Short Silver Series
by Wendy Barker
THE SILVER TONGS’
ends are shaped like bay scallops,
whose numbers have diminished in
recent years due to the loss of sea grasses
on which they fastened, and the overfishing of
sharks, who devoured the manta rays that gobbled
the scallops’ predators. Such delicate, rounded pincers
are not designed to grasp anything heavier
than a cube of sugar. Scallops: ancient symbol
of the vulva, primal force within the earth. Around
an oval table at dinner, the way a guest’s fingers
handled a pair of lustrous tongs could provide
the sterling moment of an evening.
MOTTLED
as if with curdled cream or vitiligo,
the silver sauce boat’s copper layer
underneath shows through like flesh below
the crackling skin of an oven-browned hen or
the torn hide of a roughly sheered ewe. A boat:
vessel for transport on water. Across the tablecloth
it floated gravies of our holidays. Thanksgiving—
turkey drippings, chopped giblets, white flour. Rivers
down mountains of mashed potatoes. Copper’s less
precious than silver, but these days the baser
metal is stolen from alleys and back yards, a hot
commodity now it’s used for fiber optics, plumbing,
and anything electrical. How a boat causes ripples in
still water, how the sun can shimmer through
clouds, sudden patches of shadow, light across
grasses of your own back yard.
EVEN TARNISHED
the sterling bowl’s
repoussé iris petals swirl
across its rounded center, but
on the base, a crack somewhere,
so water placed inside—to hold
fresh-cut jonquils for a while—
leaks, staining the surface
of a polished table.
THE SILVER BASKET
was designed to grace
a small table, for passing
among guests to scoop a few
nibbles of sugared almonds or
walnuts from its shallow bowl, but
now it holds a cluster of polished
stones that for the Chinese mean
solidity, stability, the ground—
almost too heavy for this
dainty vessel to lift.
THE TRIVET’S
lacey silver ferns,
spiraling tendrils are encased
within glass that allows us to glimpse
the mahogany table’s surface the trivet
is meant to protect: the cracks,
the gouged grain.
Wendy Barker’s sixth collection, One Blackbird at a Time, received the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and was published by BkMk Press in 2015. Her fourth chapbook, From the Moon, Earth Is Blue, was published by Wings Press in 2015. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2013. Recipient of NEA and Rockefeller fellowships among other awards, she teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Short Silver Series”? A few years ago I began contemplating various pieces of silver that I’d inherited from my mother and grandparents and wondering about the stories they held within them. My mother’s British background was radically different from my own, and somehow meditating on these little these pieces helped to begin to understand something of the stories that had been withheld. Writing these pieces helped me begin to trace some of the uglier, even frightening aspects of my mother’s family history. STIFF UPPER LIP (1) Headlines in The Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph, The Observer, The Daily Mirror, Sunday News, Daily Mail, even The Times: “FIRE DESTROYS BATTLE ABBEY, 120 GIRLS AWAKENED BY ROAR OF FLAMES.” And following: “Mrs. Jacoby, the headmistress, tells how, with splendid discipline, they tested new fire drill.” Some young as eight, the oldest seventeen. January 1931. Mom would have been thirteen. The girls had practiced over and over. One girl would be tapped to wake the others, they’d all walk single-file downstairs and out the great front doors. Four in the morning. “Clad in their nightclothes.” “Not one of them became hysterical.” “The flames leapt to a height of a hundred feet.” The fire burned on into the next day and the Abbot’s Hall was reduced to a ruin. Built in 1066, Battle of Hastings. At six a.m., Mrs. Jacoby sent a telegraph to the parents of every girl: “All well.”
STIFF UPPER LIP (2) One hundred twenty girls in flannel dressing gowns crowding the courtyard, a January pre-dawn. One hundred nineteen girls’ mummies and daddies coming for them the next day. Or the next—it would never do to leave Gladys (or Cynthia or Gwendolyn, or Edith, or Violet) in the midst of that horrid smell of cinders, of course we’ll bring the car to take the poor dear home, she must be dreadfully frightened, no matter what the papers say, what do they know, really, about a girl’s nerves after such a nasty shock. But no one came for my mother. Because Granny was in Paris visiting a friend? Because Grandfather believed the telegram from Mrs. Jacoby saying “all” was “well”? No cell phones, no texting, no email, no way even to phone her daddy, ask him to please, please come. The tower fallen. Even the mistresses returned home, even the one who taught French crossed the Channel back to Amiens. Alone with the housekeeper, the cook, and the gardener—the only girl left.
STIFF UPPER LIP (3) How do you get back to the place above the staircase where the floor boards hold? Where the wallpaper swirled with primroses, delphiniums, and petunias like the petals in your granny’s garden? How do you return to a night of dreams when you thought it was a drill but it wasn’t, it was the Abbey, where you’d slept for three years, in flames, the staircase collapsing onto the ground floor as the last girl reached the doorway. It was Wendy Flith, ten years old, who woke at four thirty, hot and thirsty, slipped to the bathroom for a drink of water, and smelled smoke. Thoroughly drilled, she blew her whistle, led the girls in her dorm room down the tower. Meanwhile, Mrs. Hyndman had waked from the smoke, roused the rest. Timbers like bones, ribs protruding, the entire hall blazing.
STIFF UPPER LIP (4) The few times Mom mentioned it, her accounts didn’t vary, mirrored the newspapers’ exactly. Always, it was the girls’ discipline she stressed, how they faced forward, eyes on the girl leading them down the stairs. No mention of huddling with her favorite friends, no details of the nightclothes she was wearing (a red plaid robe? one with blue piping?), or the blouses, gone to cinders, she’d never wear again. Or how cold it was, so suddenly awake in the courtyard, waiting for the firemen. Watching flames pierce the Abbey’s ceiling. Ushered into the warm gymnasium. The mistresses’ names, which ones were kind, which brusque. Did she watch the whole staircase crash to the stone floor as the last girl approached the open door? The papers’ details were enough.
STIFF UPPER LIP (5) Twenty years after Battle Abbey burned, the chair. Smoke in the night, my mother and father lifting the square wooden legs, tilting its bulk through the kitchen door. A cigarette dropped during the day, an ember bubbling through cloth and horse hair down to the metal springs. Out into the night. Her nylon nightgown, his seersucker pajamas, bare feet. The smell lasted. They carried the chair back into the house, set it down in the living room, its blackened stuffing surrounding a ragged hole to stare down into—the sturdy padded arm a tangled chasm, its wiry innards coiled.
STIFF UPPER LIP (6) After the chair caught fire, no one said a word. I never heard my parents mention it. Mom made a new slipcover. But from then on, every night I’d decide what to save first, just in case. My diary and my doll. Later, my journals and the photo albums of my son. Now, it’s my flash drive, my iPhone, and photos of my son. Underground fires smolder. They burn ten times more mass than fires above-ground. Destroy tree roots. Seemingly healthy trees will crash without warning. Wendy Barker’s sixth collection of poetry, winner of the John Ciardi Prize, is One Blackbird at a Time (BkMk Press, 2015). Her fourth chapbook of poems is From the Moon, Earth is Blue (Wings Press, 2015). An anthology of poems about the 1960s, Far Out: Poems of the ’60s, co-edited with Dave Parsons, was released by Wings Press in 2016. Among her other books are Poems’ Progress (Absey & Co., 2002), and a selection of co-translations, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems (Braziller, 2001). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2013. Recipient of NEA and Rockefeller fellowships, she is Poet-in-Residence and the Pearl LeWinn Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of this poetry series? Well, actually, the poems tell the story—Mom referred to the Battle Abbey maybe a half-dozen times in her life, but always in this distant sort of way—her wording really followed the newspapers’ reports, stressing he discipline of the girls, etc. Clearly it was a traumatic experience for her, especially given that neither of her parents came to bring her home. And then that fire with chair when I was seven or eight was a frightening experience. Much of what I hope I’m setting up in this sequence is the damage that can be done when “fires” are pushed underground. These are among the first of the poems I began writing about my mother’s unusual—even, I might say, bizarre—British background. I have a new manuscript in progress, titled Privilege, that traces much of her history and the effects of her experiences on the family. by Wendy Barker Twelve hundred years Wendy Barker’s fifth book of poetry is Nothing Between Us, a novel in prose poems that was runner-up for the Del Sol Prize and was published by Del Sol Press in 2009. Her third chapbook, Things of the Weather, was also published in 2009, by Pudding House Press. Her poems and translations have appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Gettysburg Review. She has received NEA and Rockefeller fellowships, and is Poet-in-Residence and a professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982. Please, if you’d be so kind, describe Wendy Barker in the Workshop, with “compression” being the thing that she is working on. The incident described in the beginning of “Wang Wei in the Workshop” actually happened in a graduate workshop, when, after focusing on translations for about a month, we discussed 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a fascinating collection edited by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz. Later in the evening during our workshop session, one of the students, a brilliant woman from Hong Kong, began to sob while reading her own poem aloud. Her poem dealt with the recent collapse of a towering building under construction in Hong Kong, causing the deaths of six workers. Across the seminar table from the student, I wanted to stand up and walk around the room to give her a hug, but instead, I kept on talking in my usual teacherly workshop fashion, all the while feeling woefully inadequate as she continued to weep. The student sitting beside her reached over and held her for a little while. I was able to muster some comments about how deeply moving the student’s poem was, and gradually she rejoined our workshop discussion. My poem is an attempt, first, to apologize to the student from Hong Kong for my inability to express my sympathy at the right moment, and, second, to make a comment about how much cultural and familial richness may have been lost with our drive to corporatize the world, with the building of taller and yet taller concrete towers. In attempting to convey something of what I feel has been lost in our global rush to “development,” I wanted to use imagery reminiscent of 8th Century Chinese poetry and to approximate the economy and vividness of a classical Chinese poem. Stiff Upper Lip (Series)
by Wendy Barker
Three Prose Poems
(more…)Wang Wei in the Workshop
by Wendy Barker
since the eighth century.
Of nineteen translations,
we’ve looked at five.
Lily is crying after
reading her poem
about her home city
of Hong Kong, where,
in a building designed
for ten dozen stories,
six men hauling waste
died when the elevator
shaft collapsed and
plunged twenty floors.
From that roof, no one
sees the house
of a small family
eating from porcelain
bowls on a wooden
table balanced
on level ground.
How can a moon
slip so far down
those concrete walls?
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
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