Lookin Like Areas of Kansas
From Bernadette Mayer's collection, titled, Bernadette Mayer Reader.
Lookin Like Areas of Kansas
"We had our first cucumber yesterday".
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
New England is awful
The winter's five months long
The sun may come out today but that doesn't mean anything
There are Yankees
Men & women who cant talk
They wear dark colors & trudge around, all in browns & greys,
looking up at the sky & pretending to predict all the
big storms
Or else they nod wisely
Yup, a northeaster
The sky turns yellow all the time
The river's grey
Everything's black or white
Everybody eats beans
Everything freezes
Everybody lives in an old paper house
People chop wood all the time
They slide around on these slippery icy roads
All the trees look dead
They make long shadows on the snow
There's only daylight for about four hours
People sit home & drink boilermakers
At night all the telephones go out & the power lines blow down
Every weekend there's a storm so nobody can come to see you
The fireplaces are very drafty
The mountains look black
There are no books at the store
Religion's a big thing
Everybody has a history
Sex is drudgery for people in New England
It's 12º & they use Trojans or Tahitis
Some people have to have a generator
The windows are very small
You have to go out & get cold
All of sudden the blue sky blows away
Everything's buried under five feet of snow
It doesn't go away until April or May
Everything's either apples or some kind of squash
The houses are all drafty boxes & you cant open the windows
People tell stories about each other
People have to come & plow the snow off to the side of
your road
Then people shovel pathways to different cars
They have town meetings about the new sewer systems
The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the
roofs of their houses
Even the water freezes in the tap
A coworker has been giving me books from his poetry library for the past few months, and I eagerly and thankfully soak all of them up and spend random moments of my days picking through them, opening up to random pages and escaping into new stanzas. This one by Bernadette Mayer particularly hit close to home, and really helps to remind me exactly where I come from. It reminds me of all those years spent living in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. It brings me back to those areas as I'm down here in the muggy south, and keeps me rooted in who I am, because I truly have come to believe that you are your geography.
I see the way my friend knows Richmond, and am reminded of exactly how I know Newburyport, or Amesbury, or Somerville, or Manchester. I think the places that we are raised in will always be who we are, and when we're living elsewhere, whether for work, love, or some other infinite number of reasons, there will always be certain memories that pop into our heads. Down here, when a storm is on the horizon. It looks different. It gets warmer, I see a faint rustling of the trees, and then there is this stillness. I'm not used to that, and then I was suddenly all to familiar with that post Helene. It still gives me a sense of uneasiness, and makes me miss the way it feels before a storm in the northeast. Its different, its cooler, you can literally see the blue sky blowing away, but you're stuck indoors with the small windows and big fireplaces (most of which don't work anymore). I know what to expect with storms up north, and I know how to weather them. I think that is what our own personal geography tells us. These survival instincts are rooted in our cells, and living elsewhere is nice, but it doesn't feel as comforting. It never will feel like home.
I love poetry because, with a poem like this, I can be very succinctly not home, and yet feel transported back home instantly with these words. I read this aloud and couldn't help but get emotional.
I remember waking up to a 3 foot wall of fresh snow outside the door, putting maple syrup on it in a small cup and devouring it in small morsels. Eating beans my grandmother made on the stove, in a ceramic crock that had been sitting there all day simmering. The winter I lived with my sibling and they were a farmer and we lived off of some kind of squash and potatoes they brought home from work for those long 5 months. Day drinking with my friends in college after we lost power and everything was closed down, calling someone and saying oh the cumbys has power, that side of town is okay, lets go over there and get some high life.
Religion's a big thing.
Everyone worships something, whether its Jesus or just their routine of making a hot cup of coffee in the morning, to get them going, or a moment alone with a cigarette, on a porch in the middle of the night after all the house lights have gone off and there's just one street light shining orange across the way. Religion means something different to everyone. Its just something to get us by, something that makes us feel alright for just a moment.
I think what makes this poem so special to me, is that I can hear the dry sarcasm of a lot of people I know. We all say something sucks, but we also wouldn't have it any other way. We hate the winter but we miss it when we have a particularly warm one, or we're somewhere outside of New England. This whole poem makes me feel as if I'm talking to one of my family members, or a close friend. The punctuation-less lines that break in strange but predictable ways, in short bursts, remind me of how people in New England do things quickly, maybe because its so cold and they need to keep moving otherwise they'll freeze. It reminds me of the way we tell stories, and how we have our own way of talking.
New England is awful. But is it really?