Flying Out With the Wounded

Anne Caston

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780814772102
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

This collection of poems is striking in its powerful representation of humanity and its dramatic use of language. Anne Caston explores the inner recesses of the human mind and body, delving into the murky shadows where individuals fear to tread. The poems consider the nature of death, love, brutality, friendship, and much more. Caston plays with different points of view and keeps readers on their toes. The physicality of these moving and disturbing poems is sure to captivate lovers of poetry.

LESSONS

WHEN I AM NOT TELLING IT

Somewhere in history a woman
is tying on her apron just at the moment
the rough hemp rope is knotted
fast around her husband’s neck.

The snap as it takes
the man’s full weight,
and the brief inelegant steps
of his feet in midair—

this is someone else’s story.

And the child with gallows-dreams,
the woman’s child, who would be my great-grandfather
waking the household nightly crying,
Papa, oh my Papa—

this too is someone else’s story.

But this silence which is the long silence of my life
out of which the story rises
when it rises and to which the story returns
when I am not telling it,

this is my story

as is the old knock and shove of my heart around it
and my love of grudges.

To begin with an apron and end
with a hanging, crying between:
this is a story I know
well enough to tell.

THE BURNING

If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

1.

From one end of my childhood
to the other, the silence of obedience
stretches, lifts and curls
like wisps of smoke around me.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, they say.
And the furnace in me is rage.

Now every chair I sit in, every pew,
each table or book or photograph I put my hands on
smoulders. Every thing I love goes up in flames.
I am the torch put to it.

Some things are better left unsaid.
I understand: a mantle of normalcy over things.
Good girl. Good wife. Good mother.

2.

Listen. The medusa is an obvious ruse:
the head of snakes, the stone-gray eyes, the scaly
body of a beast. You know to bring along a shield,
some mirror by which to save yourself.

You think you’re safe?
Just put your hands on me. That warmth you feel
will change to burning. Incendiary. That’s my heart.
And all the heat moves out from there.

3.

As a girl, I got so good at smouldering
not even my petticoats were singed.
My hair lay down in perfect waves around me.
My shoes were patent, black
reflections of the rooms I entered; my face genteel.

Only my voice was charred,
riddled with smoke, but who knew that?
I rarely spoke. Yes ma’am. Yes sir.
That hardly qualifies as speech.

4.

For me, it is always eight minutes before
or eight minutes after, the warmth or the chill,
never the event itself.

Or maybe the eighth minute before
is the sun gone dark
and the next seven minutes
already afterlife.

I was four.
A girl in my mother’s house.
The man was not my father.

5.

I am burning still; with shame,
with more than shame.

Over twenty-one million
minutes beyond it, and though I can’t see his face,
I can feel that arm, the one he later lost, the right arm —
arm that he held me with so his left hand could grope below.

And my mother, woman in the mirror,
eight minutes after, as the ruin set in,
what did she see; what did she
look away from?

MY FATHER’S HOUSE

There are no roads back to that house:
55Odessa Drive, our backyard
separated from the wild field by a hedge,

where each morning, I lifted into the low blue sky
on a plank swing and I sang
the nonsense rhymes and syllables

only a six-year-old can get away with:
mumbo-jumbo, eat your gumbo,
Peter-beater, booger-eater . . .

How little else I can remember now:
the hot kitchen where my grandmother cooked and sewed,
cornbread crumbled into buttermilk at noon,

orange marigolds lifting along the gravel drive.
I remember it was the first house
death visited: the pink-white froth

on the dog’s black mouth
as he staggered through the hedge and across the yard
where my brother and I were digging for worms.

I remember my grandmother
running from the porch, her dress hiked up
over her bony knees, the way she placed herself

between us and the dog,
the raggedy broom she shook at him.
Stay back, she said to us, he’s mad—he’s got the rabies.

I can’t remember now which neighbor called
the dog catcher who came and netted the dog
and put him down with a long needle on our front lawn.

But I do remember how, for the rest of that afternoon,
I swung in the dangerous yard and tried
the new words, mad and rabies, on my tongue.

WITH BAPTISTS

Singing, always singing, no matter what—and dunking.
Singing and dunking. Though drinking’s not allowed. Nor dancing.
Too close to fornication; too Methodist. But singing and dunking
Baptists are well-acquainted with, even the youngest,
though dunking can seem a lot like drowning at eight years old

if you step off into those cold waters, starting to sink,
and the preacher slaps a white cloth over your nose and mouth
and spills you over backwards and you lose your footing
and your good manners as unexpectedly as you lost your heart to Jesus
that April morning when the congregation was singing the Easter sun home.

Going under, all sinner again and desperate for solid ground,
I clawed the preacher’s arms and face,
until he had to stand me up again, fast; he shook me hard then, twice,
and my teeth clacked against each other from more than the chilly
waters and the fear of drowning, while the choir in front of us,

oblivious, sang again the old refrain:
Almost persuaded, now to believe . . .

FIRST REBELLION, 1959

By mid-December, we all were weary of the chronic
colds and ringworm we’d gotten from crouching
in the far wet winter ditches of the schoolyard
once, sometimes twice, a week
when the civil defense sirens sounded.
But there was Castro to consider, in a country called Cuba
which, we all knew, was far away from Florida but not far enough.

So between rehearsing the Adeste Fideles and Stille Nacht
for parents’ night at Christmas, the sirens blared
and we found ourselves, again, shin-deep
in the muddy waters of the irrigation ditch
that ran between the schoolyard and the cane fields.

The principal walked up and down with his megaphone
and pointed at the ones who tried to stay half-standing,
Get down. Get down, I say. If the missiles fall. . .

Lucy Armstrong, next to me, began to cry—she always cried
at the part about the missiles falling on us.
Then Charlene Baxter was crying. And I started crying too.
Not because of the missiles, but because I’d crouched
so low my new underpants were wet and because something
moved by me underwater and I was afraid
it was the baby cottonmouths
which, as everyone knew, swam in ditchwater and had bad
tempers and could kill you with one drop of their poison.
Soon the whole class was crying.

Miss Holtz, who was our teacher, climbed out of the ditch
and said something to the principal we couldn’t hear.
Her legs had brown ditch-muck on them and the back
seams of her stockings were crooked.
She called us into two-by-two lines and marched us
back into the classroom, even though the all-clear hadn’t sounded.

We took to our seats in our soggy clothes.
We folded our hands and waited.

Miss Holtz, who was the only Jew we knew personally
in Jacksonville which, in those days, was mostly
full of Baptists and heathens,
smoothed her wet wool skirt and emptied
the...