(After Carson McCullers)
There is a girl who droops on the back step of a Georgia farmhouse hunched on the sagging stoop chickweed straining toward sunlight through wooden slats
She picks the scabs off her knees
sweat tickling the nape of her neck
swatting at gnats
that wander from the manure pile
watching the bland, brown cow
flick horseflies with her tail
in the field by the barn
Having snagged one of her father’s cigarettes
she balances it between slim fingers
breathing the smoke in deeply
her lips buzzing, sunken chest ignited
Her eyes already hollow caverns
a bulbous nose protrudes from childish cheeks
hair colorless as rainwater in a ditch
skin a sickly grey hue
In this house there was once wealth, but now shutters slouch, doors slant on hinges white paint flakes off wooden window frames dormer slicked with mold foundation sinks into damp soil There’s no money to pay the nanny so the girl avoids her mother— hanging laundry on the backyard line— who she knows will soon ask her to mind her little sister Her older brother’s white collared shirt clings to her gangly arms once starched stiff, but now the linen limp and worn
She could walk the flat, dusty lanes
swarmed with June’s green lushness
under the harsh gaze of the matronly sun
past sharecropper shacks and cottonfields
to the town with its boarded-up storefronts
idle old men lingering on porches
large-bosomed, perspiring ladies
with their feathered hats and opinions
harassing her about her bruised shins, boyish hair
her unladylike sneakers
But what’s the point
in this forgotten town, this town
the world abandoned long ago
crumbling with brokenness and boredom
Every night, in her attic bed beneath the slow circling fan she scrapes her mind with a spoon If only she could talk to someone about how the liquid notes of the Franck piano prelude— overheard on the radio— drip into her heart, dig into her flesh pool like raindrops streaming down the windowpane in the breezeless afternoon mixing with red clay dust and make her want to sob About how the piano’s swollen keystrokes, and the words emerging from the typewriter—
the one hidden on the back porch, her only place of solitude— intertwine in her heart, get caught in her throat that clenches with longing The same longing as when she glimpses the elegant woman the one she spies sometimes in the store but does not know by name the woman with the slender waist hair pulled tightly in a black bun who passes so close she can smell the talcum powder and lavender soap on her skin How love and music and words carve up her body hollow out her limbs stretch her with beauty and silvered sorrow with wet loneliness weave her with nylon strings of melody crisscrossed like blades of switchgrass The thrill she gets from seeing her mind spilled on the page words of passion and pain coalescing from her head to her fingertips in a way that could never come out right from her mouth
Too young to know she has stories buried within her that one day she will pull up her bootstraps of bravery will journey far from this place make a new life inhabit cities across the sea
But this tired town, this grieving house the black-haired woman who makes her ache will return to her in dream, and in ink, on page after page She doesn’t know she will spend her life loving— loving women, loving men yet unnamed and that love decays like a humid Georgia farmhouse and that sorrow won’t let her be will haunt her pursue her through decades like a song
She needs to talk
but there is no one to speak with
about these things
so she sits alone in her dusty sneakers
on the back stoop
the smoke billowing
from her girlish, frowning lips
