I Closed My Eyes to Tell That Story Poems by Erin Veith
This book was designed by Phil McCollam http://philrules.com Body copy is set in Garamond Headings are set in News Gothic Condensed
International Standard Book Number X-XXXXX-XXX-X Library of Congress Control Number XX-XXXXX Printed in the United States of America Copyright Š 2014 by Erin Veith Latham House Press Buckhannon, WV All Rights Reserved
Poems 1 Headed Home 2 Estuary 3 Frontier 4 Thicket 5 This is Origami Now 6 Limit 7 Disease 8 Wound * 13 — & I Said I Am the Hurricane 14 I Am Claiming It 15 Accident 16 Clean 17 On Creating the Portrait of A Drunk Girl in Bed 18 Whimsy 19 Relapse Means I Forgot to Be Better 20 I Closed My Eyes to Tell That Story * 25 A Dream Guide for Loss 26 Hinge or I Moved on to After 27 Form 28 What I Mean by Bravery 29 Big Storm Comin’ 30 Urgency Is What I Added to the Landscape 31 This Is the Poem to Break Your Heart 32 It’s All in the Technique 33 Jesus, How Irresistible * 34 Notes 35 Acknowledgements
Headed Home Here is the driveway, a row of dogwood. It isn’t lovely this time of year. The path to righteousness must be paved even before we are ready. I am recycling a moment: one October evening, little house, cars in the yard. I long for someone (me, perhaps) to say absolutely. A woman hands me a coin, presses it to my palm like a prayer. I have been abandoned. (—scratch that—) I feel like I have been abandoned. All forms of landscape are autobiographical, thank goodness. Just so we’re clear, the darkness I’m about to show you is all mine.
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Estuary I was born in one of those blink-and-you’ve-missed-it towns. That’s the obvious part. I ate at a dark wooden table in a kitchen with yellow chickens on the walls. My father shot guns in the yard; he was always shooting. Then, the threat of bees— their bodies hunched over a bit of clover. In July, the only cold ground to stand on (or press my cheek against) was in the garage. Only so much of the outside creeps in, like the blacksnake in my bedroom one Thursday that year. I was small then, but I can still trace the path of its body in the carpet, how effortlessly its curving happened.
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My father, forgotten in the branches, was the first tragedy. What I did after, the second.
— & I Said I Am the Hurricane Shame is the best way to start: the moment of injury or the moment after—a synapse—the blood’s path making itself just for me and the world, a highway doubling back for the living, aerial view, the sky dizzying as ever, my pain nomadic, thinly clothed and wandering. I had to arrive where I first ended, creep back to the body, hover into a high branch and nest. Are you troubled? I blink back to July on a porch, our porch, and you speak in past tense, my body caught in so many blackout afternoons, a version of me you struggle to hold onto, but you do not say we, only then or you were drunk, like I remember how it feels.
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Notes The title of the manuscript was inspired by a phone conversation with Megan Lemcke. In “Headed Home”: The line, “All forms of landscape are autobiographical,” is from Charles Wright’s book Appalachia (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998). In “Limit”: The phrase, “everyone broken, including me,” is adapted from “For everyone who got broken, / Including me.” The original line is from Irene McKinney’s book Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? (West Virginia Wesleyan College Press, 2013). In “Big Storm Comin’”: The phrase, “every sequence has a consequence,” is from Charles Wright’s book Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977-1987 (University of Michigan Press, 1988). The titles “Big Storm Comin’” and “It’s All in the Technique” were a result of conversations with Finley Maxwell (age 2) and Aengus Maxwell (age 5), respectively.
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Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of the following publications, in which these poems first appeared, sometimes in different versions and under different titles. The Aurorean: “A Dream Guide for Loss” The Citron Review: “Urgency Is What I Added to the Landscape” Greensboro Review: “This Is Origami Now”
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