Far Company

Cindy Hunter Morgan

• Verlag: Wayne State University Press
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780814349533
• Thema: Littérature
• Thema: Poésie américaine

In Far Company, we hear Cindy Hunter Morgan thinking about the many ways we carry the natural world inside of us as a kind of embedded cartography. Many of these poems commune not only with lost ancestors but also past poets. We hear conversations with Emily Dickinson, James Wright, Walt Whitman, and W. S. Merwin. These poets, who are part of Hunter Morgan's poetic lineage, are beloved figures in the far company she keeps, but the poems she writes are distinctly hers. Poet Larissa Szporluk remarked, "The poems in this collection are quiet and deceptively simple. My first response was to be amazed by a seeming innocence in delivery—straightforward, picturesque, and compassionate—that then matured like a crystal into something precious and masterful. We are left with the whole forest having met all the trees one by one. There is so much respect in this collection—respect for natural processes that include intergenerational relationships, shared territories, and myths." The poems in Far Company reveal a mind and a heart negotiating both self and world with compassion and invention. They are cinematic in the way they navigate loss, memory, dislocation, hope, and love—abstractions evoked in deeply specific and nuanced ways. There is the drone that flies over Hunter Morgan's grandparents' farm before the house burns and the stag-handled knife in a pocket, its single blade "folded inside like a secret" on a train in Greece. But this collection is full of quieter cinema, too—a grandfather bending to cinch the girth of a horse, days "green / with snap peas and wild tendrils, " and "raindrops beading like sweat / on the lips of snapdragons." The root of this book is Hunter Morgan's love for family and her love for the land her family has shared. These poems map a journey to many places, inward and outward, and engage with the natural world and the built world, moving between both of those environments in ways that acknowledge the complexities of such crossings. Often melancholic but never sentimental, this collection belongs with any reader who seeks out literature in the organic world.

I

Rain Light

After W. S. Merwin

All day the stars watch from long ago.

I understood this even as a girl,

when my grandma and I played Flinch

on rainy days, our fingertips joining

the fingerprints of her grandparents.

In that way the people she loved

held my hand those afternoons

when hollyhocks pressed their faces

against the porch screens

and horses gathered near the fence

to drink from rain-topped pails,

the pasture thicker every year

with what had already been there

and what hadn’t, hickory

and grapevines and burdock,

raindrops beading like sweat

on the lips of snapdragons,

everything green pressing in—

close, my grandma called that weather.

Origin Story

I was six months old, sleeping in an open tent

when a bobcat circled, lingered near the cushion,

near my breath—milk-sweet, warm. His whiskers

tickled my cheek, soft as the belly of a vole.

His haunches brushed my arm. My father

witnessed the incident, then startled the bobcat,

sent it into the woods to sleep or flush a rabbit.

Every parent hands a child over to the world.

I grew as a girl grows, but I wandered creek beds,

built dens in the woods, filled them with the skulls

of foxes and dry oak leaves. Afternoons, I napped

on the edge of meadows beneath aspens or pin oaks,

woke mottled—sunlight and leaf shadows

flickering on my skin—my flesh dappled like fur.

Amulet

That Halloween I was a new girl—first day

at a new school. I could have worn street

clothes, been the girl nobody knew, but

I went as a mute clown sewn from a bed sheet—

faded stripes, ruffled collar. My mother made it,

and made my wig—red yarn stitched

to a muslin bonnet. My mother, who took me

to school, left me with a sack lunch and a tube

of lipstick—Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow—

her only makeup. For the parade, she said,

closing her palm over mine. I marched

behind Cleopatra—Cleopatra—I thought

that was her name—necklace coiled like a snake,

gold cape like a river—plastic, store-bought,

though I said nothing. Later, we had cupcakes

and fruit punch, then bingo with bottle caps.

At recess, I wandered like a fool, my hands

in the pocket of my costume

until I made it through the gauntlet

of jump ropes and swings into a grove

of maples in the far corner of the playground

and pulled the lipstick tube out—gold, shiny,

hard as the shell of a scarab—

my mother in front of the bathroom mirror

before church, my mother in the grocery

store/shoe store/fabric store—my mother

released to me in wax and red dye.

1978

One day, I paint my mother’s face

with rocks—pound dolostone,

basalt, quartzite into powder,

dribble spit into what I crush,

rub paint onto her nose, cheeks,

forehead—every streak one finger

wide. My mother made wild,

glossed with magic. I take a picture,

try to fix her as warrior companion.

I wave the Polaroid like

a smoke blessing, wait for it to dry.

When I look up, she’s gone.

Later, I find her in her sewing room—

face washed off, her foot on the pedal

of her machine as though she is driving

our brown Oldsmobile to the milk store.

The windows are open. Streetlights

buzz. It’s Indian summer.

Heat blurs the trees

into smudged still lifes.

My mother stuffs elastic

into a waistband, sends me to bed.

I lean out my window like a dog.

Bats reel. Rabid. Lucky. I squirm

all night, searching for the cool part

of my cotton sheets, those places

my body has not yet been.

Nuthatch

It’s not that I wanted to shoot anything,

but when B...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author