Approaching the Fields

Poems

Chanda Feldman

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780807168318
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Elegiac and fierce, solemn and celebratory, the poems in Chanda Feldman's Approaching the Fields consider family and history. From black sharecroppers and subsistence farmers along the Mississippi River to contemporary life in the suburbs, the rituals of home and work link racial experience, social lines, and economic striving, rooting memory and scene in the southern landscape. Love and violence echo through the collection, and Feldman's beautifully crafted poems, often formal in style, answer them sometimes with an embrace and sometimes with a turning away. She witnesses the crop fields and manicured lawns, the dinner table and birthing room, the church and juke joint, conveying the ways that everyday details help build a life. These evocative poems bring to life a rich and complex world, both timely and timeless.

ONE

NATIVE

Forget kudzu, that closed weave,
its green congesting trees, the way it twins

a telephone line’s length with vine, its only message
to overrun.

Forget the river’s muscled sweep
where nothing intrudes

and stays the same, water changing
what it washes through—retooled

stone, redrafted bank. Forget the difference
between foreign and native. Anything

can take hold here and spread. Indiscriminate
landscape. Even the road flinches

alive—a snake whips dust and slinks to a ditch.
Air’s adaptive, lifts whatever needs flight:

spore or song. The day’s margins blur
dark and light. Forget the dead

stay down, they persist as haints. A murky story
sticks to any relationship:

beloved or despised. A confederation
binds enemy and alliance, just as

the ground takes us in
and decay makes us kin.

BLOOD

Rivulets down
the generations. The lineage
of crippling

bunions, gap between
the front teeth, firecracker fits—
all the things I hate

about me. Murmured
from body to body, a hushed
murderer’s tributary, Great-great

Uncle Red, rust-briar bearded,
leveling a gun at another man.
Maybe all hearsay.

It’s not in the blood anyway,
but wound deeper down. Messages
hammered into cells. My father,

the first degrees in the family—
night lab work, tissue details
under microscopes. He photographed

me on Ivy League campuses
to make them my history.
Bloodlines no longer

the full story. We never knew
what dammed in my mother.
Her body without warning

quit flushing its toxins. Traits
I’d be tested for—the factors
that overflowed.

SETTLE

We were in a place we rarely go
anymore, the door key in my mother’s purse,
as if her childhood house had options, wasn’t its own

dead end. The cocklebur- and ragweed-choked
yard. The windows busted through, someone had dragged
the couch into the driveway, a few plates brimmed

with rainwater. It was never much
to begin with. A shotgun house on cinderblocks,
plumbing never installed. The roof’s tin lid,

wind-hooked, bent.
I’d always wondered what befell
those homesteads along highways. Slackened—

the crib barn’s withered oak. How a family recedes
from the decline. Now I know
it can happen swift. The Mississippi River’s ferry

service suspended. The lumber mill leaving
workers waiting in line. No one makes a living
farming these days. No one takes over

the uptown shops—all the undressed
window displays.
Staggering—

we were in a field I used to love and
hate. The thumbfat bees at the water-pump. Dogpacks
switching through goldenrod. The hill’s stitched

in soy and cotton. The crying
panther I’d fear to hear before knowing
it was a tale. No one in the family could believe

my grandmother’s request: to be buried between
her two late husbands. It had been thirty years since
their bones rose on floods and washed away.

Who would remind her
it would have to be otherwise? It just made sense
to let it go.

RIVER JUBILEE

After the spring rains’ glut and drain—
the adults drove to the river with nets
and buckets tethered to pick-up beds.

At the docks they peeled off their socks,
unbuckled shoes. The men rolled up dungarees
and sleeves over the knobs of elbows and knees.

Women gathered dress hems into knots
above calves to keep their shifts from sipping
the current. Nothing to hurry: the fish

straggled in the shallows, coal-dust
catfish, striped bass, and the glass
of sunfish along the bank. A convergence—

men and women came twisting down woods-
trails from the bluff until river mud sucked
their feet. Nets swooshed over fish-bodies,

they’d twitch and writhe until slapped
into buckets, and still more, flip-flopping
in the shallows. The wet, mouthy odor

of water, river-grit spangling ankles. The adults
crooned I’ll be damned’s, as they met the flesh
shouldered up on the waters.

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