Planted by the Signs. Misty Skaggs

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      There were back issues of National Geographic stacked up in the corner of the living room. A basket of trashy romance novels with seething, sultry, shirtless men overflowed next to Great Mamaw’s recliner. There was a Kennedy biography and a beat-up, flea market copy of Profiles in Courage displayed on the side table right next to her commemorative presidential plate. The family Bible squatted solemn and thick and reverent on her nightstand with its gossamer-thin pages at rest and not to be disturbed by the grubby, clumsy hands of young’uns. Out in the rusty little camper where she stored all the scrap material from her quilts, she also stashed the racy True Detective magazines I was never supposed to find.

      My favorite book was her favorite book. The one she made good use of and referred to most often. The book that Great Mamaw kept tucked in her apron pocket or laid out within reach, easy to get to on the crooked little coffee table—The Old Farmer’s Almanac. My Great Mamaw lived her life by the signs. She knew when the moon waxed and waned above her little holler and she knew what its moods meant for the soil her roots were planted in.

      This collection is inspired by and written for my Great Mamaw, Lovel Blankenbeckler. It was my honest-to-goodness honor to care for her at the end of her life, and many of the following poems were written during that time. My Great Mamaw taught me her ways, those ways forgotten and buried in the pages of the almanac. She taught me to look up at the sky, to feel the stars move through my body and right on into the ground. She taught me to know when to plant and harvest, and she taught me to know when to bloom.

       When the Signs Are in the Head

       Wet Dew

      My place is five fifteen

      in the morning

      in a plastic lawn chair.

      The kind you buy

      four for twenty

      at the Dollar General.

      Flecks of red spray paint

      cling to my skin.

      The tortoiseshell cat is satisfied

      to sleep in the cradle of my legs,

      crossed ankle to knee

      like a man.

      She’s making biscuits.

      Needlepoint pricks

      of practiced country cat claws

      kneading my pale, doughy flesh.

      The stray shepherd,

      one eye sky blue and

      the other mud brown,

      is never satisfied.

      But he missed me

      when I ventured off the Ridge

      and into town.

      So he sits

      as patient as he can manage

      and I scratch his muzzle

      and listen to the knock

      of his tail on loose, front-porch

      floorboards.

      We sit in silence.

      Except for the thump and the purr.

      Except for the cardinal

      screaming

      “Wet dew! Wet dew!”

      one last time

      before the light breaks

      the whole holler.

       The Home Cemetery

      We keep our dead

      at the dead end

      of a rutted gravel road.

      Generations filed away

      forever

      in staggered rows.

      They belong to me.

      A birthright of last breath

      And rotting body,

      buried safely beneath

      six feet of soil.

      The dark soil

      I came from.

      Full grown and dirt poor.

      This is my acreage.

      Rich bottomland fertilized

      by bone.

      The cemetery floats,

      a rounded island tethered

      to the mountains

      by creek-bed tombstones.

      Dusted with broom sage.

      Populated solely by lingering souls

      and a stray, persistent

      peacock

      trespassing on my land,

      picking his hungry way

      over my graves.

       Churched

      All the old men

      from the Beartown

      Church of God

      call me Sissy.

      There’s Ligey

      and Whirley

      and Johnny

      and my Mamaw’s cousin

      who found Jesus

      after he beat cancer

      a couple years back.

      They’re working men

      of God.

      They СКАЧАТЬ