Here is my “Where I’m From” poem. It also lives on YouTube followed by conversation with Alyson Shelton. (Apologies for the tech glitches, can forward to around 4:30 to skip those.)
WHERE I’M FROM
I’m from the Summer Weekly Reader and bookshelves of books,
Harvard Classics and Michener, Erle Stanley Gardner and Louis L’Amour
I’m from Pond’s cold cream and Dreft detergent
From the split level ranch in Kansas and the hundred-year-old farmhouse in Ohio,
the Swedish apartment with the small, sweet balcony where snow fell,
and the place in Mexico with shards of glass on the roof
and the smell of warm bread coming from the bakery down the quiet calle
From wide grassy lawns alight with fireflies,
and dark murky ponds where the bullfrogs sing,
from old grandmother mountains and summers by the Gulf.
I’m from boxer dogs and horses and tack rooms perfumed with leather
From gardenias, milky and smooth, pinned to the collar of my pale yellow Easter dress
And Lily of the Valley rioting in the cool shade
and voluptuous lilacs heavy with rain
I’m from big boozy dinner parties where
I got to pass the bowls of Spanish peanuts
And stay up late,
and I’m from a line of Southern cooks going back as far as your eye can see, and
From Benson & Hedges 100s and — scotch and soda, mud in your eye
From Virginia Lee, the tiny steel magnolia, funny and fierce, she whom I both loved and feared,
and Walter Cooper, the CEO
cruising in his big black Bentley in faded jeans and a worn t-shirt, with him my place of safety.
I’m from Sunday pork roasts redolent with garlic and crowded knotty-pine kitchens
From white-hot anger and teeth-clenching worry, and fall-down-laughing water fights
From “I’ll give you something to cry about” and “Your Maw-maw loves you so much.”
I’m from Methodist-Presbyterian-panentheistic-agnosticism and
I’m Kentucky born and bred, English-Scots-Irish and Belgian-French-German
And I’m from Country Ham and Greasy Beans and Crepes Suzettes at midnight.
And I’m from the day I saw the empty place where my mother’s breast once was,
the jagged stitches making a line between before, and after, and all that would come.
Thursday I will have a treat for you — a project by a friend that I think you will be glad to know about.
And look for Dead Ringer: Chapter Fifteen next week.
Hoping you all have had a good holiday season as we steamroll toward the apparently actual year of 2023 that continues to seem like something out of an old Ray Bradbury science fiction story every time I type it. Wowser’s. (Hey, where’s my flying car?)