My Mother's Trunk

My Mother's Trunk plagues me, squats black in the corner, clutches cold remnants. From Richmond town brought down by train, schoolmarm, scholar, believer, nitpicker, woodchopper, huddled thin bodies nearer the pot-bellied stove. Latin, Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Milton, Bulfinch's mythology sink to the bottom, time only for spellers, grammars, arithmetic—the seedstheir flowers early bitten. Wild highland tunes first fiddled when forbidden pipes hung silent in the rafters stirred blood and bone, fierce invocations lured her heart from books and chalk to the high ridge and a fiddling man— primrose and bramble entwined. She wore ashes-of-roses and wildflowers to wed, Bible inscribed with seven generations of begats and their begotten, tiny high-button shoes not fit for the ridge, put back for a time that never came. A woman brought too old to bed— the fiddler her undoing— cherished my first crooked stitches on a nine-patch, a copper curl matches the braid on my shoulder, lace 54 I could not trace, needle rusted in its tangled nest. Shakespeare, Milton, Walter Scott, Caesar's Latin, and myth see candlelight the first time since the primrose rambled to the ridge. In yellowed margins, elegant copperplate script reveals the schoolmarm of the valley. A broken bow and broadside ballad penned his fiddling to the page, sang her siren song. Re-ordering her life with more care than her man's mournful haste, I lay aside her book of recipes and herbs, intending a tonic, finding a cure. Safe from prying eyes and rough fingers, its margins her journal, elegant scraps tucked between pages - my letter for finding. My mother's trunk consoles me, squats black in the corner, embracing our lives. —Jane Hicks This poem is part of a series of character poems I've been working on for a couple ofyears. In thefirst poem, the main character inherits her mother's trunk - along with an infant sister and a goat. For months, I tried to get her to open the trunk. She steadfastly refused. When shefinally opened the trunk, I got only a list of the contents which I took to the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman, Kentucky. There the poetry workshop leader, Michael McFee, asked me to read Fred Chappell's poem "My Mother Shoots the Breeze" (from Midquest) aloud. I was moved nearly to tears. That night, Fred, whom I had never met, appeared to me in a dream. All ofeight inches tall, he perched on my bedpost and profanely ordered me to get up and write the poem. I did. 55 ...