May you rest in peace my friend. You were elegant and poised in a way that most might not have believed you were one of us but you were a Kentucky girl through and through and an extraordinary teacher and a fine fine poet. I heard your voice clear as a bell when I read this poem aloud today in your honor. A Garden in Kentucky Under the fluorescent sun inside the Kroger, it is always southern California. Hard avocados rot as they ripen from the center out. Tomatoes granulate inside their hides. But by the parking lot, a six-tree orchard frames a cottage where winter has set in. Pork fat seasons these rooms. The wood range spits and hisses, limbers the oilcloth on the table where an old man and an old woman draw the quarter-moons of their nails, shadowed still with dirt, across the legends of seed catalogues. Each morning he milks the only goat inside the limits of Versailles. She feeds a rooster that wakes up all the neighbors. Through dark afternoons and into night they study the roses’ velvet mouths and the apples’ bright skins that crack at the first bite. When thaw comes, the man turns up the sod and, on its underside, ciphers roots and worms. The sun like an angel beats its wings above their grubbing. Evenings on the viny porch they rock, discussing clouds, the chance of rain. Husks in the dark dirt fatten and burst. Gentry, Jane. A Garden in Kentucky. A Garden in Kentucky. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. 3.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 22:49:17 +0000
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