Seedlip and Sweet Apple

Arra Lynn Ross

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781571318091
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"A miraculous text of narrative and speech fragments... to raise up Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, her ecstatic voice, energy, and vision." —Hilda Raz, award-winning author of Letter from a Place I've Never Been Seamlessly bridging the material and spiritual worlds, Seedlip and Sweet Apple takes the reader into the mind of a true visionary: Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker religion in colonial America. With astonishingly original poems inspired by extensive historical research, Arra Lynn Ross creates a collection linked thematically through the voice and story of the woman who was believed by her followers to be Christ incarnate. Broadly and inclusively spiritual, this remarkable debut captures the ineffable experience of ecstatic vision, activating the progression from literal reality to heightened perception. Simultaneously, this journey delves into the manifold issues of gender and religion, public image, and charismatic leadership, as well as the line between cult and commune and the tenuous bond between faith and behavior. Written in an impressive cornucopia of forms—including iambic quatrains, free verse, and prose poems— Seedlip and Sweet Apple honors a complex figure startlingly relevant to contemporary life, pointing to a revolutionary way to work at living—and to live in working—that promises simplicity, peace, and joy. "Situated between glossary and glossolalia, word and vision, the communal act of language and the singularity of inspiration, Seedlip and Sweet Apple reaffirms the tradition of American visionaries, even while reshaping that tradition into an innovative and dynamic lyric. Arra Lynn Ross raises the roof with her convocation of tongues. A pioneering collection of poems." —D. A. Powell, National Book Critics Circle Award–winning poet "A work powerful in voice and craft." — Feminist Review

THE WORD OF LIFE

I was once as you are . . .

-Mother Ann

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Inside My Skin

1742, Baptism at Christ Church, Manchester, England

In the name of the Father

The words flew up.
The seams of my body came undone-
my breath-the flutter of a dove’s wings,
its shadow bruising the scarlet sun of the altar window,
bruising the golden wheat beetling from its stalk, bruising the bound sheaves,
the bent head of Jesus on his dark cross.
Tears of warm blood streak his cheeks,
gush into the furrows of his quivering ribs.

and of the Son

Then the bird was gone, the shadow
of the bird, its opal-throated song- gone.
I fell back inside
my skin, my seams, my chafing frock, my father’s arms.
The tip of a nose, chapped bottom lip, my tongue.
I tasted the water-bittersweet, tasted a word,
two words, three words, a name, a rose, a seed,
a longing and an answer, clear and true
as green shoots in the spring.
And as wordless: a sound only, a taste, a touch, a scent
opening-

and of the Holy

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Ecstatic

When we were younger and my brother William still a head below me,
we would run to the pastures and chase sheep,

belting out the loud baa as we flew after them,
hands outstretched and waving like scared birds.

As we ran, we turned from each other
till we stood at far sides of the field,

the dirty-wooled sheep between us;
he was a dark body jumping up and down in the mist,

his palms small dots tossing in the air.

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Early Work

1745, Manchester, England

I walk home when night is folded tight like a prayer,
wrapped in the woolen overcoat William wore before his arms got too long,
wishing I knew the names of trees;

that tall one at Sorrow and Toad roofs the roads, veils the stars.
The sky is bright tonight, and I can see the dirt clear,
the rutted grooves torn open.

My hands, stiff from winding the warps,
clench up when I sleep and some mornings
I have to pry them apart by knocking one against the other.

I press my fingers backward for about a minute
so they won’t curl back down.
Then I straighten the other.

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William Tells of a Public Whipping

I worm us through to the front of the crowd. A man killed a fat hare on Blackmoor’s land. We’d seen him singing for shillings in the streets, light of bone and laughter, a girl-child on his shoulders, and she with no shoes. Now, he pulls off his waistcoat and stained undershirt, drops his rough flapped hat to the cobblestones, and turns his naked back to take the leather. The baker’s wife beside us whistles high and higher till the note breaks, while her boy, barely able to hold his own weight, drops rocks. The sound is lost in the crowd. No one will pay for him, for the hare. The whip slices, again, again, and screams tear the air ragged. His girl scratches at the eyes of the old woman who holds her at the well. Ann grabs my hand and will not let go.

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Mother’s Touch

Mother squats and stares,
her face wrinkling into frown.
What do you mean, you don’t want a marriage?

I’m scared of the hunger.
I dreamt it,
the dark hole eating
the world.

She leans over me, hand sticky with dough,
squeezes my forearm hard, hisses,
don’t say no more.

But it’s wrong, Momma,
how people touch-
blind flies
feeling for food
and all the meat’s rotten.
Wraps me at night,
I can’t breathe
it’s so tight and wet
like my own skin falling in.
I can taste the sin.

Girl? She’s kneeling now,
her eyelids thick with grief.

(My screams wake her
at night.)

We’ll find someone nice.
Your father’s man, Abraham, has good hands.

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Her fingers bruise my lips,
holding back the moans

but the trembling takes me
as it always does, deep
as the crack
that divides my sleep, night
after night.
The sounds steal out
from somewhere
darker than me.
I won’t. I can’t! I scream,
striking her face,
wishing

I could fold the world over
and make it rise up right.

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Found

1758, Manchester, England

Sunday morning, Christ Church, mother smoothing the faded blue of her one good skirt. Nancy and Mary, the two youngest, on either side of me, heads on my lap, sleeping, dirt-blond curls catching thin brown strands. My legs ache and I want to stretch them but not wake the girls, and the preacher’s voice drones and rises, thinned like the thread of a forgotten song. We, the poor, sit in the back pews, sometimes even stand for the full two hours. My mother is a pious woman, brushes our hair Sundays (all five boys and three girls) and ties it up with ribbon she keeps in her good wood box. Made us scrub down the night before: knees jammed high in the washbasin, scouring backs and necks on the young ones till they’re red and raw, shivering more from the rough touch than cold. I remember her tearing tangles from my hair, scratching my scalp as if she could gouge out sin. I’m old for such attention now-wash in the back room, away from William and George, though he’s only ten. I’m staring up at the window, the stained glass rising high and curved, pointed toward the vaulted ceiling, huge oak beams rounding the air like rib cages.

I wonder if the word of God gets stuck in the tight joints. The red and yellow glass glows with low morning sun; a bright heart wreathed in thorns drips tears of blood on Jesus’s dirty feet, and his blue eyes leak water over the blood. He stretches his hand toward me and in his mouth I see the sun. It pulses like blood in my own lips, beats a silent tongue against mouth bones, bearing a language of taps and clicks that I echo with my hand on my thigh. Mary shifts, opens her eyes and glares at my moving hand, butts her head against my leg. I move the staccato song to my belly, fingers running ribbons of rhythm over my flesh. Faster and faster, then one slow, even beat, another valley of rushes and sudden gaps, the long void and leap of galloping hands. I fly into Jesus’s open mouth, am swallowed, broken into blood beating through veiny loops. His hands move over dead flesh, quivering with new life; I am there, too, in the dark cave, wet dripping on cold hands. I am in his calloused feet, walking uphill through thick clouds of red sand. Words swim from our mouth, thwacking hard tails against teeth; they fall at our feet, and the poor, with bent heads and dry hands, g...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• THE WORD OF LIFE
• THE NEW WORLD
• JOURNEY OF THE WORD
• Notes
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright Page