I admit to kind of falling
in love with the work of Dorienne Laux despite our differences in gender,
and many life experiences. But we
share an experience, as we shall see, her in her youth and
me at a much older age and also a heart-on-the-sleeve love of poetry
itself.
Laux was born January 10,
1952 in Augusta, Maine in a family of French Canadian ancestry. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas
station manager, and a maid before receiving a B.A. in English
from Mills College in Oakland, California in1988. She taught at the University of
Oregon and is now a professor at North Carolina State
University’s creative writing program, and the MFA in Writing Program
at Pacific University. She is
also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review,
one of the nation’s most influential literary journals.
Her work appeared in American
Poetry Review, Five Points, Kenyon Review, Ms.,
Orion, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner,
Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Zyzzyva. Her
work has also appeared in online journals such as Web Del Sol.
Her books include What
We Carry in 1994, Facts about the Moon in 2005, and The
Book of Men in 2011.
Laux lives in Raleigh,
North Carolina with her husband, poet Joseph Millar. Together they have one daughter.
As a young woman Laux was
a female gas pump jockey in the days before pump-your-own. Much later I spent almost 15 years as a gas
station clerk on second and over-night shifts in Crystal
Lake. Although I usually just had to
authorize pumps for self-service customers, I did have to go out
to lend assistance and for fuel spills. On more than one occasion, I got my uniforms
and shoes soaked with gas.
Fast
Gas
For
Richard
Before the days of self service,
when you never had to pump your own gas,
I was the one who did it for you, the girl
who stepped out at the sound of a bell
with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back
in a straight, unlovely ponytail.
This was before automatic shut-offs
and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank,
I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas
backed up, came arcing out of the hole
in a bright gold wave and soaked me — face, breasts,
belly and legs. And I had to hurry
back to the booth, the small employee bathroom
with the broken lock, to change my uniform,
peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin
and wash myself in the sink.
Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt
pure and amazed — the way the amber gas
glazed my flesh, the searing,
subterranean pain of it, how my skin
shimmered and ached, glowed
like rainbowed oil on the pavement.
I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall,
for the first time, in love, that man waiting
patiently in my future like a red leaf
on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty
that asks to be noticed. How was I to know
it would begin this way: every cell of my body
burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me
a nimbus of light that would carry me
through the days, how when he found me,
weeks later, he would find me like that,
an ordinary woman who could rise
in flame, all he would have to do
is come close and touch me.
—Dorienne Laux
This
wonderful piece came from Facts about the Moon.
Tonight
I Am In Love
Tonight, I am in love with poetry,
with the good words that saved me,
with the men and women who
uncapped their pens and laid the ink
on the blank canvas of the page.
I am shameless in my love; their faces
rising on the smoke and dust at the end
of day, their sullen eyes and crusty hearts,
the murky serum now turned to chalk
along the gone cords of their spines.
I’m reciting the first anonymous lines
that broke night’s thin shell: sonne under wode.
A baby is born us bliss to bring. I have labored
sore and suffered death. Jesus’ wounds so wide.
I am wounded with tenderness for all who labored
in dim rooms with their handful of words,
battering their full hearts against the moon.
They flee from me that sometime did me seek.
Wake, now my love, awake: for it is time.
For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love!
What can I do but love them? Sore throated
they call from beneath blankets of grass,
through the wind-torn elms, near the river’s
edge, voices shorn of everything but the one
hope, the last question, the first loss, calling
Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears.
Whenas in silks my Julia goes, calling Why do I
languish thus, drooping and dull as if I were all
earth?
Now they are bones, the sweet ones who once
considered a cat, a nightingale, a hare, a lamb,
a fly, who saw a Tyger burning, who passed
five summers and five long winters, passed them
and saved them and gave them away in poems.
They could not have known how I would love them,
worlds fallen from their mortal fingers.
When I cannot see to read or walk alone
along the slough, I will hear you, I will
bring the longing in your voices to rest
against my old, tired heart and call you back.
—Dorienne Laux
No comments:
Post a Comment