Kathryn Stripling Byer & Penelope Scambly Schott
President Barack Obama’s Inauguration was an amazing day. Those of us who voted for him–and maybe some who didn’t–were transfixed by the visuals and the promise. The nation was enthralled with the multi-colored crowd, the speeches, the poem, Aretha Franklin, the outrageous bow on Aretha’s hat.
All over the country poets wrote their own poems celebrating the Inauguration. In the enthusiasm of that day, two of those poets who live on opposite sides of the country and have been friends for more than thirty years, Kathryn Stripling Byer and Penelope Scambly Schott, each sent each other their own Inauguration poem.
At first there was no plan to do a linked series. We just kept writing poems back and forth, picking up on each other’s imagery. It was a conversation that touched deep places in both of us. We had reached a total of 10 or 12 poems between us before it occurred to us that we were actually creating a project. By now we had moved beyond the Inauguration to women’s issues we shared. Once we had a body of work, one of us suggested that we bring the series back to its original occasion.
So here we were with these linked poems. What to do now? Penelope in Oregon invited Kay in North Carolina to come out for an editing visit. For days, we sat in Penelope’s study, each at a separate computer, e-mailing changes across the room. Each poem was by one author, but the series became a true collaboration. After about a week of intense ordering, shaping, and revision, we had our manuscript.
At that point, we went down to Powell’s, the famous Portland bookstore, and studied chapbooks and journals to choose a look for our collaboration. There we decided on a 7x7" format and a documentary effect. We went back to Penelope’s house, made a fancy mock-up with a wrapped jacket and hand-stitching, and took it to a printer.
The printer was excited by our project and was helpful in choosing appropriate paper and providing galleys for spacing and corrections. Penelope and Kay each ended up with a box of 150 copies to hand-sew. Most of them are now sewn and many have been sold.
Even as Obama’s presidency meets its inevitable hurdles and controversies, Aretha’s Hat continues to express the excitement of that Inaugural day. Several of the poems have been published elsewhere on their own and will appear in future individual books by each of the two poets.
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Sky Chant
The sky on
Inauguration Day
unblinking
down
on the millions
of faces
the sky stayed
and stayed
the sky had
not one word to say
the sky settled
in for the long
haul, the sky
on Inauguration Day
opened itself
to us looking up
now and then
to exclaim, Oh
the sky
there it is
where it’s always
been, but
so much more
sky than
we ever thought
possible.
Inauguration Day, 2009
Shall we salute these wrinkled brown faces
under red Tuskegee Airmen baseball caps,
the p-51 Mustangs still revving in their ears?
Or our new president’s little daughter Sasha
fingers curled like goggles over lively eyes?
Or all the bulky teenage boys with knit caps
pulled down tight across shining foreheads?
Praise the old ladies who brought them up,
who wore big hats and said what was so,
women who didn’t complain they were tired,
though backs ached and raw hands cracked.
Praise us standing in the cold, or out working,
or watching at home. Praise our finest selves
who want to do better, who want to do right,
who know how truly each kitchen is a temple
and will plop the potatoes into the boiling pot
and praise the steam.
I Praise
Aretha’s Hat
because nobody else
but Aretha could wear it,
nobody with such a hat
up there on the stage
with the wind whipping round
like a whiplash,
an apron sash,
like a whole lot of ash
we are scattering now,
saying, Rise up you dry bones,
you burned-down
to-the-ground slave cabins,
all of you out in the cotton fields
I passed in my Mama’s big car.
I praise Aretha’s hat
because nobody else
could wrap round
her head such a swag-
gering Here I am
and you out there
listening
to me, you had
better be, too,
because
my country, ‘tis
of thee is the reason
I’m here, is the reason
all of us, right here,
we are
set to shout
it out: HERE!
Millinery
The human skull is like our planet’s mantle,
composed of separate plates. Just fold back
my scalp and you’ll see where edges meet.
If there’s a soul or anything to make me me,
I think it must tremble under those knit bones.
No wonder we live in a world topped with hats:
motorcycle helmets splashed with stars,
the furled jester’s cap hung with silver bells,
the artist’s black beret with its woolen nipple.
Under this hat, my fragile skull feels crammed
with all I remember: light falling from a porch,
the sick crunch of metal at the bad intersection,
or being small enough to rest a sleepy cheek
on the dog’s shoulder and being almost sure
the dog will speak to me in words I understand.
At last I know what any wise dog would say:
Eat what you get. If it’s bad, throw up. Bark
until somebody listens. Sleep with the pack.
Dig deep. It’s nice to put your head in a hole.
Wet earth smells delicious. Wherever
you can reach, scratch. Remember to wag.
Okay, I smile, nodding my itchy soul.
But how do you like my lime-velvet cloche?
The Quilter
She lives in a Log Cabin. Her Sunbonnet Babies.
shriek all day over Pinwheels and Tumbling Blocks.
Each night her man rolls to the far side of the bed.
She slips into boots and opens her Garden Gate.
She tiptoes past Star Flowers cut from Broken Stars.
At the end of a Rail Fence, she wiggles through
the Hole in the Barn Door. She sits on a hay bale
fingering her own hair. Frayed cotton batting
pulls loose in tufts. Moon-rise crowds the corn cribs.
A Dove in the Window calls the time. Enough of this
pieced life. Perhaps it’s time to rip off her apron,
lope into the forest, dream a Trip Around the World
under a Bear’s Claw quilt. She wants to curl deep
into brown fur. She is craving those curved claws.
Claws
Beware of names that prettify the duties
of women, the fabric that frays into spider webs,
thin as the spirit that God says survives all,
that floats on the surface of each mother’s eye,
silver filaments she ought to spin into yarn,
but she’s not sure she likes where this yarn would be
leading, the stories passed down about how fast
her fingers flew over the warping or how tiny
she made her stitches around all the pretty names
she sewed from scraps. Thimble, thimble, she never
had one, preferring the sight of her own blood
smudged over the cloth. Every stain signifying another
child, that’s what the quilters said. She said she’d keep
her own blood to herself, thank you. She never liked how
a woman’s blood seemed to be making a claim
on her. Monthly blood meant she had not done her duty.
Too much blood meant she had turned sickly.
No blood meant she was over and done with.
No pretty names for that change. What
it meant. Empty. Empty and Ready.
Blossom and Diminuendo
I hid my first bloody panties under the bed
where a bad smell led my mother to discover
what I hadn’t been willing to tell. Our drive
to Walgreens made a pale ritual. Always,
she said, use cold water to wash out blood.
When you cross-stitch flowers on dishtowels
without a thimble, the towel often blossoms
bright red. I wanted a wedding and kitchen
and babies, and what I got was roses, roses.
My mother’s brother died in World War II.
Last year she could say, I love my brother,
present tense. Now she never had a brother.
I know no way to prettify this story. My eyes
are stained with blood. Sticky green liquid
from a cut daffodil cruds up my camera lense.
Gladiolas
Or glads, as we called them,
their spikes shooting up every summer
in my grandmother’s garden.
Finally a wife with a small plot
of ground, I planted my own,
pushed the tubers down
deep. Wiped my hands on my jeans.
Waited two months. They bloomed.
Bending over their folds of magenta
and scarlet, I raked my left cornea
over the stub left behind by my scissors.
I stood with bouquet in arms, Oh,
this means nothing, nothing at all,
but the world had become blurred
and stayed that way. One week. Another,
until I was forced to admit I could not change
this other world no longer sharpened
by edges. It floated like what lies
beneath a pond’s surface. It shimmered.
The skin of my eye had been sheared
by the wound of a cut blossom,
liquid of Lorca’s doomed verde.
No help but to let the eye doctor
scrape off the crud of that old skin
and let the new grow back again.
Aren’t you glad, my eye blinked,
once the bandage came off,
that again you can see how
the stamens hang quivering,
the hand reaching out for the stalk?
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Penelope Scambly Schott's most recent books are Six Lips (Mayapple Press, 2010), May the Generations Die in the Right Order and A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth, a verse biography which won the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. She gets her sense of humor from her father and her dog. Most of life is so improbable that what doesn't make her weep makes her laugh.
Kathryn Stripling Byer lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, where she is completing her term as the first woman Poet Laureate of the state. Her first book, the Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, was published in the AWP Award Series, and she has published another four, with LSU Press, including Wildwood Flower, which received the Academy of American Poets Lamont prize for the best second book during a given year. She blogs at kathrynstriplingbyer.blogspot.com.