"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
Pamela Uschuk is the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Cutthroat. Her new poetry collection Crazy Love (Wings Press, 2009) is enlivened by twin passions for social justice and the beauties of the Colorado landscape. In these poems, nature always provides a restorative place of peace and abundance when the wartime news becomes overwhelming. Beauty is her foundation, but unsentimentally so; the broken human world remains a constant background presence, as if to say that the joys that nourish us are not for our private pleasure alone, but also to give us strength to nourish others.
Read a review of Crazy Love in the literary journal RATTLE: Poetry for the 21st Century. Pam kindly shares a poem from this collection below.
North Carolina Ghost Story
for Elizabeth Dewberry, Teri Hairston and Zelda Lockhart
I
Sunrise torches the Winston-Salem Projects, a saxophone of light swelling the cups of red buds and crenoline skirts of Japanese cherry blossoms morphing my back yard from orange clay to Southern belle parfait that a red-tailed hawk cuts through chasing pigeon breakfast on the wing. Spooked, the blue jay creaks, a rusty gate flapping as it navigates dogwood’s white dance. I walk to campus, hear a rustle, see how small things of the world survive. A burrowing chipmunk pokes his nose from rotten old magnolia leaves, breathes sky.
II
I think of my friend, Teri, waking in the Hood, her dreds emerging from a thrift store blanket, waking to pigeons she feeds strut and coo on the fire escape, waking to sirens and the smell of grits and coffee from across the common lawn.
I remember her eyes last night, chilled even while she laughed, I don’t want to hear about ghosts. Black girls don’t like ghosts; don’t tell me about no ghosts, uh, uh.
So Teri waited in the damask parlor of the elegant old college President’s house while we three climbed secret stairs to the attic, where dusky air compacted like a punctured lung with each step until our chests squeezed into the small wheezing cry of the girl we all heard dragged across the floor to the terror of her life and we felt her die and die and die, her fear bright and palpable as blood that streaked her thighs.
None of us could speak but strained to translate the acid etch of tears unredeemed, the mystery inside the marred grain of the oak floor, but we couldn’t in our strictest scholarly logic tame the icepick panic chipping at our own hearts.
Then I whispered what earlier I’d seen — the vapor trail of the matron corseted in grim gray muslin, a living cauldron of grief boiling through the rooms downstairs, clouding wallpaper, pink and oblivious as a bouquet of carnations.
Was she looking for a daughter, hers, her maid’s? We left the muffled screams of the attic floor, stained so deep two pine boards had to be replaced long after the Civil War. We left with no real clues, just the urine reek of terror leaking from the walls, the long echo of screams beating like small fists or an arrhythmic heart, a temperature drop none of us could shake, even when we descended to the parlor and Teri’s quip about the questionable ethnicity of Spectral Americans.
III
Accompanied by the sweet flutes of Carolina wrens I unlock the President’s house to clean up last night’s party, wondering about the school’s boast of its underground railroad, and how those who began this school had kept slaves.
I scan portraits decorating peppermint walls— the magnolia blossom faces of gentlemen tobacco barons, plantation owners who never pulled a boll from a plant.
Back from the hunt, one gent leads a dapple grey thoroughbred to the livery’s whitewashed stalls, his fox hounds splayed helpless as contorted cutouts behind the thick black hooves. The man’s face is pinched, his thin mouth locked on lust’s hard verb, eyes ashy, vest cinched tight under the black waistcoat above white jodpurs highlighting the bulge between the tops of his thighs, the mahogany blur of a young girl escaping around the corner of the elegant white house, up the steps just out of our sight.
