Thrall

Poems

Natasha Trethewey

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780544586208
• eBook ISBN: 9780547840420
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The stunning follow-up volume to Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer Prize–winning Native Guard, by the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States.

Natasha Trethewey's poems are at once deeply personal and historical—exploring her own interracial and complicated roots—and utterly American, connecting them to ours. The daughter of a black mother and white father, a student of history and of the Deep South, she is inspired by everything from colonial paintings of mulattos and mestizos to the stories of people forgotten by history.

Meditations on captivity, knowledge, and inheritance permeate Thrall, as she reflects on a series of small estrangements from her poet father and comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America.

Thrall confirms not only that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most gifted and necessary poets but that she is also one of our most brilliant and fearless.

 

 

Elegy

For my father

 

 

I think by now the river must be thick

    with salmon. Late August, I imagine it

 

as it was that morning: drizzle needling

    the surface, mist at the banks like a net

 

settling around us—everything damp

    and shining. That morning, awkward

 

and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked

    into the current and found our places—

 

you upstream a few yards and out

    far deeper. You must remember how

 

the river seeped in over your boots

    and you grew heavier with that defeat.

 

All day I kept turning to watch you, how

    first you mimed our guide’s casting

 

then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky

    between us; and later, rod in hand, how

 

you tried—again and again—to find

    that perfect arc, flight of an insect

 

skimming the river’s surface. Perhaps

    you recall I cast my line and reeled in

 

two small trout we could not keep.

    Because I had to release them, I confess,

 

I thought about the past—working

    the hooks loose, the fish writhing

 

in my hands, each one slipping away

    before I could let go. I can tell you now

 

that I tried to take it all in, record it

    for an elegy I’d write—one day—

 

when the time came. Your daughter,

    I was that ruthless. What does it matter

 

if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting

    your line, and when it did not come back

 

empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights,

    dreaming, I step again into the small boat

 

that carried us out and watch the bank receding—

    my back to where I know we are headed.

 

 

Miracle of the Black Leg

Pictorial representations of the physician-saints Cosmas and Damian and the myth of the miracle transplant—black donor, white recipient—date back to the mid-fourteenth century, appearing much later than written versions of the story.

1.

Always, the dark body hewn asunder; always

one man is healed, his sick limb replaced,

placed in the other man’s grave: the white leg

buried beside the corpse or attached as if

it were always there. If not for the dark appendage

you might miss the story beneath this story—

what remains each time the myth changes: how,

in one version, the doctors harvest the leg

from a man, four days dead, in his tomb at the church

of a martyr, or—in another—desecrate a body

fresh in the graveyard at Saint Peter in Chains:

there was buried just today an Ethiopian.

Even now, it stays with us: when we mean to uncover

the truth, we dig, say unearth.

2.

Emblematic in paint, a signifier of the body’s lacuna,

the black leg is at once a grafted narrative,

a redacted line of text, and in this scene a dark stocking

pulled above the knee. Here the patient is sleeping,

his head at rest in his hand. Beatific, he looks as if

he’ll wake from a dream. On the floor

beside the bed, a dead Moor—hands crossed at the groin,

the swapped limb white and rotting, fused in place.

And in the ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Part I
• Elegy
• Part II
• Miracle of the Black Leg
• On Captivity
• Taxonomy
• Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or, The Mulata
• Knowledge
• Part III
• The Americans
• Mano Prieta
• De Español y Negra; Mulata
• Mythology
• Geography
• Torna Atrás
• Bird in the House
• Artifact
• Fouled
• Rotation
• Part IV
• Thrall
• Calling
• Enlightenment
• How the Past Comes Back
• On Happiness
• Vespertina Cognitio
• Illumination
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Read More from Natasha Trethewey
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH