So much light, I think it’s caught fire, the paperbark maple self-immolating— but it’s only the coppery scrolls’ silhouette facing east. Someone once important to me planted this tree, led friends to this very spot as if it was the only blaze, the only crown in the garden. Importance ebbs in time, keeping its own mystery, and we’re left on our knees, in cinders, smoldering ash, as I was, turning to what’s more important— clover in the iris, overrun with thyme and chocolate mint, the scrawl of minor serpents to read and expel. A woman alone makes good headway in the weeds, my corona aflame, unscrolling like seraphims’ swords at the entrance of nothing and everything Edenic. Sometimes I think light comes only when we’re bowed too low to notice our leaves and limbs burnished by morning, our bodies in spontaneous combustion.
Mother died last night, / Mother who never dies. —Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night The third day, before morning coffee, lyrics came and filled me with knowing. Your last cent spent on Earth left me broke not with your going, but with years hot to the tongue. Lyrics stirred release at long last in spirit’s rising: From a distance, there is harmony, sent to me this third day of mourning/not mourning. For all we know, God is watching us, a gardener toeing stones from the mouth that never echoed the why of our turning, unknowing. Our spent garden prickly and dry then as now, but for your message from a distance this third day from dying. My cup warm not with old dregs rising, a certain peace left on the tongue, undying.
Tonight the gloaming is a shadowbox of corridors, time-dimmed like the Sunday School room of ancient ladies my grandmother called Miss in formality: Miss Rose Davis, Miss Rose Harris. The ancient world mapped those yellowed walls—Paul’s travels through Antioch in Syria, Macedonia, Athens, Corinth. Paul the tentmaker mending the knotted nets, converted in a flash to a fisher of men. Cicadas starting late this summer, not yet a blast like Paul’s fiery Damascus moment— more like my grandmother singing from the Broadman, her vibrato rising and settling around me, already asleep in her lap. Take me, take me, mememe, they rapture in high fidelity, their invitation in the half-light: Ye who are weary, come home. Nearing seventy, my own gloaming, I watch only for the soft tent of night to fall. Insect voices I wait for all year call from the canopy, primitive and unnamable. The portals of home always lit, always open, map where I’ve tripped and was pardoned beyond reason, blasted deaf and blind by mercy. Take me, I call, me, and they open wider still.
Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is a poetry mentor in the MTSU Write certificate program and has published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, and Shenandoah. Five of her plays have been produced, and her fifth poetry collection is Candescent (Iris Press, 2019).
Stills from the 1924 silent film The Hands Of Orlac, directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt. The film is one of the first to depict transplantation as a moral and artistic conundrum. Veidt plays Orlac, famed concert pianist, whose hands are damaged beyond repair in an accident. Orlac’s wife (played by Alexandra Sorina) pleads with the surgeon that hand transplants be performed, but the surgeon explains that the transplanted hands will be those of an executed criminal. The film then examines Orlac’s moral and creative crisis as he comes to believe that his hands are no longer the instruments of beauty but of corruption. The film was remade five times in one form or another over the 20th century, with each version emphasizing a different aspect of the “identity transfer” that some suppose to accompany transplantation.
