Trethewey suffered a terrible personal tragedy with the death of her mother. Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough was murdered outside her Atlanta apartment by her second husband, from whom she was divorced. Their son, who was waiting for a school bus at the time, witnessed the murder. Trethewey couldn’t bear to put a headstone on her mother’s gravesite in Gulfport because her surname at death was the same as that of the man who shot her. It would take the dutiful daughter many years to realize that the inscription could record her mother’s maiden name.
Trethewey was just nineteen, a freshman in college, when her mother was killed, but it would take her nearly two decades to figure out how to write about it. She had begun to compose the public poems that would become her third book, Native Guard (2006); they focus on the under-told, mostly undocumented story of Louisiana’s all-Black regiment, which was called to serve in the Civil War. That’s when she began to realize that she could also tell her own painful story. It too should be part of the record.
To place these elegies in context: Trethewey had just moved back to Atlanta to start a teaching position and lived down the street from the courthouse where her stepfather had been sentenced. So too she was coming to the twentieth anniversary of her mother’s death and approaching her own fortieth birthday. That’s how old her mother was when she died. It was a time of reckonings.
Here is “Graveyard Blues,” which appears in the first section of Native Guard. The book is dedicated to the memory of Trethewey’s mother, and one of the epigraphs it opens with comes from a poem by Charles Wright: “Memory is a cemetery / I’ve visited once or twice . . .”
Graveyard Blues
It rained the whole time we were laying her down;
Rained from church to grave when we put her down.
The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.
* * *
When the preacher called out I held up my hand;
When he called for a witness I raised my hand—
Death stops the body’s work, the soul’s a journeyman.
* * *
The sun came out when I turned to walk away,
Glared down on me as I turned and walked away—
My back to my mother, leaving her where she lay.
* * *
The road going home was pocked with holes,
That home-going road’s always full of holes;
Though we slow down, time’s wheel still rolls.
* * *
I wander now among names of the dead:
My mother’s name, stone pillow for my head.
Trethewey recalls that she used to jog in a graveyard where a lot of Confederate soldiers are buried. She sometimes felt that the names on the tombstones were calling out to her. Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” must have been hovering ironically in the background. After all, she opens her poem “Elegy for the Native Guards” with an epigraph from Tate’s poem: “Now that the salt of their blood / Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea.” She thought she was going to write about those soldiers on the day that she suddenly began to pen “Graveyard Blues” and discovered what was truly on her mind.
“Graveyard Blues” has the stoic grief of a blues song. It is bereft and captures the blue note of lamentation. Rita Dove referred to a “syncopated attitude of the blues” in Trethewey’s first book, Domestic Work, and that sense of clipped rhythm, of unexpected accents, also operates here. Trethewey expresses her own unresolved grief through a durable communal form, which gives her a way to process, express, and control her own sorrow. She employs and varies the classical twelve-bar, three-line blues stanza. She also skillfully converts it into flexible iambic pentameter lines and uses triple rhymes to bind each stanza together.
The blues stanza is basically a couplet stretched to three lines. The first line establishes the premise and scene, as in
It rained the whole time we were laying her down;
The second line repeats the first and hammers it in. Trethewey consistently varies the second line to give it a repetitive but also emphatically different valence and meaning. Hence:
Rained from church to grave when we put her down.
The second line drops the subject of the sentence, “It,” and informally encapsulates the narrative time of a funeral. The third line then punches home the experience:
The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.
Notice the close, slightly disconcerting off-rhyme of “down” and “sound.” We are right there standing in the mud with her. The poem has a stark physicality.
There is a grief-stricken story being told in the most condensed way in this poem, which jumps from image to image, almost in flashes, as if the speaker is summoning back the scene in stages. In every stanza, the second line creates a different emphasis. For example, the word “witness” takes on special weight in the second line of the second stanza:
When the preacher called out I held up my hand;
When he called for a witness I raised my hand—
Now we know why the pastor calls out and asks for someone to respond. The first time he does so, the daughter simply holds up her hand, a somewhat passive gesture, but the second time she raises it, which is more active. She is not merely present; she is becoming a witness. The poem then quotes an invented line of scripture, a generalized statement that contrasts with the specificity of the daughter’s grief:
Death stops the body’s work, the soul’s a journeyman.
Throughout “Graveyard Blues” Trethewey uses the weather as a barometer of feeling. The rain externalizes what the speaker is going through; it emphasizes the horror. The sun comes out just as the daughter turns and walks away from her mother’s grave. But it’s one thing to say that the sun comes out, and it’s another to emphasize that it “Glared down on me as I turned and walked away.” The sun puts a glaring light on the daughter’s feeling of survivor’s guilt as she departs and leaves her mother in the ground: “My back to my mother, leaving her where she lay.” The feeling is clinched by the triple rhymes (“away,” “away,” “lay”).
The poem moves through the time line of a funeral, from the church to the graveyard and on to the journey home, with a chiasmus in the second line (“going home,” “home-going”) of the penultimate stanza:
The road going home was pocked with holes,
That home-going road’s always full of holes;
Though we slow down, time’s wheel still rolls.
The bumpy road signals the speaker’s distress. The third line has an almost allegorical feeling about time: “Though we slow down, time’s wheel still rolls.”
The poem concludes with a final click, a clenched, indented couplet:
I wander now among names of the dead:
My mother’s name, stone pillow for my head.
Not until the final two lines do we understand that this blues poem is also a rhyming sonnet—indeed, it has the hard closure of the couplet that concludes a Shakespearean sonnet. The poem thus becomes a hybrid of an African American form and a European/Anglo-American one.
Rereading it as a sonnet, which here consists of four three-line stanzas and a final couplet, we can also see that structurally the volta, or turn, so characteristic of the sonnet form, comes after the sixth line: “The sun came out when I turned to walk away.” The way the speaker turns away from her mother’s grave is thus enacted through the form and signaled by the word “turned” itself. We recall that Wordsworth, in “Surprised by joy,” his sonnet to his dead daughter, also used this word to enact the movement of turning: “I turned to share the transport . . .” But whereas Wordsworth’s grief is expressed by turning toward his daughter and then discovering that she is not there, the grief of Trethewey’s speaker is expressed by turning away from her mother’s grave. She feels the guilt of walking off and leaving the cemetery.
As a sonnet, Trethewey’s poem ends conclusively, but as a blues poem the form is not completed because the last tercet is missing a final line. Thus, we leave thi
s blues poem with a sense of something forever left off or missing, a final absence, a permanent silence. Formally speaking, the poem comes to a ringing conclusion even as it ends in an open-ended way.
“Graveyard Blues” concludes with an image of bleak or frosty comfort. The daughter wishes to put her head down on her mother’s gravestone but recognizes that it is stony and cold. Trethewey has said that she was later filled with remorse for the way that the form had led her to sacrifice the truth. That’s because at the time she wrote this poem, her mother did not yet have a stone or any other grave marker. Perhaps the couplet led her to an emotional truth that was not literally true. As recompense, Trethewey decided to write another poem, “Monument,” to undo the seeming falsehood of “Graveyard Blues.” While doing so, she realized that she should combine, in one book, her poems dedicated to the Native Guards and the elegies for her mother. She was tending to the memories. She was trying to create for them all a lasting monument.
Camille Dungy
* * *
“Requiem”
(2006)
In the summer of 1998, Camille Dungy was teaching in England at a summer enrichment program for US high school students. On a field trip to Bath they witnessed a horrific accident. An Italian tourist, or a tourist who they presumed was Italian, looked the wrong way in a roundabout, stepped off the curb, and was instantly killed by a tour coach. Everyone was horrified by what they had just seen—and morbidly fascinated. “You’re a poet,” one of Dungy’s friends and fellow teachers challenged her. “You have to write about this.”
Dungy took this as a charge. She has said in interviews that she felt a great responsibility to memorialize what she had witnessed and the life that had ended in her presence. But she couldn’t find a way into the poem. She looked at the accident from a variety of angles, but they all failed. Nearly a year later, in the spring of 1999, she attended a concert of Mozart’s Requiem in Boston, where she was living at the time. One of her friends was in the choir. During the performance, a question came to her and she wrote it down on the concert program: “Will you believe me when I tell you it was beautiful, my left leg turned to uselessness and my right shoe flung some distance down the road?” It seemed a voice had spoken in her head. But the poem stalled there.
Dungy moved to Virginia and temporarily forgot about the poem. But then she received a package with a recording of the concert she had attended. She sat in her office, playing it over and over again, and that’s when the poem finally took shape. She was writing to the music. Formally, Dungy decided to write her own “Requiem” in the manner she had received Mozart’s Requiem. She divided it into five stanzas to represent the five movements of Mozart’s piece. The italicized and indented three-line epigraph, which seems like a quotation from a psalm but is really a piece of her own writing, represents the “Ave Maria” that opens the mass.
There is a religious element and feeling to this poem, which relates to the sacredness of life. That feeling was released when Dungy listened to Mozart’s Requiem, his setting of a mass for the souls of the dead, his act of remembrance. She shaped it into twenty-eight lines, a double sonnet.
Requiem
Sing the mass—
light upon me washing words
now that I am gone.
The sky was a hot, blue sheet the summer breeze fanned
out and over the town. I could have lived forever
under that sky. Forgetting where I was,
I looked left, not right, crossed into a street
and stepped in front of the bus that ended me.
* * *
Will you believe me when I tell you it was beautiful—
my left leg turned to uselessness and my right shoe flung
some distance down the road? Will you believe me
when I tell you I had never been so in love
with anyone as I was, then, with everyone I saw?
* * *
The way an age-worn man held his wife’s shaking arm,
supporting the weight that seemed to sing from the heart
she clutched. Knowing her eyes embraced the pile
that was me, he guided her sacked body through the crowd.
And the way one woman began a fast the moment she looked
* * *
under the wheel. I saw her swear off decadence.
I saw her start to pray. You see, I was so beautiful
the woman sent to clean the street used words
like police tape to keep back a young boy
seconds before he rounded the grisly bumper.
* * *
The woman who cordoned the area feared my memory
would fly him through the world on pinions of passion
much as, later, the sight of my awful beauty pulled her down
to tears when she pooled my blood with water
and swiftly, swiftly washed my stains away.
Randall Jarrell’s stunning little anthology piece “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is the main precursor text to Dungy’s “Requiem.” The close of her poem echoes his last line: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” But whereas Jarrell’s five-line poem is an allegory about the cruelty and human waste of the government war machine (“From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State”), Dungy’s poem is about a random, accidental death. She is determined to make some purposeful meaning out of it, to see it as something much more than a senseless accident.
Dungy’s most fundamental decision was to speak from the point of view of the man killed by the bus. What he sees is what she believes he might have seen, what Dungy herself observed that day: “The sun was a hot, blue sheet the summer breeze fanned / out and over the town.” The speaker is an Italian man, but he doesn’t sound particularly Italian or male; he doesn’t have a personal history. He sounds like the poet ventriloquizing him—he presses the s’s and sh in “sun,” “sheet,” and “summer”; he repeats the harde’s in “sheet” and “breeze,” the o’s in “out” and “over”—which is to say that he is filled with her verbal skills, her emotions, the beauty and the horror she feels in witnessing his death.
Dungy takes on his persona and immediately declares, “I could have lived forever” (this sentence, or part of a sentence, hovers out there for a long time before dropping to the next line) “under that sky.” But instead of living forever, the speaker makes a small, fatal mistake and turns the wrong way. He had forgotten where he was and “stepped in front of the bus that ended me.”
Everything in this poem is narrated from the point of view of a dead man, a corpse. This marks it as what the scholar Diana Fuss labels “a corpse poem,” which embodies a curious paradox: “A dead body and a poetic discourse are mutually incompatible, two formal states each precluding the other.” The speaker has a subjectivity, an interior life, which the cadaver can no longer claim. As Lucille Clifton did in her poem “jasper texas 1998,” Dungy overcomes the improbability of the situation to animate the dead body, which speaks.
Every corpse poem is undergirded by its own literal impossibility. In the second stanza, the speaker raises the issue of his own credibility by twice asking: “Will you believe me . . . ?” This is perhaps an anxiety buried in the unconscious of the poem. There is something obstinate and counterintuitive about the speaker’s insistence that “it was beautiful,” that he had never been so in love with anyone and everyone.
What we are meant to believe—what the speaker tells and instructs us—is that the horrifying scene is also, in some crucial way, beautiful. There is unexpected beauty in the horror. At the precise moment of his death, the speaker falls in love with the mortal world. To use Wallace Stevens’s statement, “Death is the mother of beauty.” Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say here that death becomes the mother of beauty. The poet writing this poem very much wants to believe this.
In Dungy’s poem, the accidental death of a tourist puts a burden on all the people who witness it. In the third stanza, th
e actions of these nameless, inadvertent participants take on a harried, almost ceremonial quality, as if they have become a chorus in the lyric, which itself becomes an unlikely dirge, a service for the dead. Both the speaker and the poet who voices herself through him are outsiders to the community. We see the passersby as a stranger sees them.
As if in slow motion, we observe an old man carefully guiding his shaking wife through the crowd. She is riven and sacked by observing the speaker reduced to “the pile / that was me.” The line break hovers over the lifeless word “pile.” Notice how the poem moves from one person to the next and introduces a religious feeling as we cross from the fourth to the fifth stanzas: “And the way one woman began a fast the moment she looked // under the wheel. I saw her swear off decadence. / I saw her start to pray.” The short declarative sentences narrate a religious conversion. Something sacred is invoked.
The poem concludes with an image of the woman who is sent to cordon the area and clean the street. She uses words sharply, “like police tape,” to warn a young boy who unknowingly comes around “the grisly bumper.” The last stanza is a single sinuous sentence. The language becomes heightened as the male speaker projects himself into the woman’s point of view. Notice the repetition of f ’s and p’s as the speaker states how she “feared my memory / would f ly him through the world on”—the phrase seems like something out of Hopkins—“pinions of passion.” That’s because she fears that he, in the future, will experience what she herself does. The poem closes with a rousing statement about that experience, from the perspective of the deceased speaker: “the sight of my awful beauty pulled her down / to tears when she pooled my blood with water / and swiftly, swiftly, washed my stains away.” The line breaks pull the poem downward, like a woman kneeling, and the alliterative sounds—“pulled” and “pooled,” “water” and “washed,” “swiftly” and “stains”—pressure it to a fever pitch. The repetition of “swiftly” enacts the motion of doing something quickly and repetitively even as it slows the poem down.
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 43
