Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

A Legacy

N E A L B O W E R S A Legacy In the photo I’ve never seen, she holds baby great-grandfather, braids hanging over her shoulders. I think she’s beautiful, though my mother, who tells me what she was told, says only “full-blooded Cherokee,” under her breath, as if swearing at a spot that won’t come out, claims the cousin who owns the picture won’t show it anymore, may have thrown it away with a load of old shoes and closet clutter. Because white turns the whole spectrum away, it is the color of absence, a condition defined by what it’s not, as in “We are not Indians.” Strange to hear my relatives who have so little wanting even less, mistaking emptiness for the brimful cup, the whole Irish-English lot of them, dirt-poor and Southern-proud for who they think they are, only one generation away from hired-hands and sharecroppers, only three away from the woman in the picture. The younger ones hang Confederate flags 204 ❚ The 1990s above their beds, bolt “Forget, Hell!” plates to their cars and trucks, forgetting. To save anything from oblivion, it must be named and called into the world. Old grandmother, I name you now and call you out of my own need, a name that sounds like weeping but means leaves on a still morning, or the silence after rain. Buried once for death and once for who you were, your second grave deeper, lower than love and under memory, you have withstood tons of darkness, waiting, compressed to brilliance. I can see, in my mother’s face, the face I’ve never seen in the old picture, sharp-boned, stern, but with a softness in the eyes, a tender patience or maybe I imagine this, the blood so distant and diluted. For my own portion, I have the true inheritance, the disease that proves the lineage, diabetes, skipping generations, killing my grandfather at 35, a dependable randomness pointing you . . . not you . . . me. Overtaken by the past in the middle of my life, I have finally become mortal, feeling in my veins the blood of a fallen race. The 1990s ❚ 205 Sometimes, when it’s late and the body lies down with itself, wanting a better truce with death than this balance on a needlepoint, she waves from the dark rim webbed in a sweet fatigue, and calls me by the name I answer to in dreams, and I answer. 206 ❚ The 1990s ...