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

New South

B E T T Y A D C O C K New South For years I thought I still knew where I was, that I was both there and here. Home’s what you take with you when you leave, mean to or not. I thought some things were common knowledge like those weeds you don’t root out since you can’t anyway and might as well let be what is as true as that. Like flaws in character or the odd virtues that aren’t explainable but only common, and taken on in spite of what you call them: wildflowers or weeds. It’s hard for me to say what’s on my mind. My life’s been good, and for all sorts of reasons. I’m glad for books and art. I’ve learned to like good wine, and even learned, somewhat, to cook the dinner that grows lighter and more difficult each year. I saw the films, the ballet, raised a daughter with all of what we used to call advantages. I’m not liable to wear a foolish color anymore, or some dumb thing in my hair. And in some restaurants, you order salad later. It’s lovely where we live. Of course there aren’t grapevines or blackberry tangles. What is mostly here is good taste, the natural-seeming yards that cost so much to keep them seeming natural. The city’s nice enough and far enough away. There don’t seem to be graveyards. No stone angels standing on the dead, ready 132 ❚ The 1980s to take off but staying. Nobody seems to be dead. Where are they? They used to rise in stories a long time after. It isn’t that I don’t like where I am. I chose this place, with Tom. We’re comfortable. I love the things there are to know I never could have known, once. My friends are smart and talented. And I know them. In a way they are myself, I think. There’s an electric kind of energy in them. I borrow that. But it was like a shock, like waking up in Belgium when you’d started out in Beaumont, when I saw the quilts my friends had bought. It’s silly to be shocked. I don’t know why I was, or am. I know that quilts are only artifacts like all the lost things we enclose to look at in museums. But these two, my two friends are so pleased: a wedding ring and a ribbon quilt like a frame of rainbows. I don’t blame them. Well, certainly I don’t. The whole thing’s silly. What if they’ll never know the makers. So what. There was no reason I should feel so lost, not knowing what to say. I thought of my own, a dozen at least, not counting the ones we sleep under, all folded in a chest as old as they are. And each one with a name and date pinned on. I don’t know what I thought. It isn’t like me to be unable to tell where I am standing, or if that is anywhere on an ordinary afternoon. It was the second time that week I’d seen a life hung up, not warming anything in a houseful of glass and chrome. The 1980s ❚ 133 I know I’m talking clichés, tacky nostalgia. Everybody knows the past’s not real. And never was, somebody said. It’s an idea and you can change it, hang it up and make it what you want or fear. Either way it’s tamed. One time I saw native Australian sand paintings reduced to manageable size on canvas, so we could see. It wasn’t right, however beautiful. Something they were meant for wasn’t there: the nature of things somehow. Like sand. 134 ❚ The 1980s ...