Some of my work this residency was revising, redrifting, bringing closer to completion work begun elsewhere. Here are two begun at Hambidge and worked on here. The pond is behind the mountain cabin, Walnut Hill, I stayed in the fall of 2010. Rae, the NC/ GA boundary runs just north of the pond. The weather here has reminded me of fall and got me thinking again of this unfinished poem, now I hope finished. "The Wallet," in my default mode, a narrative of a childhood memory, was rougher, longer and with more digressions when I drafted it at Hambidge staying in another cabin, Son House, named not for the great blues singer but for the son of an earlier caretaker on the property, whose last name was House, who built the House house for his son. It helped spark this father-son poem.
Pond
Bright
yellow leaves carried by the wind
drift
down to the water of the pond
where
their reflection seems to rise
from
the depth towards the surface
like
fish coming up to feed,
and
one real leaf and its shadow wed
in
a dimple that slowly widens
in
concentric circles until it thins
to
the barest wrinkle of water
that
carries the leaf with it to the far
side
into the reflected sky.
Below
the floating leaf the golden koi
swish
in a current of their own, and butterflies—
yellow
sulphurs and one golden monarch—rise
off
the water like leaves falling upward in the wind
back
to the swaying branches above the pond.
The
wallet, richly tooled with an arabesque
of
interwoven scrolls and intricate lines that coiled
into
a lariat on the front and a snake on the back
and edged all round with braided darker
leather,
held inside on the right in fine
Spenserian script
my father’s name and below it
“Attorney-at-Law”
and his office address. Opposite, in the
same hand,
was another name: James Presley,
the maker’s name, the condemned murderer
my father represented. Just his name, the
same size
as my father’s, but no address, no title,
no admission, not even an indication he
had made
the wallet for his lawyer.
I saw Presley
once through glass in the visitors’ room,
seeing a faint reflection of my own face,
ghostly pale and as indistinct as a daytime
moon.
floating over his. I didn’t dare ask
about Elvis, whom
he claimed as distant kin or about the
murder,
and when he leaned towards the louvered
grill and, pointing to me, told my father
I was his spitting image, Presley
laughed.
I looked at both men on either side of
the glass
and at my almost invisible reflection.
I was ten then.
And on the tour my father
arranged
with one of the guards I saw where
hangings once were held.
I gripped the lever, now chained and
padlocked, that once dropped
the trapdoor beneath the person in the
noose.
I saw the electric chair through the
window
where witnesses watched executions.
The guard twisted my forearms when he described
tightening the leather straps.
He winked at me, as if it were all
a joke, not a lessons he was driving
home as a favor to my father.
In the car, as we drove out the gate, my
father handed me the wallet.
I admired it and handed it back. No. He wanted me to have it.
My father, not Presley, who obviously
wanted my father
to be the one to think of him each time
he dealt with money.
It was not my father’s style. He would no
more carry the wallet
than wear cowboy boots even if it hadn’t
been too bulky
for the lines of the Italian suits he
favored.
For years
I kept the wallet on my desk, like a book
to consult.
I would open it, consider the names, how
they touched when
the wallet was closed, trying to imagine
Presley bent over
the leather, cutting the meticulous
tooling with a small chisel
or burning it with some kind of hot iron.
I wondered about
the authorities letting him use sharp
tools to make his design
and the names. Some sort of occupational
therapy, I guess,
though he was condemned to die and
unlikely
to need further training to be productive
in the outside world. I wondered too
if the gift had been sincere—some small
token of the fees
he couldn’t pay, the empty wallet perhaps
an indication
of his lack of money, or was the wallet
somehow meant
to be a rebuke, a reminder that my father
had lost the case
and the appeal? The rope, the snake, an
easy code to break,
though perhaps that was just my reading
things into what
may have been the best that Presley could
do to pay
my father back. I took it as a comfort,
as a reminder
that my father often failed and how others
suffered for
those failures, though I didn’t really
need to have something
to remind me of that. I carried it
occasionally later, moving
my identification and money from my more
conventional
wallets I had by then to the one with a
history, a good story behind
it, though one I often elaborated until
I’m not sure what
the truth is anymore about the murder,
the trial, the visit
to the prison, my father even. I only
know for sure I had it
until I wore it out, handling it, tracing
the lines of the names with my fingers,
as if I was making
it myself. It was lost in another crime, a burglary
by someone who must have thought it had
some value,
though I still have James Presley’s old
Bible,
its fake leather binding flaking off,
its back broken, the gold lettering of
his
name on the cover mostly worn away,
a page in the front to indicate it was
presented
by his church at confirmation,
much used perhaps, bent to the shape of
Presley’s hands,
or damaged from being flung
against the walls of his cell, or maybe
both,
the Bible he gave the chaplain on the day
of his execution
to give to my father,
who, having no need for it, passed it on
to me.
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