Responding to a call for some of her work for this blog, Kootenay Shambhala member and author, editor and ESL teacher Bobbie Ogletree generously submitted two powerful poems. The first―”Emily”―appears here. It has been published in Other Voices.

Emily
By Bobbie Ogletree

I wrote 800 of my 1775 poems (that they, the authorities on me, know about) during my country’s Civil War.

I understand this kind of war, how the extrovert creeps toward silence and the introvert peeks out onto blinding color; no one knows who is seeing whom after a while. Bone and blood are everywhere. This is when I started wearing white only, a truce for seeing the stain more readily. When they teach about me in high school, the young girls just can’t believe I never left my Amherst home after my married Reverend defected to the West, to power. Black is the color of the West in some Native lore, red for the East, where I stayed, the color for enlightenment. The wounded girls believe I shut and locked the door to my heart right then and there. Oh…

It is romantic, though. Me in white ghosting through rooms in my affluent but decaying home, being struck by the muse of unrequited love. They see me like this: A poem comes, I lift my white skirts and float into the parlor where my scraps of paper await me. I write the poem and then discard it. Every parchment is filled with these diversions from him. I retire the poem to think of him, and think of him, only to do the same thing over and over until I die of Bright’s disease. The irony.

No, it was like this.

I forgot about him after two snowfalls. My hermit home filled with rarified air. I breathed myself alive each morning. The body’s hands pulled knowledge out of hair and strands of skin. I met the snake, the butterfly, the mermaids I wrote of through the mirror of my spine. With no one there between me and It, I saw that death’s carriage would spin me out from the top of my head, the liquids in my eyes would be the fuel. I laughed and pinched the seams of my white skirt with my strong hands. Arms akimbo, I danced with my sherry eyes wide open.

Tags: community artwork

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Arts and Poetry, Local Announcements, Pacific Northwest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a comment.