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The House On Breakaheart Road
Poems
Gailmarie Pahmeier
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eBook - ePub
The House On Breakaheart Road
Poems
Gailmarie Pahmeier
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About This Book
This breathtaking collection of poems by award-winning Nevada poet Gailmarie Pahmeier explores the many facets of a woman's experience. Told largely through the voice of a fictional character, "Emma, " the poems display a range of moods, from tender to wry, ironic, tough, lyrical, reckless. Pahmeier's voice is uniquely her ownâstrong, profoundly wise, rich in humor and subtlety, utterly feminine. She understands how women live, how they love, and what they need. Ultimately, she teaches us "what comes of it, of love."
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PoesiaPART I
For Men Without Sons There Is Always This
Photograph of Her Parents, Dancing: 1956
A blond woman in the peopled background
is smiling, her curls hugging her face
like ivy. My father holds my mother
against his chest, a calm and grateful
twist to his lips. His hand is knuckled
around hers, the lace wedding dress
burning upon his shirt. My motherâs eyes
are open large, her lips drawn thin.
Her light-filled face contrasts his shadowed dark,
as if she is aware that in a mere
few hours, she will be a mother in the most
elemental way, that three months later
she will pull this man from a pool hall, say
I thought you knew.
What she doesnât know is that over thirty
years later she will still find some ways
to love him, that she will happen upon
the occasional day when she can say
out loud, I like this, living with him.
What she doesnât know is that the child
will be an only, silent and tearful,
that the house will ache with this childâs angry
fear and desperately lovely dreaming.
What she doesnât know is that a day
is coming when she will sit in the thick
Kentucky air placing bets on horses
she chooses for name, she chooses for me, for her
distant daughter, for all the hope and luck
and fury she owned in the blurred still
of the photograph. She chooses Wild Girl,
Angel of Energy, she chooses Eager Love.
She doesnât know, she has no idea
that I will turn out this bad, so like her
in her darker, picture-perfect heart.
Fathers with Daughters
Watching this one now in her painless sleep,
you imagine your eyes, her motherâs limbs,
an odd mesh of familiarity.
A director with only an actor,
no script, youâve a definite job to do.
Be precise, be consistent. Hold her head
in your lap in the late afternoon,
tell her sheâs lovely as soon as youâre sure
she understands somehow what that might mean.
Your daughters are a perilous treasure,
an uncertain pleasure, a certain wish,
a work to be criminally proud of.
For men without sons there is always this.
Barbie, Ken, and Emmaâs Daddy
Other girls have friends to share their dolls.
Here in the closed air of an afternoon
at the lake, Emma has her daddy,
sun-browned and deliciously worn
from the early hours of setting trotline.
He drinks beer after beer to cool him, dabs
at the fat drops of sweat along his neck,
his chest, his brow. Other girls have mommas
to sing them songs, to wash the dried day off
their unedited skin. Emmaâs mommaâs gone,
three weeks already into Idaho,
and Emma, who has waited near lifetimes
for toys ordered off the backs of cereal
boxes, knows that eight weeks is eternity.
But itâs okay. Barbieâs here and Kenâs come
along. Theyâve been to the store and gone
skating and gotten lost in the deep woods,
Ken built Barbie a house, they have children
made of sticks, two rock dogs and an acorn cat.
Later they will take their wickedly smooth
bodies to bed where Ken will snore and Barbie
will turn from side to side, choose moonlight,
not sleep, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes.
But first there will be dancing. After supper
Emmaâs daddy plays the radio,
takes Ken in his big hands. Emma leans Barbie
near and nearer and they rock and roll
their way to weary. Every night.
This is all Emma knows now and close
enough to what she needs. Thereâs comfort
in this honest life: sunshine, water,
a place to play, a little music,
her daddyâs heavy footsteps on the dark
porch, loud as loneliness and brutally
beautiful, just like Barbie, just like Ken.
Emma Remembers Something of the World Series
Game 7, October 12, 1967 / St. Louis, 7 Boston, 2
She remembers the schoolboysâ envy,
how her fatherâs worn hand wrapped her own,
maneuvered her through mote-filled halls
swallowed in possibility, some hope.
She remembers her legs, how sheâd pluck
them off the plastic car seats, how the hot
thick air rolled against her face,
how his cigarettes left her rich and dizzy.
She remembers the dusty smell of peanuts,
how the old man selling them on the street
winked, said lucky doll, told her father
eats is gettinâ outrageous inside.
She remembers the sweet, wet smell of men
in suits, how they stood and shook their arms,
how someone spilled, something, on h...