Carmen Gillespie is an associate professor of English at Bucknell University. She is a scholar of American, African American, and Caribbean literatures and cultures and a creative writer. Her articles and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including, most recently, Essence magazine. She is the author of A Critical Companion to Toni Morrison (2007) and has a contract for another book on the life and works of novelist Alice Walker. In 2005, Carmen was the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship for Excellence in Poetry. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and a Fulbright scholar and has received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
"Undertaker August: Hamilton, Ohio, 2005":
The Jordans built the black funereal home
and brought generations to rest
on the colored side of Greenwood Cemetery,
pewed plots arched and silent witness
to the fall.
Trees tear maple leaves,
skein asphalt crates, and shawl
the bent-shouldered downtown, its
signs failing like dime store makeup
to mask cracking age:
“Free check cashing.”
“No credit check required.”
Mrs. Dukes’ and Mr. Moss’
fences gate only littered refuse
and autumn’s sodden sun
delineating absences—
neighborless plotless places,
like hollow spaces scarring a mouth
when teeth go bad.
and brought generations to rest
on the colored side of Greenwood Cemetery,
pewed plots arched and silent witness
to the fall.
Trees tear maple leaves,
skein asphalt crates, and shawl
the bent-shouldered downtown, its
signs failing like dime store makeup
to mask cracking age:
“Free check cashing.”
“No credit check required.”
Mrs. Dukes’ and Mr. Moss’
fences gate only littered refuse
and autumn’s sodden sun
delineating absences—
neighborless plotless places,
like hollow spaces scarring a mouth
when teeth go bad.
Harold Schweizer is John P. Crozer Professor of English at Bucknell University. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and New Orleans Review. His new book On Waiting was published by Routledge in the spring of 2008.
from "Of Movements and Signs":
. . . Movements of the body are
illegible because they are made
across almost impassable distances;
most of them remain unseen like
the swinging of branches or the bending
of lilies under the rain or ash,
acorn and oak leaves wafting
in scaled clumps deep
in the current of the river or
the rising of the cold of the earth—
If seen they are merely thought of
as the movements of matter (the bending
of flowers, the turning of
the hand); many of them are
purposeful and explicable, to which
category belong even the intimate
adjustments we make when we cry
and shift slightly in a chair,
although each movement (the
utilitarian gait being the most
singular), if decipherable, would be
utterly revealing— . . .
illegible because they are made
across almost impassable distances;
most of them remain unseen like
the swinging of branches or the bending
of lilies under the rain or ash,
acorn and oak leaves wafting
in scaled clumps deep
in the current of the river or
the rising of the cold of the earth—
If seen they are merely thought of
as the movements of matter (the bending
of flowers, the turning of
the hand); many of them are
purposeful and explicable, to which
category belong even the intimate
adjustments we make when we cry
and shift slightly in a chair,
although each movement (the
utilitarian gait being the most
singular), if decipherable, would be
utterly revealing— . . .
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