[editor’s note.
In the wake of Marthe
Reed’s sudden and unexpected death earlier this month, I am opening Poems and
Poetics to a commemoration of her work and spirit through the posting of an
excerpt from a new book now awaiting publication. I had known Marthe Reed first as my student
at UCSD San Diego and later as a dear friend and greatly admired poet. I would surely have published the following
work (“Here and Not”), so expressive of her poetics and her project as a whole,
under any circumstances, but coming so soon after her death, the sense of loss
colors whatever reading I now give it. A
fragment comes to mind from one of the poems in Ark
Hive called “Threnody” [lament], also in
this volume:
moving
displacements
twist
into light
warm
water’s
melancholy
weather
like
an afterimage of rain
where
I find myself
bruised
awake
giving
way
Writes Amish Trivedi, assistant editor
of this page and fellow poet, by way of introduction & tribute:
“The text presented
here is from Marthe’s Reed’s Ark Hive, forthcoming posthumously from The Operating System. A poetic approach to life in south Louisiana, it’s no wonder
that Reed quotes poet C.D. Wright at the start of the work as Wright’s work
covering south Louisiana could no doubt be seen as a necessary prerequisite to
Reed’s own project. In the opening pages, Reed approaches her predicament as if
she were a researcher placed in a foreign land, situating herself among her
surroundings, in the midst of a condition of place that is both physically
distant and so very different from the places she had previously lived. From
there, she leans into language, the language of water, of floods and earth
reclaimed, only to be lost again as the seasons change in places that are far
away, the words occasionally scattered across the pages like the silt that
drives the Mississippi water to the Gulf of Mexico.
”Ark Hive
is the memoir of a person but it is also the narrative of a place, how it came
to exist in the time that Reed was living there. We traverse the geography as
we traverse the culture, one affected deeply by Hurricane Katrina and also the
governmental response to that disaster. Here the language is erased, something
that nearly happened somewhere between the storm and the individuals in charge
of helping those caught in the middle. The book ends in another crisis — one
for her as ‘nomadic wanderer’ and for the Louisiana coast, changed by the oil
spewing from the bottom of the ocean that no one could seemingly stop.
“While south
Louisiana went through change, so did Marthe, this project tying those changes
together, through her own choices of form and thought and language to a kind of
self-identification through place, through shared traumas. This was a place
once foreign that by the end is reflective of the journey of an individual poet
among many who witnessed along with her.
“Marthe Reed passed
away on April 10th with Ark Hive scheduled as part of The
Operating System’s 2019 “cohort,” a word choice Marthe would no doubt have
loved for its sense of comradery among writers and those who publish them,
something she embodied for the rest of us.”]
Here and Not
However briefly I
find myself in a strange place, I am intent on locating myself; where I came from
at this point is portable; I carry it with me. — C.D. Wright
I was not there, yet I was
there.
—Ernest Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
“Hub
City,” center of Acadiana and straddling the Vermillion River, Lafayette lies
almost due west of New Orleans across the Atchafalaya Basin. The basin, formed
by the Mississippi as it laid down successive depositional
lobes—Sale-Cypremort, Teche, and Lafourche—the great river switching back and
forth finding the shortest route to the Gulf, giving rise to the whole of south
Louisiana along the way. If not for the Army Corps of Engineers, its locks and
levees, the Mississippi would now enter the Gulf by way of the Atchafalaya
Basin and River.
My
own route to Lafayette took the long way around: from Western Australia by way
of Indiana, by way of San Diego, by way of Providence, Rhode Island, by way of
San Diego earlier on, by way of Central California farm, an almond orchard in
the countryside near Escalon. Neither
here nor there, though here nonetheless: eleven years in Lafayette. When the
jet landed in New Orleans, July 2002, stepping outside our eye-glasses
immediately fogged up, as when in winter elsewhere we had come in from the
cold. Summer humidity in Louisiana does not rest, the evenings no less
unrelenting than midday. Tomato plants give up come July, the heat of
mid-morning through most of the night sapping their resilience. Wake up, stand
outside in the shade, sweat. Summer teaches us to slow down, have a sno-cone:
plan to exercise come winter. Here in the wet, green tangles everywhere in
summer. Up telephone poles and along the wires, across bridges, through gaps in
the asphalt and cracks in the sidewalk (where there are sidewalks, sometimes),
wherever earth gathers unbidden in human spaces. No rooting it out. Green.
Green verges beside roads and highways, ferns profligate across oaks branches, moss
over wood railings, over brick and rendered walls. Green rice fields, green
bottomland forest, green coastal seas, green marsh grass—prairie
tremblant—shifting in the wet.
Being
in, though not of this place, by what permission do I write about it, here
where I live(d)? After school, I listen
to the men cutting hair at Ike’s Barber Shop, my child sitting high in the red chair
listening also. Their talk flows around me, unfathomable, a French I can
neither parse nor piece together, though it holds me still listening, as to the
sound of water tumbling over root and rock. I overhear folk chatting in
Poupart’s Bakery, cups clinking against saucers, while I order epi or baguette,
the beignets and hand pies calling from the counter. Français cadien. Old world
French, 17th Century and code-switching French, ‘Cadien. Mixed. Chatoui. Rat du
bois. Bequine, plaquemine, rodee.
Suce-fleur. Up the bayou. Make the bahdin. Five million nutra rats eating up
the coast.
A
friend invites us to dinner, her home a circle of rooms leading one into the
next. No center, only the circuit: kitchen to living room to bedroom to bedroom
to back room to kitchen. Did you miss me? The porch ceiling, painted “haint”
blue, hints at sky warding off spirits who cannot cross water—Gullah knowledge
carried across the south. Blue ceilings guard against insects also, mosquitos
plying the air, owning the evening.
I
walk the woods spying for raccoon tracks (chatoui, cat yes), armadillo burrows,
passerine fliers stopping over. Phoebes, flycatchers, nuthatches, sparrows. I
purchase guidebooks for native trees and plants, native birds. In my neighbor’s
yard, bottle-brush hosts brown thrashers and ruby-throated hummingbirds; I once
spotted a Baltimore Oriole, orange-and- black-bodied, among it brushes.
Magnolia and live oak line the median of our street. In spring, the astonishing
scent and size of magnolia blossoms, their sprawling, creamy tepals circling
the green and gold “woman house” (gynoecium) and spikey yellow “man house”
(andoceum). Seed-making and germination. Coming to know this place by means of
books and my feet, listening: Atchafalaya pronounced uh-CHAF- uh-lie- uh not
ATCH-uh- fuh-lie- uh. Puh-CAHN not PEE-can. Sound of squirrel scolds rain from
the oak trees, cher become sha.
Lafayette
is Catholic country, a tradition familiar and not, my mother’s Episcopalian
faith never rooted in me, nor Judaism in my husband. At school, our children
navigate the shoals of piety among the faithful, vegetarianism among the
carnivorous. Kin-less also, we orbit the edges of extended families upon which
community takes form here. Outsiders-in- the-midst. Mike digs in, devouring
mounds of boiled crawfish or trays of oysters half-shelled, drenched in garlic
and tabasco, washed down with a bottle of LA 31. Oysterloaf in New Orleans,
rabbit plate-lunch in Lafayette, hot boudin at the roadside stop. Praising
their grandmothers’ rice and gravy, dirty rice, or corn maque choux and shrimp,
my students gape in disbelief when they discover I do not eat meat or seafood:
“But what do you eat?” they wonder, amazed. Often Lebanese food, heritage of
waves of Maronite immigrants from what would eventually be known as Lebanon. Local eggs, mirlitons, Cajun Country Rice™,
roasted chilies and grilled okra, cornbread, collards, Creole tomatoes,
muscadines. Sweet corn, sweet corn, sweet corn and peaches. Pickled okra, cheese
grits or Zea’s sweet corn grits with roasted red pepper coulis. Wild
blackberries and pick-your- own blueberries in summer, oranges, Meyer lemons,
satsumas in winter.
Writing
Louisiana, outsider-inside, poles of affection and alienation push and pull
against me. An astonishing and richly diverse region, both culturally and
ecologically, its inhabitants have sold paradise for oil and gas money, ignored
the most vulnerable, allowed schools, hospitals, and the poor to bear the
burden of economic crises, crises often manufactured through tax-giveaways to
the affluent and corporations, spending one-time monies as if they would last forever.
Paradise is poverty-stricken, imprisoning its citizens at the highest rate in
the country: 816/100,000 – far greater than even Russia’s 492. Its waters,
polluted and poisoned, its coastlines washing away at perilous rates – 2000
square miles in just 80 years. By 2050, if global temperatures rise just two
degrees, erosion combined with Antarctic ice melt will reduce New Orleans to an
island tied to land by a bridge-cum- highway, the state’s coastline a series of
slender fingers in the sea: New Iberia, Morgan City, Thibodeaux perched upon
the flood.
Still,
who am I to rebuke or challenge, to call into question? Is this my place, too,
outsider-inside? I lived in south Louisiana eleven years, eleven years in love
and in despair. Do those years cede me ground to write? No Cajun, no Creole, no
Louisianan by birth or adoption? By what permission? Only love, heart broken
open again and again.
Sky
over New Orleans, that endless expanse of blue and cloud, high and wide as all
the earth, or so it seems. Walker Percy had the way of it, “a sketch of cloud
in the mild blue sky and the high thin piping of waxwings comes from
everywhere.” The soft mutterings of the Gulf, water lapping sand or mud, Kate
Chopin’s “voice of the sea whispering through the reeds that [grow] in the salt
water pools,” “white clouds suspended idly over the horizon.”
The
mass of vegetation composing a swamp: Lake Martin’s bald cypress, water tupelo,
and live oaks draped in Spanish Moss, seeds afloat on the water. Elm, ash, pecan,
buttonbush, palmetto. Blue-eyed grass
and red buckeye. Invasive bladderwort, water hyacinth, fanwort, coontail, duckweed,
and hydrilla tangle the water where native lotus, yellow and blue flag iris,
red iris and water hyssop thrive also. Powdery thalia. Sedges all along the
lake’s margin. The extraordinary population of birds inhabiting the lake: White
Ibises, Anhingas, Neotropic Cormorants, Snowy Egrets, Little Blue Herons, Green
Herons, Great Egrets, Roseate Spoonbills, Tricolored Herons, Cattle Egrets,
Yellow-crowned Night-Herons, Black-crowned Night-Herons, and Great Blue Herons.
Common Moorhen and American Coots, Belted Kingfishers. Along the levee trail:
Pine and Yellow-throated Warblers, Northern Parula, White-eyed Vireos, and
Indigo Buntings; flycatchers, woodpeckers, nuthatches, wrens. In the air and in
the woods, Sharp-shinned Hawks, Cooper’s Hawks, Broad-winged Hawks, Red-tailed
Hawks, Barn Owls, Eastern Screech-Owls, Great Horned Owls, Barred Owls, Common
Nighthawks. All these species and myriad others, the swamp a-thrum with life.
At
Jefferson and East Main Streets, sunset rises over Pat’s Diner, saffron and
orange tumult of clouds towering. Cajun shaved ice stands: watermelon,
raspberry, orange, and pink lemonade—or wedding cake, guava, piña colada.
Drive-through daiquiri stands where, with a quick bit of tape on the lid,
you’re good to go. Fishing camps at the coast, hunting camps in the woods. Back yard gardens, back yard chickens:
agriculture given way to oil field support. Last Borden’s Ice Cream store in
the nation. Dance the two-step at Blue Moon Saloon to Feufollet and Lost Bayou
Ramblers. Krewes and courirs of Mardi Gras, beads stranded in the limbs of oak
trees all year long. Kayak Lake Chicot, Lake Martin, Lake Fausse Pointe.
Segregated city, de facto segregated schools: poor and black northside,
affluent and white along the river. Meet in the middle? Festivals Acadiens et
Créoles, Festival International. In the city, two public access points to the
Vermillion, its winding swath obscured by private estates. Eluding silence, I write amid fragments, from
journals, photographs, memory, archives—time capsule of a disintegrating world.
A place and an idea impossible to reconstruct, it falls apart inmy hands, its
multitudes. What are these fragments, this narrative? I build a box of loose
pages, maps, stray keys, and seeds. Memento mori. What to keep, what to give
away? What will not come with me, or might? Here and not here, what to make of
this place called home?
An
archive is an act of memory and affection, of loss: adrift upon a skim of oil,
a scud of cloud, fragments on the floating Gulf.
No comments:
Post a Comment