Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining

Poems

Mark Wagenaar

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781597090360
• eBook ISBN:
  9781597093606
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

In his third collection, the award-winning author crafts poems that "reckon with the sins of history and the human-made scars on the natural world" (Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi).

Winner of the 2016 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining explores the South and its history through the eyes of the living, the dead, and the inbetween.

"The songs of Charles Wright, Rilke, and Blind Willie Johnson have tuned Wagenaar's ear, but the music is his own, irresistibly so. Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining is a brave and difficult grappling, ending with the difficult joy of a child's birth and the world's subsequent remaking. This is, simply put, poetry that adds to the glory of the human endeavor." —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling

"In Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining, there is a rapturous beauty that encompasses the American South, the United States, and the world, a poetic rooted in the space around the poet and extending outward to the world with questioning, compassion, grief, and hope." —Afaa M. Weaver, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

"The speaker searches constantly for evidence of God's presence in the world. It is a book of doubt just as much as it is a book of faith. Indeed, doubt threatens, at every line break, to wrest faith from the speaker's hands. But books of doubt are books of faith, and Southern Tongues understands this." — Los Angeles Review of Books

II

TROUBLE WILL SOON BE OVER

MISSISSIPPI TONGUES: A POEM IN NINE PARTS

I am going, Deacon Jones
I went down to the church house
I got down on my bended knee
I prayed, I prayed all night, I prayed
Deacon Jones, pray for me

—John Lee Hooker, “Burnin’ Hell”

I feel my body, my bones and flesh beginning to part and open upon the alone, and the process of coming unalone is terrible.

—Dewey Dell, As I Lay Dying

I. Southern Divinations

The signs are everywhere. The cat drops headless birds, cardinal,
bluejay, something whitewinged, beside the rocker on the front porch.

A diamondback leaves its skin at field’s edge. Heaps of dead wasps
near it, sun-brindled bodies like a funeral pyre in time’s slow flame.

A perfect circle of feathers: yes, you’ll owe more than you have today.
A perfect circle of raised white welts: yes, there will be enough

for dinner tonight. You find a one-antlered deer skull hung
from the branches of a young oak: yes, she’ll come back someday.

Bag worms like prayer lanterns at wood’s edge, sizzle
of cicadas in the trees, a hundred ratchets spinning on the car

of the dog-bayed August sun. The signs are everywhere. The dogs
got another one of the chickens. A mimosa drops its flares

into the river, the light of years resurfacing reaches you. The light
of other towns. Other tongues, older tongues. Issaquena, Choctaw

for deer river. You say it to the crumpled deer body roadside,
tiger lilies blazing on their wicks in the ditch. Issaquena.

The first two county seats are now ghost towns on this alluvial plain,
buckshot soil, bottomland. Ghost towns, ghost tongues, we, too,

are alluvial, & bear the traces of others upon us. This county is no
dry bones, this county will rise again, our neighbor rumbles, the one who wears

a gator’s tooth around his neck for luck. Seven types of fog, seven types
of rattlers. Ache of crepe myrtle blossoms by the road, white ones, fuchsia,

ache of all we cannot bring ourselves to ask: pocketless, starless,
what can a body keep, what can a body bear? You must ask yourself,

the river, the dark, you must ask a hundred times, because so many
have gone into both without an answer. Benthic ourselves,

alluvial, we bear the signs, names, petals, ashes of a church fire
on the air, we bear the light of names no one knows how to say anymore.

II. What’s the Last Thing that Goes Through a Bug’s Head

when it hits the windshield—

the attendant asks

at the last station before the two-lane blacktop
hits the Natchez Trace: foot-smoothed path
from Natchez to Nashville: hundred-foot pines,
Pegasus & Lyra-blossomed magnolia, crepe myrtles
like burning cars roadside: his half-limp almost
the same as my father’s,

arthritis in his knee radiating

like starlight in water: a riddle with an answer,
one we ask instead of asking about our own
last words, last questions, even at this lonely
outpost, where rusty ceiling fans chase their tails
all day, & a mini pagoda of disposable cameras,
each with their own

empty window, wait

for a figure to wave back at us: the Bible opened
on the counter to a dog-eared Psalm 88,
& mahalath leannoth (to be read at the suffering
of afflictions) circled in red: a lineage that begins
with a half-limp, & goes back generations
of Primitive Baptists,

Hard Shell Baptists,

back to a man owned by another: lineage, the falling
of one day into the next: what we are heir to,
what we are at the mercy of: Old Trace, what flickers
in the blood? : something kin to the twenty centuries
of dark in the Pharr Mounds, burial tumuli a few miles
from this place:

something like the sixth taste

on the tongue, or the seventh, if it exists: unanswerable:
how long this season of white hair, how long
will Yahweh stay silent: how much of this galaxy’s
light, this river of heaven, is the light of white dwarfs:
dead stars: where else do death & eros collide
in the world: burst sacks

of thistle still on the stalk

bulge like eyeballs in the next field, waiting
for the right wind out of the cypress swamps
to carry the seeds: as we wait, halfhearted, off-balance,
for something beyond us to carry us, to get us
through another day, to bear these frailties—

its ass.

III. Southern Locution (Erasures)

Even now the letters & syllables begin to

Ravel themselves around their own disappearances

As the speakers forget them: Mephis, Missippi:

like phantom limbs, like a

Shroud of fingerprints lifted from arrowheads

Underneath the bodies. This is how a place vanishes. The letters

Rise toward names already beyond the horizon.

Even now they dissolve on our tongues, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael

Schwerner . . .

IV. Mama Jan’s Advice for This Life

Grief’s a drowned palomino, all fifteen hands of her.
We’ll spend our days tracing those hands on this gravel road

off a gravel road off county blacktop. All the names return
at day’s end, whitetail hour, with the tiger lilies dying in a ditch,

all them boys still missing, their mouths full of moonlight
& Issaquena County clay. Go on, do a Google search:

the first three it suggests are Issaquena County jail MS,
Issaquena County jail, & Issaquena County prison.

The boys may as well drive their snorting short boxes
& half tons (half-pints of clear shine beneath the seat)

right through the glittering barbed wire. If there’s a hole
in heaven’s side, it’s been worn in a little at a time,

like the Natchez Trace, worn in with our bodies.
When the children grow up, they’ll break

your heart, don’t kid yourself. Because everyone else will.
We’ve seven types of rattlers, & how many kinds of luck?

That’s all you got in a county of bottomland forest
in buckshot soil, & water on the way to the Delta. Find somebody.

All you are is a confluence of needs. My Earl,
he once brought me a glass of water when I was coughing

in the middle of the night, wrapped in the T-shirt he was wearing.
Find somebody that ten...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Dark Was the Night / Cold Was the Ground
• II. Trouble Will Soon Be Over
• III. Bye & Bye I’m Going to See the King
• IV. Sweeter as the Years Go By
• V. Let Your Light Shine on Me
• Biographical Note