Priming Light
- Priming Light
Chanda Feldman, Tennessee-Arkansas border, cemetery
What I want is the assurance that when I goI’ll be taken to the hill. I can see itIn my mind, the grave they should walk me to.It’s almost land unknown, on the Tennessee–Arkansas border, in woods aboveThe flood plain, where my ancestors are buried.They never knew much of me; I’d be strangeTo them, but if there’s time for romance…As if the day could be to scale. I imagine the dirtCovering my body will be a good humus,The loam of pin oaks and hickories. Leave meWith limestone markers for head and foot,The ones that won’t stand up to time,My name’s engraving left to erode under rain,To be crept upon by moss. Leave me in the landOf my priming light. O grandmother-cultivar,Your roses beneath the kitchen windows. OFall men, your chests strung with the season’s pelts,Rabbits’ blood in the sink. Let me retrieveThe yams, pull loose turnips from the garden.Let me escape, O midday heat, to the north sideOf the house. Let me lie on my grandparents’ bed,Where their sex made thirteen children, let meSniff their scents there. I will die wantingTo hear one more time my name in the mouthsOf my old women. Let them call me fromMy daydreams on the summer quilt, then I’ll rise. [End Page 163]
CHANDA FELDMAN’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, the Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. A former Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University, she is also a recipient of grants and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cave Canem, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She received an MFA from Cornell University.*
First appearance in Ecotone.
