Sad Girl Sitting on a Running Board (review)

Michael McFee. Sad Girl Sitting on a Running Board. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1991. 68 pages. $9.50. Sad- Girl Sitting on a Running Board, taken as a whole, is an elegy for the speaker's mother. It opens with "Funeral Home," a pained description of the body ("Not like her at all"), but ends by introducing her as a young woman at the end of World War II shouting, "It's all over, Molly!" ("Grace") Read straight through, it offers a poetic experience of shock, pain-laced memories, confrontation with mortality, and a deep level of appreciation for the woman who is gone. The mother's legacy includes "over a half-century of snapshots, these incidental /stills that still tell a life." ("Inventory") Reading the second and third sections, we seem to be leafing through those family albums. "Sad Girl Sitting on a Running Board," the tide poem, describes a figure in an old photograph, the poet's mother in childhood. The following poems are chronologically arranged, moving from shots of a young woman to photos of a young couple and then a young family. McFee's approach allows him to carry on dialogues with relatives as they were before he was born. The speaker knows the future of these characters, as the young faces in the album do not. But they know their past, their hopes and feelings, which are mysterious to the poet. He can only know the past by the images he describes and the stories he has heard. He knows, looking at one photo of his mother, that her father had died the year before, perhaps a suicide. In "Doubled," he remembers the shock he experienced as a child when he learned that his mother has been married twice; for the first time he finds a photo of this unknown first husband. The fourth section turns from old photos to images from the year just past, in an endeavor to come to terms with the mother's death. A pocket watch she bought her son when he graduated is "killing time" in his pocket, and he will "bury" in a handkerchief "the coiled heart that I have to wind tomorrow." ("Pocket Watch") A comet, a Christmas tree, laboratory brains, and Schubert's last quintet become objective correlatives for the mysteries of human living and dying in time. Each poem stands on its own, but the series of related images resonate from poem to poem with increasing power. The mother's life is transmuted to poetry as they "bolt her birth date at her head,/ the bright half of the couplet everybody writes." ("Last Birthday") In the final image her coffin becomes a sound-box from which death brings music. It jolts us into recognizing the paradoxical delight we readers take in the poet's sad songs of death. The final section, a long narrative poem entitled "Grace," introduces two sisters in a Tennessee logging camp during the summer of 1945. Yet it is still part of the poet's working out of grief for a mother's death. The older sister, Lois, has a red-haired little sister, just like the Lois in the photos described in 68 section 1; by the end of the poem her first husband has written from overseas asking for a divorce, evidently the man in the photo "my mother buried in a book." ("Doubled") In the wild mountain camp named Grace, the end of the war is preceded for both sisters by the loss ofloves. Yet this poem is filled with energy, challenge, the vibrant life of both sisters and their love for each other. As they learn the war is over, they seem ready to leave their losses behind and set out again on a new path. This writer, then is granted grace to reach back over time and transmute photos, facts, and memories through imagination and art into the imagined experience of this intense young woman Lois who would become his mother. The dark thread of pain that marks earlier references to death gives way here to the comic relief of Major Flora's story about stealing a woman's corpse for burial after her wake had...