Frances Ruhlen McConnel
I was raised with two brothers and grew up a tomboy. My best girl friends were in Girl Scouts—tomboy activity at least in Tennessee and Alaska--but my absolute best friend in grade school was an endearingly mild-mannered boy named Wayne Newmann. One summer day as we were wandering around a local strip mall, barefoot, probably dirty-shirted and dirty-faced, wearing baseball caps, and I held the drugstore door open for a lady and she said, “Thank you, young man,” I was thrilled.
Puberty hit me like a cherry-bomb and then the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s like an atomic one and that's when I started writing poems about the gender issue and I've been writing about it ever since. I like to say my husband and I have an androgynous marriage, which does raise eyebrows, including his, but he lets me play whatever role I feel like. Still, for me, it’s a subject full of drama.
In the Pantoum “In the Garden, My Mother Invokes Wordsworth” I am interested in the boy/girl difference in body as well as in the role one is born into. If I had had room I would have included something about my dad’s body too, to contrast it with my mom’s, but the guys kind of get bunched together in the guydom category, I hope in an amusing way. Both this poem and “We’ll Go No More a Roving” also deal with the contrast between Tennessee and Alaska, and in both poems Alaska comes off as much the more masculine place. Or, I should say, Tennessee was a place where as a tomboy I could fit in without discomfort, but Alaska was different. Or I was different, of course, having hit puberty. All of those things get braided together. But it’s the drama and intensity of the subject for me that keeps luring me into poems about it.
In the Garden, My Mother Invokes Wordsworth
Wisdom is often nearer when we stoop than when we soar,
she says, pinching peas from vines in the garden,
the working mechanisms out in the open
on her bony fingers, with their raised pulleys and blue cords.
She kneels in the garden, pinching peas from the vines
and a butterfly dips down to land on one big knuckle
of a hand nothing like Daddy’s plump ones. The pulleys and cords
are a bit scary I sometimes think, a bit witchy;
also the butterfly sitting lightly on her big knuckle,
and the spells she casts on plants, on nature.
I’d be scary too, even witchy, if I could,
but I have to yank at the pods with my clumsy fingers.
I cast no spell here, crouching among plants,
listening to the music of peas jumping into her pail,
needing no yanking from her fingers,
while next door my brothers play catch with a wormy corn cob.
They drown out the music of peas hitting Mom’s tin pail
with their shouts and the neighbor dog’s frantic barking.
As they toss the cob back and forth over its head.
it leaps and leaps, making me jealous.
My thoughts drowned out by the pleasure of their shouts,
oblivious to women’s work, our squatting like Indians,
their joy leaping and leaping, makes me jealous.
Not that they wouldn’t work too if Daddy were here
who is oblivious to these humdrum divisions of labor,
who is moving us next month to Alaska,
making us leap with joy, all our friends jealous.
He’s another magician, I think, my mind day-dreaming off,
next month taking us to Alaska
where icicles drip from eaves like upside-down candles.
Thinking of such magic, day-dreamer that I am,
I ask Mom what will grow in our garden up North,
besides icicles, dripping candle-like from the eaves,
Will peas come already frozen on the vine?
I nudge Mom, whose mind must be growing gardens Up North,
day-dreamer herself, and she rises, knocks dirt from her seat,
I reckon, she says, pee will freeze in mid-air,
with the dogs and your brothers piddling just anywhere.
She pulls me up, knocks dirt from my seat.
And our backyard snow will be yellow as custard.
My brothers like dogs, piddling everywhere!
But what about us? I ask, giggling
at the thought of snow the color of custard.
My mom reaches out to touch my cheek,
Who, us women? She laughs, We don’t have
our working mechanisms right out in the open,
Besides, her fingers are light on my cheek as a butterfly,
wisdom is nearer to those who stoop than those who soar.
We’ll Go No More a Roving
1
When we got to Alaska things changed, but in Tennessee
we went anywhere, my brothers and I. For instance,
we took the mazy back-route to town center:
up the path past our house through the woods to the F streets,
uphill to the place where the other Frances in my class lived,
who had a retarded brother so their house was magic.
We tiptoed across their backyard to the quartz-crusted
boulder we thought Indians had used to mark the trail head.
More magic. There we ducked downhill into some other
kids’ territory. Still, no one challenged us. Or me even,
since no one said I couldn’t go alone if I’d a mind to,
and I had, though it was a sometimes nerve-wracked mind-to.
Then across the creaking foot-bridge over a dry creek.
Perhaps they’d dammed it building the town, which was
younger than we were. Before that it was countryside
where the red river clay had to be broken up like pavement.
Poor soil and poor farmers who couldn’t fight the Feds
turning them out, as they’d exiled the Cherokee years before.
Through willow and sumac, blackberry, sassafras, kudzu,
imagining our feet clad in moccasins, we clambered up
a steep bank, clutched at by briers. No one ambushed us.
Nor following our neighborhood creek the other way,
through slippery culverts under highways to fields
and swamplands, the creek blackening, sometimes
rippling with a swimming moccasin. And even beyond
in the dark, mossy forest, where we constantly shushed
each other’s crackling through brush, trying
with slamming hearts to walk silent as scouts;
no one chased us off, though we never went
as far as Clinch River nor the electric fence
that circled our town, protecting us or so our parents thought.
But, truly, we never heard then of kids kidnapped, assaulted,
though, deep in the woods, we might have dreamed it.
2
In Anchorage, there were new rules. I was in bud
and must submit to an escort anywhere wilder
than the vacant lots around us, or the bank of nearby
Chester Creek swamp. Even the swamp itself
meant sneaking off. And Goose Lake, with its family
of loons, its rattling dirt track, its birch and spruce forest,
its leeches and moose, to go there I needed a brother.
Humiliation, subjugation, chains of love. I knew
from books there were families where kids
didn’t torment each other, but not mine. Dear
silence of trees, how I missed you! No matter the streets
of staggering drunks, soldiers, rough customers,
I begrudged being tamed. Though, that summer
I’d grown breasts like soft birds nestled against my ribs.
Beside our house was the dirt lane of an alley and down
that alley they started--patches of wild cranberries
between the woods’ edge and Nelchina Street curving
downhill to the Flats and neon-lit bars, gambling dens.
Go there? I didn’t even want to ask. But low-bush cranberries
no higher than your ankle that you had to crouch to pick—
that drew me in, filling coffee cans, liking the way pellets
pinged against tin, then pinged less, then not at all. I got lost
in my head those afternoons, in one of my brother’s plaid
flannel shirts, disguised as the tomboy I still yearned after.
One day I got ambushed. A Plymouth pulled up. Two guys
inside. Young guys, maybe servicemen. The driver
asked me something in an accent thicker than my own,
but sweet to my ears. Mississippi, I thought, or Alabam.
I stepped closer. I may have said, Sir? Or Excuse me?
Not the Huh? my mother hated. He asked it again and I
stood there baffled, dreaming, perhaps, of that tanned arm
at rest on the sill, fingers tapping the car roof,
the idea of my bringing a car of young men to a halt.
Then the one riding shotgun leaned over
and said with a little smile, “Miss, pardon,
but he wants to know where the whores are.
You know that word ‘whores’?” I jerked back.
The driver gunned his engine and yelled, “Are you a whore?”
A car door rattled and I ran for it. But the Plymouth
followed after and the men’s laughter. That’s when,
I told my brothers later, I scooped up a rock and heaved it,
shattering their brake light. At least I think hit it,
though I never had much of an aim. My brothers
thought it a riot—my fear and then my outrage.
I never told my parents. They might make new rules;
scare me worse. Why did it matter so much anyway?
Guys yelled stuff at you all the time. Though not
grown men. And why had I come nearer? Was I
asking for it? Afterwards, I stared into the mirror,
my face red, hair sticking to my brow, dirt on one cheek,
smeared berries. Nothing there a man would want, except
I had an inkling they’d gotten what they wanted:
a girl’s fear, her shock, her thoughts dissolved into shame.
A mythic scene it’s hard to forget: a woods of light
and shadow, a maze of winding paths and in the center—
a monster. A male monster: man or god or demi-god;
bull or satyr or some spell-driven demon. And just by going in
you implicate yourself in whatever happens or just
in the ruthless ways of the world. But if you don’t go in,
you can’t be the hero. You’re not even part of the story.
Frances Ruhlen McConnel is still retired from UC Riverside’s Creative Writing Department, teaching a Master Class in poetry writing at Pitzer College now and then. She and fellow Claremont Poet Lucia Galloway and co-chair the steering committee for the Claremont Library Poetry Reading Series. Her new poetry manuscript is called Falling is the Same as Rising. Her most recent publications are in Chris Buckley’s anthology of California prose poems, Bear Flag Republic and in The Cimarron Review. Also she has just begun leading a writing group at the Pilgrim Place retirement community in Claremont.