Epithalamion for the Long Dead, and: Fragments of Miss Ginny
Rent from DeepDyve- Epithalamion for the Long Dead, and: Fragments of Miss Ginny
Epithalamion for the Long Dead
Once there was a girl with a trunk full of lace and beeswax
given to a man with forty acres, a rough- beamed house on a hill.
She perfected the art of biscuits, cooked her hens’ suns in cast iron.
How warm it always was, and in the quiet night, she waited
for him to slowly pull the ribbons of her bodice, to take the moon in his hand.
Now theirs is one of those homesteads seen from the highway, disappeared
to just a set of flagstone stairs in a field, leading nowhere. [End Page 40]
In what were rooms, yarrow and snake grass. The barn choked with kudzu.
But there is something in the way a dragonfly wants a pane to tap its wings against.
Her blackberries still grow along the thorny fence, giving their blossoms to bees.
They have a thousand grandchildren who will never find their way home.
To them, they are just names and dates on the first page of a cracked-spine Bible.
Fragments of Miss Ginny
Sarah Alice “Miss Ginny” Spencer (1895–1973)
She was born in the fall of her mother’s life. Orphaned at eleven, her siblings, their own families in bloom, wouldn’t take her in. For years she lived as an inmate in a Methodist home for abandoned children.
Her daughters swear she rarely spoke of her childhood except to remark [End Page 41] how, when would-be parents came, the little ones clamored and clung to their legs. A kennel of devils, she called them.
Always more laundry coming in, her back humped over the washboard, and if the sheets weren’t creased there’d be a leather strap to the palms.
By sixteen, she had a woman’s hands. All her life the same routine: collar first, then yoke, sleeves, back, and sides. She pressed and pressed and pressed.
Her firstborn cried constantly, his only summer.
She raised chickens and turkeys to kill, pluck, butcher, and cook.
In her kitchen, there were crocheted pot holders, a steel teakettle on the stove.
After dinner on Sundays, she’d fold the lace tablecloth like a shroud over the scraps. [End Page 42]
In the garden: baby’s-breath, bottlebrush, forget-me-nots, marjoram, and thistle.
At Christmas, there were rows of drop candy and fudge spread out on paper bags, left to cool on the porch floor. To keep the ants at bay, she’d pour hot water on the hills. A giving, a taking away.
Her husband was a carpenter. Each day, she’d ferry him to Texas Oil and back.
Evenings, he taught their daughters to jitterbug. She declined every invitation to dance.
Her granddaughters remember how on summer afternoons she’d pile sugarcones high with homemade peach ice cream.
Alone on Lake Sabine, her mood changes with the light. Mornings, even [End Page 43] muddy water glitters, and when the sun is high, everything is still and impossibly green. The cicadas’ buzz, the heart’s baseline. At day’s end, the sun’s reds cool to ash, the night is choked with mosquitoes, but she has a home to get to, toting her week’s dinner on a string.
Note: “A kennel of devils” is from Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus, 1604. [End Page 44]
Danielle Sellers is from Key West, Florida. She has an ma from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an mfa from the University of Mississippi, where she held the John Grisham Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, Smartish Pace, Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Her first book, Bone Key Elegies, was published by Main Street Rag. Her second collection, The Minor Territories, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. She teaches literature and creative writing at Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas.
