The Garden of Numa Pompilius

simulat sibi cum dea Egeria congressus nocturnus esse*
— Titus Livy, Ab Urba Condita, i. 9

From whom does the great king
gain his wisdom, the king
whose great laws pour
as from a river?
Some say a woman advises him,
but the king’s house
has neither woman nor woman-child:
no dainty foot has walked here
since the consort’s burial.

Some say, in his grief
he has gone Orphic-mad,
and now a boy inspires him.
It’s true that beardless youths
come freely, serving from silver
bowls and chalices. (Greek ways
and wiles — are they among us?)

This too is idle gossip —
for neither youth nor maiden
has seen the silent garden
of Numa Pompilius.
The summer’s short nights
he sleeps alone here.
Scribes come at dawn
to take his judgments,
hear the new laws.
His wisdom astonishes,
surpassing, surprising
his ever-contending counselors.

The source of his power is here,
a stone-cut spring, old as the Tiber,
that only kings may drink from,
in the grave-scent of yew trees,
the bitterness of laurel —
a still voice that thrills him,
pale arms that come
fro out of nowhere
to rest on his shoulders —
the voice above calumny,
conspiracy and faction.

Rome is Numa, and Numa, Rome.
His, the rites to Jupiter,
the incense rising, entrails read;
his Virgins at Vesta’s hearthside;
his, the temples of Mars and Janus,
the ordered calendar and the names of days —
his thoughts no sooner spoken than enacted.

Her thoughts. Those garden nights
he dare not look backward
to search her countenance —
madness or blindness
the nympholept’s punishment.
She might be crone, or eyeless,
or Gorgon-locked, or nothing more
than poplar leaves rustling.
Her name on his lips,
an Etruscan mystery,
is all he has, or knows.

She will not have a temple,
chooses her own altar and pontifex.
He comes to the spring font,
to the branches bowed
with night-wind,
calls thrice (their only ritual) —
Egeria! Egeria! Egeria!

__________________
* He himself pretended to be in nocturnal congress with the goddess Egeria. — Livy, History of Early Rome.

Water Music IV

To be is to have been with these waters; to be
is to have roots in bleeding earth,
from mud, that oozing formless mother squeezed,
is to have known the longest path downhill —
falling, fierce drops from the blistering clouds —
or to be born as dew in pre-dawn light
or to come as crystal. solemn in frost.
or to spring from the rocks’ deep airless streams,
chill child of the darkness, full of tumult.’

To be is to flow, formed and yet formless,
bubbling with atoms’ singing bravado,
proud of a charge, an affinite valence,
a molecule’s journey defying death,
reflecting yet fleeing the sun’s hot lamp,
alive yet buoying the leaves of decay,
carving trails everywhere, here mingling,
there feeding hungry roots, there wearing down
some arrogant hillside, toppling its trees —
to move with a certainty of purpose,
knowing the land is shaped by tireless ions.
To be, however small, yet know yourself
the sine qua non of spring and summer!

To leap, however deceived, to hot air
into the trap of a motionless pool
over the brink of a cataract, down
to the inky depths of an ocean trench, —
all are the same to you, no place an end,
at home alike in gill and gullet, one
with even the loneliness of glaciers —
To know your destiny, the truth of your being,
borne from the source by your own charge.
To know is to reach by any means
an end which no other essence compels;
to be, and to leave where you pass
your subtle fingerprint upon the hardest stone.

Note: The equinoctial storms engulfing the Notheast this weekend made me think of this poem.

The Prophet Bird

I have heard the shrill call of your prophet bird.
Night and the moon have brought me out
to the sea shore to hear its funereal song.
I will not weep, cannot despair.
I stand on this storm-blown, sea-rising
drought-ridden planet, yet my heart
is not sinking, even as maniacs
wild-eyed Kalashnikoved & holybooked
explode themselves and bring carnage around them,
even as I consider Europe a vast boneyard,
the Middle East a trashheap of uncivilizations
piled high since the first silt of Nile & Tigris
gave idle kings & priests the criminal idea
they had dominion over everything, and for all time.

What creatures! Fashion a stylus or a horn of brass,
and then a scimitar. Invent polyphony,
then make for Torquemada
an exquisite device for torture.
Should such vile animals,
with the table manners of Harpies,
be written off by the Animal Kingdom,
turned out by thorn and briar by the Plants,
poisoned to extinction by acrid Minerals,
blotted by the very sun and stars?

I answer only that Beauty redeems everything.
Even the tiger, when it is not hungry,
looks on the bounding gazelle
as a thing of wonder.

For the line of one neck and shoulder
on a Phidean marble,
one phrase of Handel or Mozart,
one heart-stopping dab of paint on canvas,
we are forgiven much.  We share with life,
from pseudopod to mammoth,
from the most delicate tendril
to the great bulk of whale-flesh,
the way the all-too-familiar disk
of the sun-faced daisy might see us,
the fascinated horror we feel
as we regard the self-
illuminating eye of the giant squid —
all monstrous to all, all beautiful to all
as long as life goes drunk on self-delight
and aches for the touch of its kind,
as long as we know that all life enjoys
the benediction of earth-turn and sunrise
that the first word the Universe uttered
was Surprise!

Another human chapter is ending.
It is not the end of everything
(only the thin-lipped prophets
with their dry-leaf Bibles
believe that everything will end).
The story is not over.
It will never be over.

Walls and guard towers have fallen,
death camps and prison camps closed.
All this is good. That some mass murderers
sleep in their pensioned beds disturbs me.
That new Lenins and Berias and Stalins
are waiting to be born, disturbs me.

But life itself has something in store for us.
We will star-leap if we must to another Earth
if we cannot learn from this one.
The air, yes, is a different color now.
Trees on the mountaintops brown in its acid.
If elm, beech and chestnut
possessed a smiting god to call upon
the green world would rise and smother us.

Full half of the cause of the harm we do
is that we live so briefly,
so little time for giving and healing
after so much seizing and taking.

So let us live longer, not less,
let us become old-timers, undying,
cyborgs if we must —
if all the great men and women past were there for us,
even if only as their brains afloat in a tank
in squawk-voice semblance of living,
still they would come to us
the way the ghost-Athena seized
the sword-hand of Achilleus,
saying to him, Don’t do that

It is because we die
that we make Earth an ashtray,
choke ocean with petrol and styrofoam.
I do not worry much about banks, and mortgages.
Things fall apart, and pass away.
Their place will be taken by other things.
I would welcome the end of six-lane highways,
the tic-tac-toe of airplanes across the sky.

I see a different millennium unfolding
not of steel girders and oil derricks.
So long as we escape the total madness
of mouth-foaming God-told-me-so
hand-on-Apocalypse men,
so long as our better natures prevail

I will live to see every book ever written
available free to everyone on earth,
Beethoven free, Homer and Virgil and Dante,
Shelley and Poe and Whitman for everyone,
a never-closing museum that all may walk
alone or in the best of company —

Your prophet bird
would sing disaster,
minor in downward scale —
my bird, the melody inverts,
beaking the flats away,
my scale ascending.

Summer Storm

I am standing in the rain.
The summer cloudburst
clots the sky, soaks me
as I stand in the unmowed grass
behind the summer cottage.
The clapboards, streaked and shining,
reflect the corrugated bolts
of jabbing lightning. I stay
until the rainlash wears me down.
I have left your easy sleep,
your clutching arms,
in the attic that quakes
with thunder and wind,
air like lost bats against the panes.
I lay down rain-wet beside you.
The candle is guttering,
exchanges flashes
with the expiring tempest.
In me, a furnace burns
within a heart of brass.
In reason's engine
there is no rain now.
I watch you turn and toss.
I try to feel nothing.
To think that you love me is hubris anyway.
All of your nights are sudden storms.

English Breakfasts

i
Grandmother died yesterday,
a little girl tells me at breakfast,
and Mommy says we’ll inherit something.
How English, I think.
The teapot hides
in a quilted cozy.
The sugar is cubed,
the silver spoons polished
by the Irish maid.
Not one pinched face at this table
can extrude a tear.

ii
On the street, a moving truck
is engorged with furniture.
Its double-doors close.
A thin, pale woman
looks back at the Tudor
house, the round hill,
the enclosing oaks.
I suppose I shall miss it,
she tells her husband.
It had too many rooms, anyway.

They drive off. The house
settles and sighs audibly.
A branch falls
from an embarrassed maple.

iii
My father, whom
I had not seen in thirty years,
told me of his memories:
Your grandfather took me out
for a beer once.
I was twenty-six
and in the army.
It’s the only time
he ever really talked to me.

When I wrote, I called him “Old One.”
He signed his letters,
“Don.”
Going on sixty, I warmed up
to “Venerable Rutherford”;
he was past ninety,
and, finally, at the close
of a hand-printed letter,
he ended it:
DAD.

Epigrams

Always check pigsties for pearls:
many have fallen in.

Two in the bush
is the root of all evil.

If you go to a place,
and you find it is Sparta,
then you must make it Athens.

Irises

Before a certain bridge I cross each night —
my eyes are bent downward so as to miss
who does or doesn’t come to that window —
I study a cottage’s garden plot.
I have never known who lives here,
but have grown to know that militant line
of soldier irises in purple plumes,
their wind-rumpled hoods on defiant spear-ends,
the constant bulbs as certain as sunrise.

By day the flowers welcomed visitors —
hived bees and humming, brazen dragonflies,
by day they shamed the variable sky.
(By day I see that, in your nearby loft, 
your windows darken,
concealing your presence or your absence.
Only your door mouth, opening and closing,
admitting and ejecting visitors,
confirms to me that you are tenant still.
Your lovers’ faces smite me with smiling;
in their dejection I recall my pain.)

On moonless nights I man the silent bridge,
brood on the madness of water lilies
that choke up the swelling, algae’d outlet.
I peer over the dam-edge precipice
at the shallow, tamed creek bed far below.

Beneath the lit and curtained windows
of your unsuspecting neighbor,
the irises stand guard like sentinels,
dark eyes awatch beneath those still petals,
the hidden golden stamens scolding me,
the patient bulbs oblivious to love,
serene as Buddhas, requiring nothing.

Within your casements,
above the dim-dark bookstore,
a galaxy stirs,
a sphere of light in a candle centered,
then other spheres, then moving silhouettes.
One is your cameo, then you are lit.
Moving to music now, your arms might close
around another’s neck. Your visitor
eclipses you, his night enfolding you,
your ivory breast his evening star,
his your heartbeat till morning’s dim crescent.
(O double Venus, which of you is true?)

Lights out, all but the streetlamps,
I turn back to my sleeping irises,
black blooms in owl-watch, consoling friars.
All day you give me eyes-alms blossoming;
all night you silently companion me,
never mocking this madness of loving,
dying of perfect beauty, and alone.

Note: The One for and about whom this poem was written is dead now. The summer nights depicted here live on.

Ice Storm

The entire state covered in ice,
each tree and branch and branchlet
a candelabra; thousands of millions,
thousands of thousands of millions
of pearl-size gem-globes diamonding
the low December sun to nova brilliance —
countless as the stars in the visible sky —
if tears, enough to count
all the dead who ever died
(Dante’s innumerable rings
of Hell and plateau’d Purgatory
would not have space enough!) —
Niobe cried dry at last, relieved
of her weeping duty, calm
and at peace with her tormenter, Leto.

Ice spheres soften, elongate to cones,
tip to icicle spear-points and fall,
ring-singing their one-note, finite joy,
the unvoiced, voiced and visible,
their moment between two oblivions,
a self-made boat of water, westward
and down from iceberg to sea,
and so we sink, world ending with sun’s
apocalypse, the blind and blinding
quotidian. We are never done with words;
picking up shards of thought, slip-
sliding away from our grasp as fast
as we can take them in hand,
the firm solitude of ice gone
in the melted pool of yesterdays.

I just found this -- scribbled nervously on a legal pad. It was written two winters ago, as I sat on the campus of Uiversity of Rhode Island, waiting to commence the defense of my master's project. There are sneaky allusions to all three of my projects, but the impetus for the poem was the early morning bus ride from Providence to Kingston -- the sun diamonding off millions upon millions of pearl-size ice globes on every tree.

Chance Cards in the Wuthering Heights Board Game

Pay $200 rent to Heathcliff.

Dogbite at Thrushcross Grange. Pay doctor $50.

Win $200 gambling with Hindley Earnshaw.

Heathcliff runs off with your sister. Lose inheritance.

Sleep with Linton Heathcliff or lose $100.

Name your child Linton Linton, Earnshaw Earnshaw, or Heathcliff Heathcliff.

Sleep in the barn for two years. Forfeit $100 for porridge and soup.

Dig up Catherine Earnshaw. Collect $20 gravedigger’s fee.

Lose Thrushcross Grange to Heathcliff.

Stay in Wuthering Heights forever.

Child Sex Criminal

At six
I find the place,
the tender glans
whose finger-rub
in gentle circles
makes me tremble,
till sparklers go off
from brain-stem
to end of spine.

It was, and remained
my secret,
an under-blanket ritual.

So much to mind
about the body’s plumbing:
dry underwear,
toilet concealment,
as though the outcome
of last night’s dinner
was a national secret.

Nervous Aunt Thelma
chides us:
How can you have a bathroom
next to the kitchen?
The sound of flushing
sickens me.


First grade at Hecla School
you raised your hand
and asked to go
to the cave-cool bathroom

Second grade boys
march to the bathroom,
expected to pee
on the teacher’s schedule.

I confide to the principal
at the next urinal:
I don’t have to go —
I’m just pretending.


On homeward bus,
half-dozen boys
hunch over, wince
from the agony
of holding it in
just five more minutes.
I cannot hold it,
walk stained
and dripping
to shouts and spanking.

My penis rebels
against conformity,
an unzipped peeper
as Miss McReady
explains subtractions.

I touch the spot.
It springs to attention.
Suzie, who gave me
the chicken pox, stares
from the cross-aisle seat
and giggles. Five
minus three is two.

A nature book
from a restricted shelf —
NOT TO BE REMOVED
FROM CLASSROOM —
tells all about spiders.
I take it home one night
to show my mother,
devour by moonlight
long after the lights-out,
then slide it back
to its shelf-place
at the start of school-day.

But someone saw,
and ran to tell Miss Macready.
Now books the other children
may borrow,
I am not allowed to borrow.
“We don’t loan books
to thieves,”
my teacher tells me.

We learn to read music.
After I was out with measles,
I returned to find them singing
with flats and sharps. I had
no idea what they were doing.
Miss McReady will not explain.
I am trapped forever
in the C-Major scale.

My next report card
alerts my parents:
DISOBEYS SCHOOL
REGULATIONS.

My mother assumes
it’s over the book
brought home by stealth
and just as quietly
restored.

Suzie and Miss Macready
whisper and glare at me.
I read what I want
and when I want to,
break rules
I find ridiculous.
I have already decided
there is no god.
I will never sing in a church choir.
I will not pee on demand.
I am marked for life:

thief,
rule-breaker,
child sex criminal.

Peeling the Onion: A Pennsylvania Memoir

When I was around fifteen, my grandmother, Florence Butler Ullery, decided I was old enough to hear grown-up things. She told me how her father, Albert Butler, had robbed a bank sometime after 1910. He had miscalculated what day the payroll cash arrived, and had come home with only $30 for his trouble, followed within an hour by the police, who dragged him off to jail. My grandmother showed me a photo of him, a middle-aged man with a Masonic pin on his lapel. It was taken in Scottdale, apparently the day he went off to prison after his conviction. On the back was written, “The pictures with both of us in them didn’t come out. Good-bye from your Pa.” He never came back, leaving my great-grandmother Christina Butler to fend for herself.

“Those were rough years, during the First War, and then the Depression,” grandmother sighed. “But we got through.” Great-grandmother Christina had died when I was eleven, preceded by “Homer,” the cigar-smoking old man who “boarded” with her and to whom it was said she was “secretly married.” As children, we were told to include “Grandma Butler and Homer” in evening prayers.

My grandmother, a wide-faced, simple woman, sat peeling onions, her chair pulled near the “slop bucket” where the peels fell. “The truth is like this here onion,” she said -- the first and last time I ever heard her speak metaphorically.

“What do you mean, grandma?”

She held the onion out for me to examine. It was partially cut open to reveal the white under the skin. “See here -- I peeled it and there’s the white part.” She cut some more. “Now look -- there’s some dirt and another peel inside.” She cut again, halving the onion. “Now the rest is all white. That’s the way people talk to you. There’s always a lie outside, then a little truth, and then some more lies, and then the inside is all true.” She asked me if I understood.

Yes, I said, there were people in town who said one thing and did another. Like my stepfather, “Uncle Joe.”

My parents had been divorced the previous summer. A messy affair, and everyone had to move out of town. My mother took up with my father’s sister’s husband. Both couples divorced. “Uncle Joe” became my stepfather, proclaiming how happy he was to have such a brilliant stepson and how he would make sure I got to college. We moved to the new town and Uncle Joe and my mother pretended to be married.

Then Uncle Joe came into my room one Saturday and told me, “You’re not welcome here. There will be food on the table, but that’s it. The day you graduate from high school, I want you out of here, and don’t expect anything from me.” I later found out he had dumped his children by a previous marriage in an orphanage some years before.

To get away from Uncle Joe and my mother, (“Gertrude and Claudius” in my own Gothic imagination) who were quickly becoming the town drunks, I spent most of that summer with grandmother, in the four-room, tarpaper-covered house that had been her mother’s and was now hers.

I noticed something I had never seen before. Grandma kept a loaded shotgun near the door.

“What’s that for?” I asked, alarmed. I was terrified of guns.

“It might be for your Uncle Joe,” she said. I smiled at the thought, but assumed she was joking. While my grandfather was alive I had never seen a gun in the house.

The next day, a car came up the long driveway and grandma told me to turn off the light and duck down in her bedroom. She turned off the television and all the other lights, locked the door, and came into the room and crouched down on the carpet.

I heard the chickens scattering in the yard, then a single set of footsteps on the porch. A light knocking on the door, then louder. Then an angry pounding.

“God-damn it, Florence — I know you’re in there! I just want to talk!”

It was Uncle Joe’s voice.

He pounded again, cursing. He stood for a while, then the footsteps tromped down off the porch. There were chicken noises again -- a loud one as the rooster went for him and he likely kicked it; another round of cursing as the rooster followed him to the car;  and then the car started up and did the turnaround to retreat back to the mountain road. We waited until everything was quiet again.

“What did he want?” I asked.

Grandmother was livid, shaking with a combination of rage and fear.

“He comes out here, on days when he’s supposed to be working. He wants me to go to the county courthouse and sign my property deed over to your mother. I told him ‘No’ twice. I have three children and this will always be home for all of them. He wants to use me and your mother to get this house. Your Uncle Ron and Uncle Bob will always have a home here, and your mother too. When Joe comes in the daytime like this, I just turn out the lights and hide.”

That night I dreamt of Grandma shooting Uncle Joe dead. It was a good dream.

*     *     *

A few days later, while peeling potatoes, Grandma bent her head toward where the gun stood, and she saw I was looking at it, too. She took a deep breath and told me another story.

“My mother lived here for a long time after my Pa went to jail. You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman in the country, running a house all alone. Your husband goes away, or dies, and there are all these men sitting around in roadhouses reading the paper, and they see the name in the obituary, and they remember you. Men you hadn’t seen since you were a little girl in school.

“One day a car comes up the drive and it’s two or three men. They’re real polite and respectful. They bring a big sack of groceries. They come in and sit down and have some of your bread. There’s a bottle of whiskey in that sack, so they say, ‘Let’s open it and have a drink.’ And you want to be polite, so you get the glasses out.

“And then one of them says something about how lonely it must be out here without a man around. And they laugh and make jokes until you blush. And then they suggest something, and if you had a whiskey with them and you’re a little silly and you give in —“

She paused and looked at me, not sure if I, at fifteen, knew what she was saying. I knew. I just looked at her and waited for the rest.

“And if you’re dumb enough to do that, then there’s no stopping it. They tell their friends, and pretty soon they come by the carload. That’s the other reason I keep the shotgun there. That’s the kind of thing that happens to … women.”

I had visions of my great-grandmother fending off rednecks with the shotgun, and I never forgot the story.

*     *     *

My grandmother Florence has been dead for many years now. Her oldest son Ron, a tall lanky man with speech as slow as melting tar, lived far away and didn’t look like anyone else in the family: he’s dead too. Her son Bob lived in the house until his passing a few years ago. My stepfather, “Uncle Joe,” finally moved in with my mother, and gasped his last from emphysema in the run-down shack he had so coveted. My mother is long gone, too.

Curiosity about Great-Grandma Butler and her Alsatian ancestors led me into some genealogical research a few years ago. I discovered cousins I never knew, and some of them visited the house and sent me photographs. The roof had crumbled and the house is now a ruin.


The cousins interviewed some of the neighbors and found one farmer who remembered all his parents’ stories about the Butlers. He knew about the bank robbery, and that Albert Butler was part of a gang of three robbers, all of whom went to prison.

Papers we had obtained about Great-Grandma Butler were startling. She had married an Alsatian man named Georges Jaquillard, who divorced her saying she had committed adultery “with numerous persons on numerous occasions.” So Albert Butler was her second husband.

After Butler went to prison, the neighbor farmer reported, Great Grandma Butler supported herself by making and selling moonshine, all through the Prohibition and for some years thereafter.

“Yes, she sold moonshine there,” the farmer reported. “But she didn’t just sell moonshine. She sold herself — and her daughter Florence.”

Truth is an onion. My grandmother, at its white heart, had prepared me to understand it when the time came: “the kind of thing that happens … to women.”


Note: I wrote the above as a "family story-telling" exercise in a course on Native American Literature I took with Prof. Alexia Kosmider. As you can see, I don't take the easy route with homework. I had never written down this memory until then. The photo above shows what remained of my grandmother's and great grandmother's house.

August Recess

Reform, like
Zeno's arrow
never comes:
before the halfway measure
must come the quarter measure,
before it
the hemi-demi-semi-measure,
before it the intention,
never mind the will.
Lacking the single push of empathy
the bowstring is unreleased because
it was never pulled.
The fat hand, weighted
with golden rings,
the leaden-braceleted
wrist, the immobile arm
en-Midas'd by bribery.
Fear no arrows from this
sclerotic Congress.

(Written in August as our Congressmen cowered beneath "Tea Party" madness)

About Marilyn Nelson

Back in 1770, Phillis Wheatley, the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry, penned her longest work, an adaptation of one episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It was the story of Theban Queen Niobe, one of the cruelest tales from mythology. Until very recently, this work of Wheatley’s was scorned by most critics as Wheatley’s walking in the footsteps of her white captors, a useless exercise in “white” neoclassical poetry. Yet the story Wheatley told included her own story in a subtle way. Niobe, a great queen, loses all fourteen of her children to the bows and arrows of the rogue gods Apollo and Diana. Wheatley had been torn from her mother in Africa by slave traders, the agents of rogue nations answerable to no moral law. Wheatley found in classical Greece the cry of the African mother.


Like Wheatley, Marilyn Nelson claims all myth, all stories, all nations as her own. She knows she needs no permission to step inside another person’s skin in another place and time. Like all great poets she knows that all poetry is hers, in whatever language. So I was thrilled to see that she has translated Euripides' Hecuba, whose central character is the Queen of Troy, another bereft mother. And I see that she has translated some of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. When I say this, it’s like saying, “She has climbed Mt. Everest.” Rilke is the most rarified and difficult of all poets to grasp and translate, and Marilyn Nelson renders him with stiletto sharpness, retaining her own voice and manner. Do this, and you are flying with the eagles!

I delight in Nelson’s choice of topics. She knows there are great stories to tell about great people, or ordinary people who prove themselves greater in soul than their oppressors. When she writes of her slave and liberated ancestors, she rises above victimhood and depicts them with dignity, power, and agency. Her poems around her homecoming to family history are poignant, and tinged with a curious irony: if those who came before did not do as they did, good or evil, then I would not be here to tell it. I would be someone else, all one color, all one thing, and maybe not even very interesting. To forgive history even while enduring the knowledge of the hand holding a whip takes a large soul.

Nelson’s life of George Washington Carver, the great botanist and artist, should be studied by young poets, who seem so in lack of something to write about beyond their everyday lives and love affairs. History teems with heroes, whose story only a poet can tell. After 9/11, Nelson set out to write a requiem work “to everyone in the world who died on that day,” including the 24,000 people who died of starvation on that day. Making everything out of one life and death, she wrote Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem about a Connecticut slave whose skeleton was extracted for “educational” use by a doctor – a polite way of saying his body was cooked down in a pot until nothing was left but the bones. The central poem in this book, “Not My Bones,” is one of the great poems of our time.

Her poems about her father, one of the heroic Tuskegee airmen of World War II, and the poems about his fellow flyers, her extended family of “uncles,” convey both the heroism of these men, and the horrific prejudice and race violence that still prevailed in America in the 1940s and 1950s. Whether it is the story of the World War I black soldier lynched on returning home in uniform, or the more subtle story of her father in uniform on a train, mistaken by a white woman for a porter, Nelson has the right words, the right giving and holding back, the right way of putting the anger in the events told, not the voice telling. These poems make you gasp, weep, and stagger, hit right between the eyes.

She writes “everyday” poems, too, and makes them extraordinary. I love her “Dinosaur Spring,” and her hilarious “Levitation with Baby” (a Muse poem), and her childhood recollection of “How I Discovered Poetry.” It is no accident, then, that she can sing to the young in sonnets, and her poignant cycle about a lynched 14-year-old boy – a most unlikely topic for a children’s book – is A Wreath for Emmett Till. Nelson’s book is challenging, high-toned, in gorgeous language a young person would take to heart and live with for a lifetime, even while teaching a dark moment in our history. Its presentation and kindly author’s notes are a model for how we might turn a new generation of young people into poetry readers.

Nelson also has the gift of a great narrator: she has a keen understanding of human psychology, as keen as a Dostoyevsky or a Maupassant. She knows we are not all culture but instinct, too. She sees the raw power of desire, anger and lust, the seed impulse coursing inside everything that lives. In “Churchgoing,” in classically formal language, she has finally explained to me, in terms that convince me, why slaves and former slaves could be Christians after being slaves to Christians. She writes:

That Christian, slave-owning hypocrisy
nevertheless was by these slaves ignored
as they pitied the poor body of Christ!
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble,
that they believed most, who so much have lost.

She is the poet Phillis Wheatley would have wanted to be.

The above text was my introduction to Marilyn Nelson when she appeared as judge and reader for the 2009 Philbrick Poetry Prize at the Providence Athenaeum.