Faye Kicknosway comes to us from near Detroit, Michigan.
She's published five collections of poetry.
Most recently, The Cat Approaches,
and she has illustrated all but one of her own books.
I hope you'll have a chance to see copies of The Cat
Approaches when we go over for the cookies
and see the pictures in it too.
Miss Faye Kicknosway.
[APPLAUSE]
I invent a chair.
No legs.
No back.
No seat.
No armrests.
It is a very simple chair.
I invent noise, and regret it.
I invent collars, garters, stays, padded bras, girdles,
tight pants, indigestion, constipation, insomnia,
and bad breath all on the same day.
I invent remember and forget where it left its gloves
and ask it to go and find them.
I sit down.
Listen to drawers open and close.
Days pass.
Finally, it brings me its hat, its tea,
and a few comic phrases.
I invent chimneys.
The most difficult chimneys that begin deep in the Earth
where it is too hot, and the bricks keep melting.
I invent the late children, lost between the lawn
and the front door.
I invent their little, distracted faces.
Their sunburned, itchy shoulders.
Their dance steps and daydreams.
Then I wait for them to come home.
I invent the boat that is not on the river,
nor on the ground near the river.
I invent the boat that is inside the eyes of the man who
sits legs up beside the freeway fence watching the traffic.
Short story.
The rings and Donkeys and Sand.
Once there was a small flea who loved
to sing Italian opera while sunbathing
in between the hairs of a small German sheepdog asleep
on the Cote d'Azur.
There was another flea, his brother,
who lived a miserly, niggardly life on the back
of a Mexican hairless.
Their sister, Roxanne, dissatisfied
with her ordinary life, ran away with a flea circus,
and after leading a long, horribly dissipated life,
died an anonymous death in the tail of a black Pekingese.
The naked man wears a hat because he
is worried about his hair.
It escapes by wagon, by dog sled, and camel out the window.
He sucks his mustache, glares, and is not happy being naked,
but he is afraid bees will fly up his shirt sleeves
and sting him or up his pant legs and sting him.
Clothes are perilous.
One takes one's life into one's hands wearing them.
The naked man is annoyed and stands in the corner calmly,
ceremoniously.
He will not get dressed because there
is no other light in the room save the one shining
through his skin.
This is divided into wet and dry.
He has taken his underwear off.
His mustache.
He looks at his toes through his foliage.
Look at those toes, he says.
I'm going to wash them.
The naked man looks in the bathroom.
There is a spider in the bathtub.
He yells for the children to catch it in toilet paper,
and he weeps bitterly when they refuse.
He looks in the mirror.
Why is his hair so wet?
It is too close to the light bulb.
He throws his clothes out the window.
It comforts him.
I invent a nightgown for him.
He has his pants off and is attracted.
I hand it to him.
He hangs it on his fingers, on his mustache.
He ties his fingers into pretty bows behind his back
and walks pigeon toed through the house,
simping through his mustache, I'm
the little, old lady who cares for you.
I'm your mother.
She was rude.
He was naked singing.
Gracie, 1967.
You're a hillbilly, and you come to a place like Detroit.
A place bigger than any place you've ever been.
All you can do is pass coffee over a counter.
A dark, foreign man comes along and asks you to marry him.
You go home dressed all right and wearing nice jewelry.
You parked the car at the foot of the road
because it's springtime, and you walk up the hill to the house.
Ma sticks her hand out the window waving
until she sees how dark he is.
What does she know?
How far past the chicken coop did she ever go?
How many men in the bushes and in cars
at the side of the road with their mouths and their zippers?
How far past the chicken coop did she ever go telling me,
didn't I raise you better?
She thinks it's easy living up here.
Men are falling over themselves to marry me.
What I do, because that's what they're
thinking when they look at me.
What I do.
No man is going to kill himself hauling me off to a preacher.
What does she know always around the house, never farther
than the chicken yard, except maybe the church.
Sometimes, down the road wearing a bonnet.
How can she say she raised me better?
Better than what?
I'm supposed to spend my life feeding the chickens?
Better than what?
What does she know?
So he's dark and short and talks funny.
No other man asked me to marry him.
No other man put his hands on me like I'm special.
I'm supposed to look at how dark he is
and listen to how funny he talks and tell him to go
when he asked me to marry him.
I go home with my husband to introduce him to my folks,
and my daddy comes around the side of the house,
and my two brothers stand on the porch with their hands tucked
into their pants, and my mama stops waving, howdy do,
welcome, and points her finger at him, at my husband,
and says, what are you bringing home, sister?
What are you bringing home?
I was dragged down from my room at the top of the house one
year when the wind threatened.
Mama had heard it first on the radio and had turned it off
and all the lights off and would have torn the telephone
from the wall thinking the wind and electricity would
be attracted to us down the wires,
but father would not let her.
I was dragged down and in my father's arms,
and I was small enough not to understand the noise I
heard, nor the smell of fear.
My mother's voice sounding harsh and angry,
and she coaxed at my sister to be calm at me,
although I was rolled up like a little cat against my father's
sweaty shirt.
Things broke free from the house clattering against it.
I slept tucked into my father's arms,
his chest noisy against my ear.
I woke up sometimes and saw my sisters
sitting in a chair near mother.
The both of them stiff as my sister's dolls.
Their hands were held in fists between them,
and their eyes were opened so wide I saw the whites clearly,
even in the dark.
The room we were in smelled wet, and I could not remember it.
It was so changed by the light.
The chairs rose and fell.
They were thicker than I remembered them,
and they burst and opened and seemed
to bend from stalks that began under the floor of the house.
The tables glowed.
Their polished faces bright as the edges of flowers.
Oh, mama, we'll be killed.
My sister cried, and as I looked at her,
the light seemed to break her face into pieces.
And I took that image of her into my sleep,
and cradled in my father's arms, I
dreamed she walked out into the rushes and weeds near the river
and was taken slowly by the black water.
First, to the knees.
Her arms held out stiffly in the air, and then to her waist.
Her white dress floating out around her
like it was growing up from the water, and she had entered it.
The meaty, large petals of a flower.
It was like a bell or a globe.
She hung at its center, and I watched the petals
lift up and close around her.
I cried out for her to come back,
but the flowers sank into the water.
I made a net of my hair and cast it
into the water dragging against its weight.
A dark thing, woven of sticks and reeds,
rose up from the water.
I threw hands full of mud and weeds at it,
but it pulled at the net drawing me into the water.
I awoke believing that it held me.
My father tried to comfort me, alarmed at how afraid I was.
I mean, I've never been in a big storm, but where I live,
there are tornado warnings all the time.
And one went off, and there was a loud wind,
and I have a 10-year-old daughter,
and there was a thunder, and it hit,
made a sound very close to the apartment.
And it shook, and my daughter looked at me, and she said,
I don't want to die.
And I never thought that she thought like that.
And my grandmother, when she had lived on the farm,
they had a telephone.
And during a storm once, electricity
was attracted down the wire, and hit her,
threw her across the room, and she never
had another telephone in her house.
So those are the two incidents that
triggered that particular poem.
Do you know what they did to grandpa?
They put his box on the river.
They put it on the river and him in it dressed up
so dandy, so peaceful in all that bedding with his eyes shut
and his nose shut.
They sailed him out on the river like he was in a boat.
They nailed it up.
The air in it fluffing out his pillow,
fattening out his handkerchief and his pocket.
They took it down from their shoulders there in the reeds
by the bank of the river.
They took it down, and he said nothing,
nor did he stir about inside it, although he
had a fear of the water.
And he never went near it.
They put him down beside it, letting go the little,
brass handles.
And they scooped water up and onto their heads
with their hands, and they kneeled beside it,
and they splashed it up at one another.
But there was hardly any fun in it.
Grandpa so still lying beside them,
and they would have put it on fire
and seen how long it would float before the water took it.
They would have siphoned gasoline from a car
or looked for dry rushes and twigs to set upon it
and then light it up.
They talked of it squatting there beside grandpa
breaking off sawgrass from around their feet
and putting it between their teeth.
He wouldn't float long, and the fire would not consume him.
The water would fume and fret at the box, lap up against it,
and the wood would soak through.
Grandpa would wash right out of the box,
and even his corpse would cry out
in fear of the water taking him under.
They decided against it.
The nails would not be fast in the wood,
although the wood would swell up from the water.
The wood would move against itself
and the nails would twist free from their holes, and the box
collapse upon the water.
All the fancy bedding that grandpa
had had made special for this occasion
would be yanked and torn.
First, by the box coming apart, and then by the currents
fighting it this way and that.
I've been working from some Walker Evans photographs
for a while now, and the one that's impressed me the most
is Bud Fields and his family.
The one that's part of, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
when Evans and Agee went down South together.
The animal in the photograph that this poem is from it's
not a horse.
In fact, it's a mule, and I can't
remember which of the sharecroppers
is sitting on the mule.
Floyd somebody Not the Tingles, not the Fields,
but the other farmers, the other sharecroppers
that they were with.
But it became a horse in this particular poem.
He'd rent the horse, and it's sounding
like it had asthma, and its legs shivery,
and its back dropped so far your feet dragged
on the ground when you sat on it, even
if you was the youngest.
He'd rent it, touching it on its side
all the way down to its tail and back up to its neck.
Picking its feet up, squinting into its face,
prying open its mouth.
Hoarse.
It was, after all, a horse.
And all he needed was what it was
harnessed to the plow for a couple of afternoons.
He had a hand cultivator, but it was hard, slow work.
That horse, I always waited for it
to die the way it shook and wheezed,
and he'd hit it with the harness straps.
And it would pull and rattle at the harness,
and he'd have his sleeves rolled up
and be hauling back on the plow pulling against the horse.
And the plow would dig into the dirt and get stuck,
and he'd have the harness wrapped
around him and in his hands as well as the plow handles.
His feet braced and his legs stiff.
His hat pulled deep on his forehead cussing his luck
for having thought to do it this way
when he had good, strong kids could pull better.
The horse too old and sick to care, and him sweatier.
And finally, so mad, he wasn't mad at all.
His lips tight and disappeared right off his face,
and his arms lumpy with his veins all
knotted out in his skin, and his shoes on laced
and full of dirt.
Him more buried and turned over than the Earth.
Stiff legged and measuring nothing with his eyes
like he had done when he began not looking at where
the sun stood in the sky.
And how long it would take to do this much and then that much.
By mid-afternoon, if he was lucky, maybe this part here,
and that would leave over there and back behind that little yew
and the trees to do.
Nothing.
His eyes straight ahead on the horse's backside
blinking the sweat loose sometimes, but mostly,
letting it settle and roll down his eyes.
Not looking anywhere, turning the horse around,
pulling on the plow, loosening it, holding onto the animal,
and turning it all around to walk back up again.
Dipping the plow, and pushing it so it was into the ground
and could claw it up and out and him as tired.
By the time she made him quit, as the horse had
been when he had started, giving him water and looking
at him suspicious and cautious of his mood.
And what she could do to make it better, so he wouldn't be mad.
Supper was late when we got home,
and him saying, if that horse died on his land,
the man who owned it had better come
and clear it off and pay him back his money.
And money besides for the time lost looking
at his goddamn dead horse.
Whatever possessed him to think he needed to use it anyway?
He'd say it as he untied the harness straps
from around his back and arms and hands,
looking down on it like he hadn't never seen it before
and didn't know maybe it belonged on trees
or should be thrown in the water or used in the house
somehow in the winter near the stove.
It's so heavy and useless.
He spoke so flat and low with no heat in his voice.
It all burned out of him by the sun, and the work he'd done
and have to do again tomorrow and probably by the looks of it
the next day too.
And he'd heard there were better ways to live.
Better ways with only looking at the fields
from automobile windows as you drove along beside them
and pointed out the window and wondered
what that hillbilly was doing.
And he was tired of being that hillbilly and tired
of being tied to this useless hide of dog
food all the days of his life and to this small patch
of land.
Worthless is what it was.
And he drank from the dipper and us crowded together back
where he couldn't reach us with the harness straps
if he should try.
Looking at him and at her, knowing she'd handle it.
She'd even out his temper before we took the horse back
and headed for home ourselves.
And as we went back, and it darkening,
his mood toward the horse changed,
and he wasn't so sour toward it.
It did the best it could, old and lame and sick as it was.
The air was cooler, and his body and legs weren't so knotted up,
nor his arms.
His sleeves rolled down.
His hat pushed back on his head.
The day didn't hurt so much thinking about it as we walked
in the slow dark toward home.
[APPLAUSE]
If you're familiar with the photograph,
I say it in this particular poem.
Bud Fields and his family.
This woman here, sloppy shouldered, squint eyed.
I don't know her, nor this room she's in.
Those wooden walls and floors all stained up,
all whopper jawed, and needing nails and paint.
I don't know her.
The size of her nose or her mouth pulled up.
The sleeping kids she holds.
I couldn't name you her if you asked me,
nor him, nor the rest of them all lined up in hell so still.
Unnatural.
I've seen fish on a string down a country boy's back look more
natural than they look, posed close together,
not scratching, not with the window open and the old one
there looking out.
And his handkerchiefs not knotted tight on his neck
like he usually wears it.
And her with the safety pin.
The young one, getting long boned and moony,
scratching her toes against the wood, I don't know her neither,
nor do I care to.
That suspicious old lady, head cocked,
sideways looking out at me.
New shoelaces in her shoes.
I wouldn't look out my window to look at her,
nor listen to her talking at the vegetables in her backyard
garden.
None of them is worth the time, and they've all
been dead longer years than I've been born and living.
And the road out front don't lead nowhere near their house.
It sitting in the hollow down lower than that stand of trees
out back with the chicken coop.
And that little picture tacked on the wall
back there, where the old man can see it,
but the kids have to stand on the washtub turned over
don't mean a thing to me.
And the shirt over the door.
You can see its collar here.
I've never seen it on any one or any place
other than right there.
It's always been just like that, part
visible at the top of the picture.
But mostly her.
It's mostly her I don't know.
I may be seeing pictures of rooms like this,
and kids sleeping or awake all tilt faced and dreamy eyed
like that one or wanting to frisk by the side of the house
with the dog throwing sticks and giggling
like that little one they're held
in between his father's knees.
I never seen kids like that running in the street
or in the alley.
Even that old lady.
Maybe I've seen her too, or someone like her,
peeking around the curtain.
The room behind her dark and never opened.
And him, he's everywhere.
I see him any time of the day.
But her, I've never seen her.
That big hand rolled into a fist.
Those feet bent double under her.
That little edge of slip showing underneath her checkered dress.
No, I've never seen her before, nor do I care to see her now.
Her hair all knotted and black.
Those bug bites showing on her chest were her dress is open.
The dirt on her, and how she's all slumped down
on the edge of the bed looking like she
hasn't any sense at all behind her face.
I don't know her, nor do I care to.
She leaves that baby whining on the floor,
while she goes out in the field looking for men.
She leaves it between chairs, so it can't crawl too far.
Every day she leaves it.
She goes farther and farther, sometimes disappears
in the weeds, sometimes stands in the shade of the trees
looking out at the men and rubbing her hand on her arm
or scratching at the ticks on her legs.
She squints under her hand, and sometimes follows
the road, wagons coming along.
Sometimes cars.
She lies herself down under a tree,
and everything stalls right there.
She's slower and slower getting back.
One day, you'll take this picture out
to show me to have me story it for you,
and there'll be an empty place at the corner of the bed,
and the baby will be all knotted up and asleep on the sheet
with no mama anywhere near it.
She'll be gone.
She'll have disappeared down the road so far,
there'll be no time to call her back so you can show me
this picture with her in it.
She'll be in the shade of a tree or in the shade of some man's
arms, and none of them will see it.
They'll all be right there, lined up,
looking straight ahead and never sideways
to see if she's made it back in time.
She'll be gone, and nobody will notice.
The bed will be ditched in from having
her weight on and in that spot for so long,
and the baby will be asleep, but nobody will notice.
You show me this picture, and I'll say, look at how funny
that bed looks like someone's been sitting on it.
There won't be any way for me to tell you about her.
She'll be gone, and I could meet her on the street,
and she could hell on me until her throat got dusty.
I wouldn't hear her.
You got to know someone before you can hear them,
before you can answer back, and I don't know her.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]