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By
Rebecca Meredith
I went down to the Mississippi
Delta to watch my father
die,
Taking the son who'd never
seen/ the place where my
bones grew, where
my heart stopped and started
a million times
in love, in hate, in Godforsaken
Bible-Belt fear.
We drove the length of it
in August
the heat making a little
mirage of every rise in
the road,
a promise we could never
get to.
That's the way it is, I
told him,
the radio plays country
and evangelicals, and nothing
else.
The cell phones don't work
at all,
And all you can do is lay
yourself on
the delta's dinner table
and let the kudzu take you,
Let the Drama-Queen southern
thunderstorms
cuss you for a Yankee dog
and submit to it until you
can run, still living, away
and just let it have the
dead.
And just as I was shedding
a natural tear
for the dead man that made
me
and the living one by my
side
who could run away and so
would never understand,
we came to the crossroad
of 61 and 49
and he grinned my old family
grin,
popped a little Son House
on the player
And Lord, we lifted over
the delta, feelin' alright,
carried together on the
broad, unbroken back of
the blues.
By
Rebecca Meredith
The old ones used to tell
me,
looking out at lines of
thunderheads
on the horizon,
About the time the tornado
touched down
on Lacy Thomas' farm.
The funnel, they'd say,
Laughing as if they'd been
there themselves,
and seen it all,
Picked him up and stripped
him, and set him
Buck naked and perfect,
in the crook
of a live oak tree.
And when the storm passed,
and he came down,
Lacy Thomas walked the three
miles home to find
That all he knew was gone.
Gone.
Or, reconstructed into something
that could
withstand the love of a
storm capricious as a child.
They'd found him, smiling,
singing a wordless song,
Stretched out amid the pieces
of something
that must have been important
the day before.
They named him miracle,
and told each other that
story
a hundred times, agreeing
about the devastation,
but never feeling quite
right about that smile.
They always fell quiet when
they told about
the loose change they gave
him when they met him
Walking barefoot toward
no place, every place
having become the same.
Today when I heard you
had died,
Distant thunder rolled,
And the landscape shifted,
accommodating
a void unfillable
By anything not exactly
you.
The wind lifted me like
it did Lacy Thomas,
That last moment when he
still
knew his way,
Stripped me of the world
that held you,
and set me, perfect, into
one that does not,
Reconstructed into something
that can withstand the love
of a life capricious as
a child,
And wondering if I can ever
lie down again, and sing,
wordless, in a place that
feels like home.
By
Rebecca Meredith
But who will resurrect
the Holy Fool?
Who will raise the wild,
courageous heart
that danced around the sacraments
and saints
in human garb and flawed
human desire?
Who will help remind us
we are not
so wonderful or terrible
or lost,
but all of them at once,
so utterly
without pretense that pretense
becomes all-
And we can only all fall
down, and weep
for who we are, for who
we're not, for who
we love and cannot save,
or have, or want,
and what we cannot be, or
do, or say.
But who will resurrect
the Holy Fool,
the teacher who reminds
us still to laugh
and thumb our noses, leer,
to drop our pants
in front of God and eminence
and all?
We must remember that,
when life and death
are left to mysteries that
stand beyond
our ken and power, we can
still perform
one holy rite, and open
up our mouths
and hands, uplift our hearts
and cross our eyes,
and dare to laugh, and,
laughing, become wise.
I
am a poet and psychotherapist
in Bellevue, Washington
who conducts poetry therapy
groups as a part of my practice.
My work has appeared in
The Forum, a psychoanalytic
quarterly, as a part of
Seattle's Jack Straw Writer's
Program, and others. I am
a Hedgebrook Fellow as a
result of my work in short
fiction as well.
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