Chris Rice Cooper
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Jimmie Margaret Gilliam’s Torn From the Ear of Night:
Marked
With Grief
On December 27, 2016 White Pine
Press
The process of tearing an ear of corn from the
field similar to that of childbirth – the farmer is the doctor, the ear of corn
the baby, and the stalk the mother. The
stalk goes through the trauma of childbirth but unlike the human childbirth the
stalk never receives her young back and therefore endures a grief – which will
not end until she is once again pregnant with her next ear of corn, only to
endure the same grief all over again.
There are numerous themes in Torn
From the Ear of Night; self awareness, sexual awareness, homosexuality;
domestic violence; shame; guilt; finding one’s identity as a poet; but the
theme that is the focus of this blog post is how grief like DNA is passed
through five generations of Gilliam’s family, or five generations of ears of
corn.
In the prose poem “The Word Photo”
Gilliam writes of her family members that are detailed in an old photograph,
taken within weeks of great grandmother Emma Halford’s death. In the photo Gilliam’s grandmother Lucy is a
baby in her mother Emma’s arms surrounded by Emma’s husband Joe, and Lucy’s
siblings Johnson, Annie, Minnie, and Leah.
Little Lucy sits on
her mother’s lap. Emma’s long hand keeps
her within the circle of her right arm and hand. The child’s arms are crossed. Her oval eyes turn up at the edges; they are
shaped like teardrops. The small girl’s
gaze is reflective – outside the space framed in the pictures – as if she knows
within weeks her mother will be dead.
It is through
teardrop-shaped eyes that the poet Gilliam wrote all of these poems – detailing
the sorrows and the joys of life and death, specifically with baby Lucy at the
loss of a mother she cannot even remember, but can forever feel.
She will die in the night holding little
Lucy in her arms. The child hears the
death rattle, cries for Mama the next morning when she wakes alone.
In “Torn From the
Ear of Night” Lucy is the orphan who doesn’t remember her mother’s passing or
her father’s cries but will forever carry a mark of sorrow:
The bruise on her
childhood’s heart
Turns purple in the
dawning hour.
(What a girl was came clear in the throat of purple/blue iris.)
In “Beloved Daughter” Joe writes to his daughter
Lucy where it is revealed that death did not stop at his precious wife but
continued; taking his young son Johnson who was killed by a train; his daughter
Leah who died in an asylum. Joe pleads with his daughter Lucy to come to his
aid.
Dearest Lucy, come, please come as soon as you can. Peace continues to elude your daddy.
In the tale The
Forgotten Ear, an Arikara woman is gathering corn from the field. When she thought she gathered all the ears of
corn she started to walk away only to hear a child weeping: “Oh do not leave me! Do not go away without me!” She searches the field for more ears but can not
find any and walks away only to hear the child weeping: "Oh, do not leave me! Do
not go away without me!"
At last, in one corner of the field,
hidden under the leaves of the stalks, she found one little ear of corn and
collected it, adding it to her other ears of corn.
Gilliam is that forgotten ear of corn,
except she is left abandoned in the field.
In the poem “A Girl Blue as a Bluefish” Gilliam
details her own birth and how close she came to death:
Dr. Hensley delivers the baby
A girl blue as a bluefish
The umbilical cord wrapped around her neck
How
can I tell them their child is . . .
Nurse Baumgartner’s quick movements tops
His pronouncement
She repeats all the procedures
Clears the passages, nose and throat
Whacks the buttocks
Breaths into the stubborn lungs.
My head is sore and
swollen
(from knocking it
against the wall)
a penance I gladly pay
try to enter your dull
stare
the lost brown of your
eyes. Mother
you don’t love me
you
don’t understand me
your
daddy doesn’t love me
he
doesn’t understand me
you
don’t love me
I want to understand
my mother
Her whirling mind/her
head divided
But I die every time
she looks up from the sewing machine
Fastens those words on
me.
In
“The Gun Scene” the speaker of the poem has a memory of witnessing domestic
violence between her parents.
In her anguish she
pulled me to her. She pressed her face
into my small body and poured her grief into me filling the tiny quivering cups
at the ends of all my nerves.
Her mother tells her small daughter to go get
the gun and the daughter obeys, thinking that her mother is going to shoot her
father.
The realization of her
failure to shoot him spread over her like goosebumps before a faint – she turned
the gun on me to wipe me out in one trigger.
What stopped her – all
I know is some nights alone at that place between fall and winter I see the
August sounds of katydids frozen and I hear silence louder than the discharge
of a gun
All I know is inside
me, terror – everything stopped.
Sometimes I don’t even
know if this story is true – it might could be a fantasy. But I can smell terror – a metallic smell – a
gun in my face, small black moon/full/looking me in the eye.
Later you tell me
he bends to her body
kisses her
first on her forehead
then on her mouth
he presses his lips
into the hollow of her
neck
loses his head in her
bosom
then he howls
wild with amputation.
In
“Graveside Sequel” the mark of sorrow is passed though five generations: Emily, Joe, Lucy, Noland’s wife, Gilliam, and
her two daughters Jill and Jenny.
mountain iris/ purple
batons
you hand to me
I pass on to Jill and
Jenny.
In “Graveside” the speaker of the poem describes
the grief that has been passed from her buried mother to herself. At first it appears the grief is due to the
loss of her mother; but at closer inspection the grief is due to the fact that
the mother still lives on inside the daughter, a grief she does not want to
inherit.
I am your poet, Mother
Though my words do not
grace your ears
I am bone of your bone
You stand in my frame
Bone catches in my
throat
Of this grief.
In “Fall, Raking Leaves” a love poem
dedicated to Gilliam’s wife Geri, the speaker of the poem finds goodness out of
grief, which is the ability of the living to choose what not to repeat or
repeat of the dead.
the dead remind us
where
not to hurry to go
we are the only body
that they have
In “Graveside”, her dead mother holds the same mirrors, demanding her daughter which identity she should partake. It is through this grief that Gilliam finds her voice as a poet, and the strength of exhibiting triumph out of grief:
Your death still takes
my legs away, Mother
But I will walk on air/
my will
Away from the mirror
you hold for me
Deep in the earth.
*Jimmie Margaret Gilliam (08/07/1935 – 09/24/2015) was a
co-editor of Earth's Daughters from 1975 to1986. She was Professor Emerita
at ECC, she taught English Literature on the College's City Campus from 1971 to
1995. She was co-author of the poetry volume The Rime & Roar of Revolution
(as Jimmie Canfield, with Bob Dickens, 1975) and author of the poem/novel Ain't
No Bears Out Tonight (as Jimmie Gilliam Canfield, 1984) and Pieces
of Bread (as Jimmie Canfield Gilliam, 1987), which was on the Academy
of American Poets 1987 Fall Reading List. Her work was featured in Writers
At Work, an anthology published by Just Buffalo in 1995 and used in the
Buffalo public schools. She has given readings and workshops all over WNY, in
Albuquerque, NM, and in her hometown of Asheville, NC. Her poems have appeared
in a variety of publications, including the "Poetry Page" of The
Buffalo News, Earth's Daughters, The Asheville Poetry Review, Eve Magazine, The
July Press, and Black Mountain Review.
