the rhymes alluded to. Let's set the ancient that used to wash my dad's work clothes, collect wood and cut kindling for the fire, hands that carried a hoe to the fields and fitted the dark soil around com and beans, then returned to star verses in her red-letter Bible. timepiece at a pace both heart and memory can withstand and fill this empty space. --Phyllis Price Her hands slide away and I feel the valleys of skin between veins. I feel the hollow palms that have lost their grip but search restlessly for past moments to fill them. --Shirley R. Chafin
Appalachian Review – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Jan 8, 1987
You can share this free article with as many people as you like with the url below! We hope you enjoy this feature!
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.