filling with miles of rain.
But when the river sleeps,
her celestial children
break the sticks of gravity,
grab fistfuls of fish
scented amber clotted with diamonds,
ferns, and petalling clouds;
adorn bracelets of woven rain,
rise with islands of sweet grass
and stars strung to their backs
to wander over the scarred surface
of the earth, like their mothers
simply searching for the sea.
“TOWARD THE SEA” FROM BULL’S ISLAND
The wind is an empty place.
You enter expecting something softened by the sea.
A piece of cedar shaped into a body
you once loved. Perhaps the hand that held you
from a distance or the face that simply
held you here. Still moving in and out of time
during the hour when night meets day,
you try to find your bearings.
You pick up objects. You want to remember.
Jagged edged rocks in the palm of your hand.
You hold them up in the moonlight.
They are earthbound, filling with sky.
You walk on further, pause to scoop tiny iridescent
shells, the colors of cream and roses.
Little by little the air brightens into hours,
which are either empty or full of all the things
you love and remember, depending
on which direction the wind is coming from.
“IN THE DREAM OF THE SEA” FROM THE LAND OF MANGO SUNSETS
I call you from the open water
surrounding us, speaking
across divided lives.
I call you
from the waves
that always have direction.
Where strings of morning glory
hold the dunes in place,
I call. In winter,
when wind pours
through cracks in the walls.
Inside, I call
although my voice
has been silent
and dissolving.
In sand
pulled back
into the body
of the sea,
from the blue
house built on sand
balanced at the edge
of the world
I call you.
Drowning stars,
shipwrecks, and broken voices
move beneath the waves.
Here, at the open
center
of my ordinary heart
filling with sounds
of the resurrected,
in the dream
of the sea,
I call you
home.
“TANGLED” FROM PAWLEY’S ISLAND
We return to hear the waves returning
to the beach, one after the other, connecting
us like blood. Long before we came
here, we were listening, remembering
wind, spinning salt, uninterrupted
sunlight. This is a place where dreams
return, fish bones tangled in seaweed.
Rinsed clean and kept, whatever sorrows
come are folded into the sea’s
unbearable secrets.
“SHEM CREEK” FROM SHEM CREEK
I
The swollen earth splits its skin
into waterways, scattered
and winding in every
direction, releasing winds
that carve the land to shreds. Where
sun-filled clumps of spartina,
smoothed into supplicating
rows of heavy bent heads, crowd
the edges of Shem Creek;
marsh wrens build their tiny nests.
As if they are playing hide
and seek, porpoises appear
then disappear below the sea.
Fish birds littering the sky:
egrets, gray herons, and terns,
oyster catchers, pelicans,
gulls diving and turning through
the thick pink tinted air.
II
Weaving through miles of treeless
Subdivisions and strip malls,
the creek gathers everything
from oil, soap, and gasoline
to tires and refrigerators.
After the rain, run-off fills
the oyster beds with dioxins.
Arsenic and mercury
drift through the water in clumps
of invisible clouds
as if no one will notice.
III
Beyond the clutter of traffic,
tourist shops, seafood restaurants,
hotels, bars, and parking lots;
docked shrimp boats bob up and down
beside the docks, where the creek
pours silently into the sea.
“BARRIER ISLAND” FROM ISLE OF PALMS
Where nothing is certain, we awaken
to another night of delicate rain
falling as if it didn’t want to
disturb anyone. On and off
foghorns groan. The lighthouse beacon
circles the island. For hours, melancholy
waves tear whatever land we’re standing on.
Listen to the sea-rain dripping
through fog, suspended at the edge of earth
on a circle of sand where we are always
moving slowly toward land.
A STANZA FROM “THE SOUND OF YOUR OWN VOICE SINGING” FROM FULL OF GRACE
The weight of love is the heaviest burden
you have learned to carry.
In the silence of the heavens,
it’s a dream that wakes you
with the sound of your own voice singing.
About Marjory Wentworth
Marjory Wentworth by Andrew Allen
MARJORY WENTWORTH is the New York Times bestselling author of Out of Wonder, Poems Celebrating Poets (with Kwame Alexander and Chris Colderley). She is the co-writer of We Are Charleston, Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel, with Herb Frazier and Dr. Bernard Powers; and Taking a Stand: The Evolution of Human Rights, with Juan E. Mendez. She is co-editor with Kwame Dawes of Seeking, Poetry and Prose Inspired by the Art of Jonathan Green, and the author of the prizewinning children’s story Shackles. Her books of poetry include Noticing Eden, Despite Gravity, The Endless Repetition of an Ordinary Miracle, and New and Selected Poems. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize six times. She was the poet laureate of South Carolina from 2003 to 2020.
Wentworth serves on the board of advisors at the Global Social Justice Practice Academy, and she is a 2020 National Coalition Against Censorship Free Speech Is for Me Advocate. She teaches courses in writing, poetry, social justice, and banned books at the College of Charleston.
Marjory first met Dottie in the early 2000s at a party; the next evening Dottie showed up at her door with a bottle of wine and Marjory’s first book of poems and asked her if she could include one of her poems in the front of her forthcoming novel, Plantation. Their mutual love of the South Carolina Lowcountry bonded them, and their friendship was immediate. Both women were married to men named Peter; even their children were the same ages, and they remain friends to this day. Sometimes friends become family, and it doesn’t get better than that.
For further information, see marjorytwentworth.net.
Also by Marjory Wentworth
Out of Wonder
We Are Charleston
New and Selected Poems
Taking a Stand
The Endless Repetition of an Ordinary Miracle
Shackles
Despite Gravity
Noticing Eden
Essays and Recipes
Nathalie Dupree
Snails
All I wanted for my thirteenth birthday was to dine at the nearby French r
estaurant like a grown-up. After much parental negotiations, Juli, my best friend since first grade, and I arrived on the local AB&W bus at Longchamps just as it opened for dinner.
Dressed in our Sunday best, we were greeted by the tuxedoed maître d’ as if we were royalty as he led us to our candle-lit white-clad table. Holding out my chair, a waiter whisked a huge napkin onto my lap and a menu nearly as large as I into my hands. After a few moments of being dumbfounded by the multiplicity of choices we asked for help and left ourselves in their capable hands.
And so I began my romance with fresh parsley, garlic, escargots, and French food, a strange and exotic land to a Southern girl. Before they arrived, we could smell them, the garlic and butter also providing a welcome sizzle. “Escargots,” the waiter said, are very special in France.
The fat escargots, served on a scorching hot round tin plate with indentations for the delicate pale shells, seduced us with their aroma before we saw them. The waiter, delighted by our unabashed enthusiasm, taught us how to hold the snails with a special implement, as well how to pull the snails out of their shells with a tiny fork. We sopped the bread in the indentations holding the buttery remains, sated only when every last bit was gone.
Finally, we were presented with little bowls with rose petals floating in them and told to lightly run our fingers in these finger bowls to clean them from our excesses. From then on, I have always relished dipping bread in the garlic butter sauce, even preparing it when there are no escargots. Sometimes I use this sauce with fresh clams; other times mushroom caps; but have been known to eat just fresh home-baked bread, garlic, parsley from my garden, and good butter.
Juli and I had just become of the age to wear stockings and garter belts—long before panty hose. When we left the restaurant it began to rain. We huddled against the wall and hid each other while removing our stockings, one by one, so we wouldn’t get them wet in the torrent that followed while we waited for our bus in the dark. We stood barefoot, against the wall, until finally the child in each of us broke loose, and we danced around, not caring about anything but being grown-up enough to eat out in a restaurant where waiters hovered over us and we could eat anything we liked. The garlic memories danced in our mouths until long after we got home. When I arrived home and Mother asked me about the evening I described it all, especially the escargot and their sauce. “Oh, my,” she said, “I’m surprised you would eat snails.” I didn’t say a word, although it was the first I had realized escargot meant snails in French.
By sophomore year in college, Juli (now called Juliette) and her much older, sophisticated beau (also her boss) took me to dinner in a real candle-lit restaurant, with obsequious waiters and an extensive menu. Iceberg lettuce was the only lettuce I had ever eaten before. That night we had romaine lettuce in our Caesar salad, crisp and cooling, coddled egg sauce (which the waiter prepared at the table for the salad, mashing in the delicate anchovies) and crispy croutons fried in butter. I do not understand how anyone who has had a proper Caesar salad can desecrate it with chicken or other additions.
I ate my second escargots that night, drenched in a thick butter and garlic sauce, each plump snail in its own hollow in the circular plate topped with the sauce and fresh garlic. Juliette’s beau showed us again how to use the escargot tongs and gave us permission to dip our bread into the left-over sauce. As if he could have stopped me.
* * *
The snails I ate in Paris, with real French bread, were better than the ones that I cooked. Or maybe it was being in France for the first time, or just France. Although one can walk through the huge Parisian Chefs Market, Rungis, and see tin plate after tin plate with stuffed snails, ready to be popped in the oven, it is possible to see, even in the modest “Super U’s” of France, five or six kinds of fresh snails on ice, ready to be cooked by the enterprising chef or housewife.
By then I had been eating and cooking snails for years. Not fresh ones, of course, but the kind in a can tucked into a hearty plastic sleeve with delicately striped taupe and white shells piled on top. Fresh parsley was available in grocery stores when no other herbs were, or, alternately, there was dried parsley and butter along with freshly chopped garlic.
How I Got to France
After my annulment at age twenty-five from my first husband, Walter, I decided it was time to go to France. I contacted my old beau, Chester, who was working for a law firm in France, and was promised a place to stay in Paris as well as in Cap d’Antibes in the South of France.
I had never dreamed I would have enough money to go to Europe. I thought it was for other people, and that it would take thousands of dollars. But a girl I had worked with had told me she had traveled to Europe for very little money. There was enough in the settlement from Walter for the trip, barely.
My stepfather, John Cook, retired from the White House Travel Office, but, working at a travel agency, booked this trip. I decided to go to London first, made arrangements to stay at the YWCA, and then fly to see Chester in Cap d’Antibes, traveling on by myself to Paris, where I would stay in Chester’s apartment. All I had to do was provide the airfare and a little more money. It was mid-June in Washington and I dressed in a shocking yellow—near chartreuse—sleeveless summer dress. It was my first international trip and I was late to the gate where Mother and John were anxiously and angrily awaiting to see me off. I was the last one on the plane. The stewardess (as they were then called) huffed at me for being late and told me where to sit. I sat down in the front of the plane, second seat back, next to an Englishman.
We were asked if we wanted anything to drink and I said “No,” quite firmly.
After I had turned down escargots, foie gras, lobster, and other grand foods, the Englishman could stand it no longer.
“Why aren’t you eating and drinking?” he asked. “Are you sick? It’s a long flight.”
“I’m on a very tight budget and I don’t want to spend money on the airplane. I want to save it to spend when we arrive!”
He was a very attractive man, much older than I, but not overwhelming in any way. “But everything in First Class is free,” he said.
“But I’m not in First Class. I have the cheapest seat you can get.”
“No,” he said, “you are in First Class. I am in First Class, so you must be, too.”
I was furious. I had told John to get me the cheapest tickets possible, and now I was in First Class. How could that be? I could see dollars floating out the window and I called the stewardess over.
“Am I in First Class?” My tone was belligerent.
She looked a bit stunned.
“Yes,” she said. “Can I get you something?”
“Yes. I don’t want to be in First Class. Could I get a seat in back and get some money returned?”
“Well, no, once you are ticketed you are ticketed.”
“Look at my ticket, then. Surely I’m not in First Class!”
She perused my ticket and my boarding card. “Your Boarding Card has you seated in First Class, although your ticket is for coach.”
“But am I paying more? I didn’t want to pay more!”
We wrangled about for a while, and finally the Englishman said, “Look here, why don’t you settle down, sit back, and enjoy it. If you were seated here by mistake, or someone arranged it, it is still where you are sitting.” He turned to the stewardess, who was a bit flummoxed by my anger. “Would you please bring champagne and escargots for the lady? She has a little time to make up for!” That was that. I flew First Class to Europe, probably bounced up either because someone knew my stepfather, or because I was late and they had given my seat away.
I ate escargots, caviar, and lobster and even drank a bit. The Englishman told me everything I was to see and do in London, enjoying introducing me to the world. I was deliriously happy. I didn’t even have to pay for dinner, which was delicious.
When we arrived, he insisted on my sharing his taxi, and took me on a tour of London before shaking my hand and dropping me off a
t the YWCA, where I had a clean and bright sunny room with a thick and puffy quilt to tuck me in. I went to Harrod’s Department Store, with its incredible food hall. I was freezing in my sleeveless dress, realizing that June in England was not necessarily hot as it was in DC, and purchased a pink wool dress and jacket on the fifth floor. I then went down to the Food Hall, where I shopped and ate. I’ve never lost my love for England and Englishmen, returning in a few years to live happily for two years and study at the London Cordon Bleu.
But France, ah, France. France enveloped me with passion for food and romance. Never had I been so overcome with either. I was captivated by the country’s sensuality by the end of my first day there.
Chester and a couple of his other houseguests met me at the airport in Nice. We drove up to lunch at La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul de Vence. I was enchanted and overwhelmed. Saint-Paul de Vence has a breathless view of a valley that plummets down through thickets of trees and wildlife. The Colombe d’Or’s vast collection of paintings on its walls were by some of the most famous of the Impressionists who had lived nearby, eaten there, and traded their paintings for meals. Small wonder, a meal there was the cost of an oil painting.
My first meal in France consisted of crudités (my first experience with fresh French produce, lovingly picked and presented), grebe (a tiny bird) pâté, and crusty French bread. We asked for butter, and it was sweeter than cream.
It was from Chester’s cook in his Cap d’Antibes home that I learned the marvels of French home cooking. After I ate my first omelet I rushed into the kitchen to learn how to make one. I pestered the cook until she showed me, breaking the fresh eggs into a bowl, whisking them with drops of water and pouring them into sizzling butter in an omelet pan. She poured it around the pan, made a little motion to move the runny part under the cooked part, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and within minutes it was done and flipped, folded, into the dish. I ate it, too, just to taste it again.
Following the second omelet, I sat down to meet French lettuce, tender, leafy, with no crunch but enormous flavor, each leaf barely coated with vinaigrette, for the first time, sitting outside under a grape arbor, a few blocks from the Riviera. I was in heaven, not France. Every pore in my tongue seemed alive, ready to savor every taste of food.
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