Ann Fisher-Wirth and Beth Ann Fennelly
Beth Ann Fennelly: This poem felt collaborative because our lives felt collaborative--there were all of these overlapping circles of experience that fed off of each other and resulted in intense interaction. It seemed natural that Ann and I would then write jointly about our joined experiences. One thing I've learned about collaborative writing is it isn't so much that you're doing "half the work" as you're doing a different kind of work, feeding off of and feeding a mutual energy that can take on a very powerful rhythm.
Ann Fisher-Wirth: Yoga has been at the center of my life for decades, but until this poem I had never really tried to write about it. Beth Ann and I were doing yoga together nearly every dawn, before the bugs came out, and her suggestion that we collaborate on a poem became a wonderful opportunity for me to celebrate our friendship. My part of the poem also headed off in a slightly different direction, as I began to experience the heartbreaking contrast between the peace that yoga offers and my dread at the first signs of Bush's insane march toward war.
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Yoga in the Mornings, Poetry in the Afternoons
I. Downward Dog, Happy Baby, Cobra
Faulkner planted cedars along his front walk
to keep malaria-rich mosquitoes from his estate.
But here in Mississippi in fetid July, nothing’s kept out
that wants in. It’s dawn. I’m here because I want in
to my body, because I want to learn yoga
from you, because you want to teach it. I’m here,
though it’s muggy, though we must look funny
(if only to Faulkner’s whiskey-besotted ghost)
though chiggers have eaten into my ankles
and I’ve lacquered them with nail polish
to suffocate the bugs, as you taught me.
A strange cure. As is yoga--which I’d ridiculed.
Now I don’t skip class, even when I wake woolly
from the previous night’s wine.
After, walking home, gathering and inhaling
from my husband’s arms the warm-bread body
of our newly-risen baby, lines of sleep
still mapping out her face, I wonder--
is it the bug spray, or the deep breathing,
or this strange, fast friendship that leaves me
dazed and flushed and spry-limbed as a cat?
Is it yoga, or is it you, your frugality and red bra straps,
home-ground polenta, toe rings, and goddess pose,
your expert read of my drafts or downward dog,
your raptures for the pulpy kelp off Point Reyes, California,
your ex-hippy glamour--you’d laugh, but it seems like glamour
to one who came of age in argyled Reaganomics--
No, I say, when asked if I’ve ever written collaboratively,
but then what have we been doing, all this heatwrung summer,
stretching on dry grass, See where your boundaries are,
you say, then work past them, stretching on dry
pages, our poems throwing sparks, kindling each other’s--
the three modest letters of your name root in my lines,
lines which made you say, not entirely happily,
Sometimes I think we’re the same person.
I’m moving to this town, you’re leaving for a year,
now you’re in my kitchen in your sexy Chinese skirt
scissoring your fingers to show where to snip pothos
because a cutting can start a new plant,
another thing I never knew--
meanwhile in a distant California coma, your mother
sheds language like a bathrobe, perfecting corpse pose--
They feed and wash her, you say, rubbing your sore hip,
looking for the first time anywhere near your age,
and the body can last a long time when it does no work.
Another time you confessed, I fear she’ll never die.
And here in Mississippi we feed and wash
my daughter, whose body is all work, breathing hard
as any yogi to wrest the lid from the citronella candle,
wading deeper into language, tossing a cracker from her high chair
for the pleasure of leaning over her tray to spy it,
then pronouncing, Uh-Oh, and, because she can,
because the word’s so apt, saying Uh-Oh again,
our lives splicing like strands of DNA.
If consanguinity means to share blood,
Ann, come share blood with me
in mosquito-thick Mississippi
while there’s still time left
though our husbands have been looking at us strangely.
To stretch out the morning, we go to the farmer’s market,
split a bushel of peaches, then eat buckwheat pancakes
at the old filling station--when the waitress mistakes me
for your daughter, I don’t correct her, nor do you,
though it’s true that I feel guilty when my mother phones--
Next class you tell me, Relax into the pose.
So you teach me to snip plants and poems, to grasp
my insteps and roll on my back in happy baby pose,
while my own happy baby masters Sucking-on-Both-Toes,
then Throwing-Fit-Because-Fly-Swatter-Is-Taken-Away,
while I master Quiet-Sex-with-Husband-while-Baby-Watches-Barney,
while you master Yearning-for-Five-Babies-Grown-and-Gone,
Boxing-Up-My-Mother’s-Stuff,
Dividing-with-My-Sister-these-Parcels-of-Remorse.
To return to the question, is it collaboration
if we align our soles and pull each other’s wrists
to teeter-totter, give-and-take, to deepen our stretch,
if we both go home and then, without discussing it,
write poems about birth? Is it collaboration
if later I read collaborate means to labor together?
If your next poem recalls your daughter, who is my age now,
as a newborn bunched on your chest in the bathtub,
her feet grazing your hipbones,
how you wrung the washcloth
and smoothed it on her tiny back to warm her--
and if I read your poem
and envy both the image
and the daughter on your chest--
is it then collaboration, is it
if the next dawn in cobra pose
I cant my hips wrongly
which brings you alongside my mat
to lay your warm, ringed fingers on my back--
if plagiarism comes from the verb to kidnap,
Ann--while there’s time--come
plagiarize me a little
II. Sphinx, Star-Gazer, Mountain
1
Beth Ann, don’t grieve,
the year that I’ll be gone goes quickly.
Cicadas will clamor in the cedars
and the chiggers run amok,
little Claire will be perfecting
Throwing-Fits-in-the-Grocery-Store,
if she’s anything like mine she’ll hit No early.
Flushed with Chianti and your five-years’-anniversary-trip
to Florence, you’ll be starting another baby. We’ll practice yoga,
you in your skin-tight body suit, me in my ratty p.j. pants
and one or another tank top with the scarlet bra straps showing.
Maybe my hip will be better, maybe I’ll have that
legs-in-tailor-fashion-torso-flat-on-the-ground
flexibility back again. Maybe your Downward Dog
will be all the way down, head and heels both tenting you.
Who knows?
Breathe deep, Beth Ann,
you’re like pennies from heaven.
My babies grown, two poet friends flown,
you move to town with your mop of auburn hair,
your sequined purses and sexy knees,
the wraparound tops that fit like water.
I love how you wade into crowds—
the queen in your play, you crack yourself up,
bearing cakes and zinnias. Good thing your voice
has a Woody Woodpecker twang,
a boisterous, pleasure-seeking har-de-har-har crack,
otherwise you’d be too gorgeous. Good thing you’re tough,
you slice into poems like a laser.
Looking at drafts, making rapid purple checks
and cross-outs on the page, you move poised and stern
and swift as arrows. I trust you, and when I say
Sometimes I think we’re the same person
it’s shyness makes me hesitate. Who except me
would want to be me? –this laboring little beast
with its richly tooled saddlebags
of joys and raisins, pots and dates and memories?
2
Push back
into Downward Facing Dog, press away with your hands,
lift the pelvis, let the heels melt toward the ground,
spread your fingers, breathe, breathe,
let Ujjayi breath roar up through your throat
and flower in your stout heart, you are learning
to carry the ocean. Lead with the heart
as you arc up and back in Star-gazer, lead with the heart,
let your homage to night and all the starry rivers
bring you over, head bowing down toward your front knee,
hands twisted all the way back to lift, palms together,
behind you…
Sorrow covers the globe.
As you face earth you see how sorrow
sifts in the dust, we wait for rain,
for football, for justice, sorrow chokes the dried creekbeds.
My husband at the table in our 100-year-old house
reads me the words of Arundhati Roy—
Are you writing another book? Another book?
Right now? …What kind of book should I write?
My favorite student Isaac comes to class,
I don’t recognize him, he’s been called up
from inactive reserve, has a military buzz cut.
We’re going to Iraq, he says, any day now.
He’s 22, skinny and smart like my sons. The Marines
has made him a pacifist. I’m trying to teach Elizabeth Bishop,
your favorite poet, and I’m stunned, stalled. It’s going to take
guys like me dying, he says, not being in class, before this country
stops to think. Class, what does it mean,
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors?
What colors are the historians’? They think. Silence.
Then: Black and white?
Red?
3
Lying on the belly, place the hands before you, arms bent,
elbows close to the body.
Lift into Sphinx and gaze out level across the desert.
Now stand with the feet together or close, parallel,
toes spread wide, all four points of the foot grounding, strong,
earth holds you. Draw up through the calves,
wrap the thighs to the bone, drop the pelvis,
open the chest, the belly is soft, the shoulders are back and down.
This is Mountain. Here you can stay, touching earth and sky.
Breathe.
Follow the breath.
Just follow the breath.
Let the thoughts grow calm.
Your face after yoga when you see Claire
is all the burbling birds at dawn
in the trees outside my window. Trouble is coming,
trouble is all around, and I wish for you
the heart a flower,
at its center a golden fountain.
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Ann Fisher-Wirth's third book of poems, Carta Marina, was published by Wings Press in April 2009. Her third chabook, Slide Shows, placed second in the 2008 Finishing Line Chapbook Competition and appeared in December 2009. She is coediting an anthology of contemporary American ecopoetry that Trinity University Press will publish in 2012. Recent or forthcoming poems in Many Mountains Moving, qarrtsiluni, Persimmon Tree, Blackbird, The Fairy Tale Review, and several anthologies. She teaches at the University of Mississippi.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi, and lives in Oxford, MS. She has received a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Award and a 2006 United States Artist Grant. She's published three books of poetry, all from W. W. Norton: Open House, which won The 2001 Kenyon Review Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, and was a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick; Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables. Great With Child, a book of nonfiction, was published by Norton in 2006. Her poems have been reprinted in Best American Poetry 1996, 2005, and 2006, Contemporary American Poetry, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, The Pushcart Prize, and Poets of the New Century. She won a Fulbright grant to Brazil and spent the spring of 2009 there alongside her husband, fiction writer Tom Franklin, and their two small children.