This week's poet of the people is Ashley Crout. I met Ashley a few months ago and since then I have heard her do readings and had lunch with her and another friend. It is like we have known each other for years.
You can hear her this Wednesday at Mind Gravy. 04/10 - 7 pm Cool Beans.
Bio
Ashley Crout was born in Charleston, SC, and graduated from Bard College and the MFA program at Hunter College. She is the recipient of a poetry grant from The Astraea Foundation, has received awards from The Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation and is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Atticus Review and Dodging the Rain, among others. She lives in Greenville, SC, with her hound, Stella.
CLOSED ADOPTION
All I knew of my birth mother then
was the fierce red color of her hair
that burned away any usual humanness,
her build still slight with youth
and her love of the horses she rode
across the mind of my childhood.
I filled my room with horse figurines
so that we would have something shared
between us when she came one day
to find me. But sometimes what is missing,
does not know how to return. You find
yourself seeking the safety of certain devotion
such as the loyalty of vaguely human horses
like the ones in westerns who know how
to head home if ever they are separated
from their cowboy in the course of the story.
I cannot end this with even a brief singular nod
of acknowledgement. I saw her once
decades too late, the woman who carried my life
until it could be separated from hers.
I recognized her the way I know myself
in the mirror. She moved as I moved. Her face
was trapped in my face. I would not let her out.
I had never resembled anyone. You would think
it would have connected us. I was once
brand new in the world. I needed her then
is what I said during our single intersection.
She had no language for how she heard this,
did not respond. I considered being devastated,
then I decided to take my life back.
I pictured all my horses restless in the barn,
alerting me to a dangerous presence, a coming
storm indifferent to my safety, my survival,
the interdependent structures of my house.
You’ve grown old, I might say. I will outlive you.
SONNET IN A TIME OF CONTAGION
A slant rain deadens the night-dark highway.
There’s something I’m trying to leave behind.
In some yesterday, a new disease came.
You now must hold yourself still in stopped time,
stand at a remove from the living world—
seen but unheard, your voice hushed by distance.
Skin on skin touch forbidden, that’s the curse.
You could be coated with it. That’s the dance.
You could look like yourself but carry it,
sicken someone, accidental murder.
You could hate it but find you’ve married it.
This has happened before. It grows further.
I mean your death could stand right next to you
and you wouldn’t know it. You wouldn’t move.
WOMAN WHO SAID $37 MILLION JACKPOT WIN HAD RUINED HER LIFE FOUND DEAD IN HER HOME
And so it seems you cannot buy your way out of lonely.
How many years did she string her
luckiest numbers together looking
to match the winning sequence
before the unlikely day that she did.
She had not meant an avalanche of dollars
but the people she believed they would draw
towards her. She had never before been special
to anyone. She had outlived an entire line
of women who aged unwitnessed, unmentioned
by any voice in any room.
Some tragedies are about what does not happen.
Maybe she sat in her usual house, and the money
overwhelmed her with its possibles, its faces
of former rulers as immovable as the dead become.
Maybe she waited for the townsfolk to begin
to swarm their singular greeding hive mind
at her property’s edge. She dreamed of crowds
that at once would know her, at once would love her
if only they all drew together imitating an embrace.
There is no account of the how it had,
as she is said to have said, left her life a ruin.
Maybe it could never have been enough
for the madness of hands sticky with want
that surrounded her mother’s mother’s house
and outstretched their temporary mouths
revealing the entire top rows of their teeth.
Maybe all those who beamed at her briefly,
just polite enough to make their faces grateful,
bought garish gleaming boats and sailed away.
Maybe she felt smaller then as if seen
from a distance until she was almost an absence
like the failure of light outside her windows.
Even her body left her alone in her sleep.
Authorities found her days too late – unable
to separate what once she was, a physical house
abandoned, from the thin sheet she’d drawn to her
as one does when desperate for the necessity
of touch. Maybe, in her wealth of grief, she submitted
to sleep so fully, its shutdown of conscious
calculated wants, that it kept her body in such
a stillness that it never moved again. Maybe
she lost all knowledge of how to lift herself out
again into the gold sun, the sight of its glare
like coins placed on the eyes of the dead.
LAND DWELLLERS
When you are inhabited by a geography, its waters –
the animal scent of the marsh, the brine-soak
of the ocean – rise into your mouth. You swallow.
You are never not swallowing. Its land hums under
your feet. You cannot place the song. Its land loosens
into silt. The rust red dust sinks, is sinking, until it settles
on the flat of your diaphragm. To breathe, you have to
lift entire cities as if holding an offering up to God, excavate
your body from the roots of the family that named you.
You never had their thick drawl in your mouth, how it
stretches every word backwards into a story that glories
the past. Your mother and your mother’s mother could
have been someone but they only sat watching the world.
Slatted rocking chairs cast them forward then back
then back. The slowed sound of their language lingers,
like the crushed lavender scent at their necks, long
after it means whatever it meant. Your chest is resonant
with human voice. You are both the house and the one
locked out, your flushed face cooling against the windows.
One day you will run. One day you will run back
for the same reasons that you left. You are populated
both with those whose sins are unforgivable and those
who prophet a God to them. Every one of them, every last
one of them, is yours. Every goddamn one of them is you.
