Kitchen Heat

Poems

Ava Leavell Haymon

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780807157633
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Kitchen Heat records in woman's language the charm and bite of domestic life. Ava Leavell Haymon's poems form a collection of Household Tales, unswerving and unsentimental, serving up the strenuous intimacies, children, meals, pets, roused memories, outrages, and solaces of marriage and family. Some of the poems are comic, such as "Conjugal Love Poem, " about a wife who resists giving her husband the pity he seeks when complaining about a cold. Others find myth and fairy tale lived out in contemporary setting, with ironic result. Others rename the cast of characters: husband and wife become rhinoceros and ox; a carpool driver, the ominous figure Denmother.An elderly female is Old Grandmother, who creates time and granddaughters from oyster stew. The humidity of Deep South summers and steam from Louisiana recipes contribute to a simmering language, out of which people and images emerge and into which they dissolve again.
Denmother went to college in the 60s,
could pin your ears back at a cocktail party.
Her laugh had an edge to it,
and her yard was always cut.She grew twisted herbs in the flower beds,
hid them like weeks among dumpy marigolds.
The wolfsbane killed the pansies
before they bloomed much.She'd look at you real straight and talk
about nuclear power plants or abortion. At home
alone she boiled red potatoes all night
to make the primitive starch that holds up the clouds.
-- "Denmother's Conversation"

DEPENDABLE HEAT SOURCE

You Can See It in the Architecture

Gather ’round, Yankees—come out from inside
those masonry double walls and smallish windows, furnace
puffing away, an iron lung just under the carpet floor.
Southern houses are built in fear of heat.

Our haunts wear eyelet instead of sleeping caps
and shawls, and they tend to be young girls dead
of the yellow-fever afterbirth of a baby
that had to be strangled. Built of wood, inside and out,

high ceilings, a pine floor set on soft-brick piers,
footed in the flat boggy muck of overflows, raised
above swamp fire, mosquitoes. Roomy closets
stuffed with whatever it is we find to wrap bones in,

hung with bay laurel sprigs for the mildew. I’m describing
a tinderbox, you may have noticed, with bead-board wainscot
or floral wallpapers, and layer on layer of paint and wax.
They say you always become what you most fear.

With an attic. Always an attic. For the updraft,
don’t you know? Old raw cypress smell there,
where the heat collects, builds, heat the downstairs
rooms were designed to hide, to funnel up here,

up here with the cobweb trunks that won’t lock
anymore and the bundles of dry-rot doll clothes.
A dark triangle vault—listen close now, you’ll be glad
you came outside—gluttonous for thermal increase,

hungry for a hundred oppressive summer afternoons,
till the hot red eye of memory flicks open
underneath its oily gauze bandages
and the whole structure is consumed.

White House in Watercolor

after a painting by Judi Betts

Late morning siennas bleed into cyanine green.
A two-story frame house carves itself
out of a mumble of shadows. Seven windows
sink back, double-sashed, vermilion, sulfur.
In the foreground, filed teeth dazzle
into fence pickets, their bases sheared off
in umbers uneven as wild onion and sourgrass.

Bare white paper glares under the north gable:
the shape, an archangel garment of bleached wool,
nothing to announce. An unpainted oval floats
on the porch wall, a jowled eyeless face.
And the front steps—more unmapped white,
edges erratic with camellia and bay laurel
and notched along one side with telltale right angles
to summon up the dirty boots of uncles.

This is not the idea of a house. Not the house
you could draw once your best friend
taught you the 3-D cube: a box to crawl into
from any side, a box that held nothing.
And it’s not the Three Bears’ tidy house
before the little sneak thief broke and entered,
broke some more and left blond corkscrew hairs
in the nap of the bedspread.

This is the house the light shines through,
where windows hold back secrets the shade
of fading bruises, and a cotton wad sags
on the screen door against haunts and mosquitoes.
The house where all the accidents happened
that left you the way you are—unable to face
a sheet of bare white paper till it’s brushed over
with color you can’t see through,
painted into uncertain shapes
you only claim to recognize.

Eye Games

In any bright room, the dark is there, waiting
to soak through at the first timid request.
I’ll show you. For a moment

ignore the lively colors that reach toward
your face. Look straight at the charcoal
shadows even now trying to recede.
Take all the time you need. You’ll see

the design relax, positive go negative.
The sables, the carbon blacks open
their hoarse throats, and the real dark
—the dark behind it all—eases in.

Try it again. See the sight plane as just that,
a two-dimension film before your eyes.
Rotate your head side to side, nod up/down.
Extrapolate. You’ll find that the plane is small,

a pixel section of a hand-painted paper globe
that’s no larger than a breakfast room
and you are inside it, sitting in a little highchair
at dead center, maybe a tray in front of you,

some red and yellow beads, or a nice spoon to bang.
All around you, the globe wraps tissue paper scenes,
mainly in pinks and blues, that rumple a bit
along the seams from the clumped paste.

Now focus on the small inked-in accents—
a man’s black shoe here, the skinny hands
of a clock, one sliding behind the other, a daub
of burnt umber on the floor under the bookcase.

Look again. The ink disguises slits,
cigarette burns, failures in the delicate paper,
and here the humid dark pours through a syrup
of ashes, sticky as oil smoke, bitter with sulfur,

benzene, filling the globe, you in it still trapped
in that chair, the plastic belt cutting across
your soft stomach. You’ve dropped the spoon
and you’ve already learned nobody’s coming

to pick it up for you. Your eyes fill
and you’re no longer able to see
the pretty pictures, no longer able
even to believe they are there.

Heat

Butter, Crayolas, tar—edges wavered,
ran together—our mother’s make-up,
chocolate, the ice blocks in sawdust.
My grandmother knew more
than one way to skin a cat.
She made me a chubby
baby chick out of yellow
modeling clay that lay
down, and in a single
July afternoon,
became an egg.

My grip goes
soft: I know the heat
hiding in the latitudes
waits to reduce us all
like the wax crèche figures
I unwrapped last Advent
season to find the Baby Jesus—
halo and all—melted into a headless
camel of the unlucky Wise Man, himself
dark and shapeless in the manger
with one of Mary’s blue-white arms.

Old Grandmother Magic

My grandmother said
I could be a boy
when I kissed my elbow.

I skinned up into the old fig, hid
in the tropical smell of crushed mimosa,
warm baby’s flesh, contorted myself
all afternoon. The green fruit swayed

and waved like weak-wristed southern beauties,
my shoulder sockets ached, the sweat
and prickle of failure, an itch
along my neck from the hairy leaves.

Too chicken to break my arm,
I yanked off all the swelling figs
I could reach and watched my little roost
streak slow with gluey milk sap.

Even now, I check to be sure:
my neck is stiffer,
I can’t get my elbow
close to my mouth at all.

Sometimes when I’m sleepy
or not paying attention,
I’ll notice my son’s elbow, and wonder
how it was he ever did it.

First Grandchild Breaks the Egg with No Shell

My grandmother sent me out to get the eggs.
I was big sister now, she said; no more crying
for Mama. Too short to use the door latch,
I crawled under a canvas flap. Dark struck me
blind. Hay, yeast, feathers, sweet lime,

the air bubbled like a soup pot, a witchhouse
where iron teeth snag certain little girls
who stray too far from their mother’s blessing.
From roosts on every side thrummed
a low, lazy sound, almost a growl.

I was in their territory, no mistaking it.
I knew already I’d have to lie: I couldn’t reach
under the three setting hens, humming away
hidden in the dark. I patted empty nests only,
on tiptoe, the way I stretched one-handed

for pantry shelves with scissors, knives stored
out of sight. My fingers groped into an egg
and felt the yolk. I was poking the head
of a newborn, touching the back of her eyeball.
Egg white and yolk collapsed, ran down

into hushed straw. Eyes squinched closed,
I crossed the daylight to her kitchen,
carried two warm eggs with normal shells.
She heard me out, although I didn’t quite
confess—I blamed it on the egg.

Becaus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• What the Magnolias Say
• CHOOSING MONOGAMY
• DEPENDABLE HEAT SOURCE
• BABIES’ BONES FROM MAGIC CRYSTALS
• Acknowledgments