Listen Here (50 page)

from
Short and Simple Annals
(1983)

Turn down the brim of your old felt hat
so all I can see are your rosy lips

Chew on them absently
Think thoughts I have no way of hearing

Step carefully through
the muck of the barn

Stop to look at the beginning of sun:
beside each brown slat a blue one

Sigh and rub the ache in the bone
the place over the heart where fullness

has flown like a hen out of a coop go
around the black snake that lies in your path

The eggs inside its belly strung out
like cocoons just before the butterflies

emerge from their safekeeping Shush the hens
that roost in a row on the cow's back

Listen to the soft cooing issuing
from their throats to the ruffling

of their shiny feathers as they rise
to the rafters like powder puffs

Here where nothing moves but the cow chewing
its cud its dull stare turning to rock

Make your hands flash in the dark
make them light up the barn

as they take me back to that moment
in my childhood where nothing belongs but milk

filling the pail inch by inch
with its white froth

warm and sweet
as the breath of a baby

from
Short and Simple Annals
(1983)

The house where I was born had a big front yard.
The porch was blue eye shadow.

The dwarf cedar had eczema. Rain rolled
down it like water off a duck's back.

The moon-faced walk led to a gate
that creaked when the wind opened it.

This music rivaled the bee's tiny bell,
the bird's bubbling promise. Most of the time

I heard it: the iron gate's solo, its dog face
looking both ways, its ears curled up like snails.

Sometimes I made this music myself:
swinging back and forth, listening to

the click and moan that sounded
like my heart in the dead of night

when in the bedroom alone I heard
through the wall the ghost of a quarrel:

mother's dark hair, pressed against the chair's
pale flank, my father's fist raised and juggling

the anger that when it fell smashed
my mother's face in two like precious china.

(April 20, 1939–)

“I'm a hillbilly, a woman, and a poet,” says Irene McKinney, “and I understood early on that nobody was going to listen to anything I had to say anyway, so I might as well just say what I want to.” She has said what she wanted in four collections of poetry. In 1985, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She has also been awarded a West Virginia Commission on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. In 1994, she was named Poet Laureate of West Virginia.

Born in Belington, West Virginia, where she currently lives, McKinney is the daughter of Celia and Ralph Durrett. She earned her B.A. from West Virginia Wesleyan College, her M.A. from West Virginia University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Utah. She has taught poetry at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Utah, the University of New Mexico, Western Washington University, and Hamilton College. Currently, she teaches English and creative writing at her alma mater, West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon.

About McKinney's book of poems
Six O'Clock Mine Report
, poet Maxine Kumin has written, “I am grateful for the poems that burst forth from her West Virginia roots to shape this fine collection.”

Poetry:
Six O'Clock Mine Report
(1989),
Quick Fire and Slow Fire
(1988),
The Wasps at the Blue Hexagons
(1984),
The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap
(1976).
Edited book:
Backcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia
(2002).

Maggie Anderson, “The Mountains Dark and Close around Me,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 39. Jeff Mann, “A Conversation with Irene McKinney,” in
Her Words
(2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 194–205.

from
Six O'Clock Mine Report
(1989)

Bergoo Mine No. 3 will work: Bergoo Mine
No. 3 will work tomorrow. Consol. No. 2
will not work: Consol. No. 2 will not
work tomorrow.

Green soaks into the dark trees.
The hills go clumped and heavy
over the foxfire veins
at Clinchfield, One-Go, Greenbrier.

At Hardtack and Amity the grit
abrades the skin. The air is thick
above the black leaves, the open mouth
of the shaft. A man with a burning

carbide lamp on his forehead
swings a pick in a narrow corridor
beneath the earth. His eyes flare
white like a horse's, his teeth glint.

From his sleeves of coal, fingers
with black half-moons: he leans
into the tipple, over the coke oven
staining the air red, over the glow

from the rows of fiery eyes at Swago.
Above Slipjohn a six-ton lumbers down
the grade, its windows curtained with soot.
No one is driving.

The roads get lost in the clotted hills,
in the Blue Spruce maze, the red cough,
the Allegheny marl, the sulphur ooze.

The hill-cuts drain; the roads get lost
and drop at the edge of the strip job.
The fires in the mines do not stop burning.

from
Six O'Clock Mine Report
(1989)

Think of this: that under the earth
there are black rooms your very body

can move through. Just as you always
dreamed, you enter the open mouth

and slide between the glistening walls,
the arteries of coal in the larger body.

I knock it loose with the heavy hammer.
I load it up and send it out

while you walk up there on the crust,
in the daylight, and listen to the coal-cars

bearing down with their burden.
You're going to burn this fuel

and when you come in from your chores,
rub your hands in the soft red glow

and stand in your steaming clothes
with your back to it, while it soaks

into frozen buttocks and thighs.
You're going to do that for me

while I slog in the icy water
behind the straining cars.

Until the swing-shift comes around.
Now, I am the one in front of the fire.

Someone has stoked the cooking stove
and set brown loaves on the warming pan.

Someone has laid out my softer clothes,
and turned back the quilt.

Listen: there is a vein that runs
through the earth from top to bottom

and both of us are in it.
One of us is always burning.

from
Six O'Clock Mine Report
(1989)

Bleach in the foot-bathtub.
The curling iron, the crimped, singed hair.
The small red marks my mother makes
across her lips.

Dust in the road, and on the sumac.
The tight, white sandals on my feet.

In the clean sun before the doors,
the flounces and flowered prints,
the naked hands. We bring
what we can—some coins,
our faces.

The narrow benches we don't fit.
The wasps at the blue hexagons.

And now the rounding of the unbearable
vowels of the organ, the O
of release. We bring
some strain, and lay it down
among the vowels and the gladioli.

The paper fans. The preacher paces,
our eyes are drawn to the window,
the elms with their easy hands.

Outside, the shaven hilly graves we own.
Durrett, Durrett, Durrett. The babies there
that are not me. Beside me,
Mrs. G. sings like a chicken
flung in a pan on Sunday morning.

…This hymnal I hold in my hands.
This high bare room, this strict accounting.
This rising up.

from
Six O'Clock Mine Report
(1989)

The straight neck held up out of the lace
is bound with a black velvet band.
She holds her mouth the way she chooses,
the full underlip constrained by a small muscle.

She doesn't blink or look aside,
although her left eye is considering
a slant. She would smile
if she had time, but right now

there is composure to be invented.
She stares at the photographer.
The black crepe settles. Emerging
from the sleeve, a shapely hand

holds out a white, translucent blossom.
“They always say things which embarrass
my dog,” she tells the photographer.
She is amused, but not as much as he'd like.

from
Six O'Clock Mine Report
(1989)

Maybe because I was married and felt secure and dead
at once, I listened to my father's urgings about “the future”

and bought this double plot on the hillside with a view
of the bare white church, the old elms, and the creek below.

I plan now to use both plots, luxuriantly spreading out
in the middle of a big double bed.—But no,

finally, my burial has nothing to do with my marriage, this lying
here

in these same bones will be as real as anything I can imagine

for who I'll be then, as real as anything undergone, going back
and forth to “the world” out there, and here to this one spot

on earth I really know. Once I came in fast and low
in a little plane and when I looked down at the church,

the trees I've felt with my hands, the neighbors' houses

and the family farm, and I saw how tiny what I loved or knew
was,

it was like my children going on with their plans and griefs
at a distance and nothing I could do about it. But I wanted

to reach down and pat it, while letting it know
I wouldn't interfere for the world, the world being

everything this isn't, this unknown buried in the known.

(January 9, 1911–June 16, 1993)

Poet Louise McNeill was born in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, on a farm that was settled by her ancestors in 1769. She earned an A.B. degree from Concord College in Athens, West Virginia, and, at the age of nineteen, began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. She later earned a master's degree from Miami of Ohio, and a Ph.D. in history from West Virginia University.

In 1938, McNeill won the
Atlantic Monthly
Poetry Award and was invited to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference where she studied with Robert Frost. In the fall of 1938, McNeill was awarded a fellowship to the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Her first major collection of poems,
Gauley Mountain
, was published in 1939, after Archibald MacLeish took an interest in her work. In that same year, she married “Yankee schoolteacher” Roger Pease. The couple lived outside the region for many years, but returned to West Virginia in 1959.

For the next twenty years, McNeill taught history and English at various West Virginia colleges and universities. She was named Poet Laureate of West Virginia in 1979 by West Virginia governor Jay Rockefeller.

In McNeill's autobiography,
The Milkweed Ladies
, she reminisces about the West Virginia farm that had been in her family since the eighteenth century.

Poetry:
Hill Daughter: New & Selected Poems
(1991),
Elderberry Flood: The History, Lore, and Land of West Virginia Written in Verse Form
(1979),
Paradox Hill: From Appalachia to Lunar Shore
(1972),
Time Is Our House
(1942),
Gauley Mountain
(1939),
Mountain White
(1931).
Memoir:
The Milkweed Ladies
(1988).

Maggie Anderson, Introduction,
Hill Daughter: New & Selected Poems
(1991), xiii–xxvi. Arthur C. Buck, “Louise McNeill, West Virginia's Hill Daughter,”
From a Dark Mountain
(1972), 24–26. Loyal Jones, review of
The Milkweed Ladies, Appalachian Heritage
17:2 (spring 1989), 63–64. “Louise McNeill,”
Appalachian Heritage
13:4 (fall 1985), 12. “Louise M. Pease, 82, Poet of Appalachia,”
New York Times
, 19 June 1993, 10.