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From Bones of a Very Fine Hand by Marjorie Saiser. Forward by William Kloefkorn, Nebraska State Poet. Winner of the year 2000 Book Award for Poetry from the Nebraska Center for The Book. This book is available from the press for $12 plus $2 shipping and handling. Please send a personal check drawn on a U.S. bank, or money order. The book may be ordered on-line from Amazon.com. I Don't Want to Think about You Go talk to your friends in the town. Sit in the tavern and play cards. Stop tipping the rabbit hutch, the rabbits dropping out the door like brown and white marbles. You're getting your crowbar, smashing the hollyhocks, hitting the pink and yellow ears of the flowers with the heavy hook of your crowbar, beating on the ground, beating the straw bale to pieces, pounding it, beating the pump in the yard, prying up the old sidewalk under the cedars in front of the house, you're going into the shed, you're beating your old model T, opening the doors and hitting the windows, the seat, dust rising every time you bring the crowbar down, you don't have to wreck everything like this, I forgive you, none of this is necessary, you're beating the stucco off the falling off the walls like pieces of crackers. Pounding the cedars, pounding the trunks, breaking the mason jars in the bushel baskets, you're going down the cellar steps, I could push the door shut with my little girl hands, I could keep you down there. I could roll the heavy two-wheel cart over and I could push it onto the door of the cellar, leave it and run away. You are breaking jars, gallons of pickles and applesauce. You're in the kitchen, smashing a loaf of bread on the white enamel counter, the crowbar over your head, you bring it down, you are smashing the curved glass of the china cabinet, smashing the wood itself as if it would bend over in the middle holding its old stomach, you rip the bed with the crowbar, beat the mattress and the blanket. I run to the cage in the living room, where the canary is; in the bedroom you are banging the metal of the bed, beating with the crowbar, noise, iron, it will shiver hands and arms, it must make old evil h they must be numb. I carry the cage into the yard, I run to the road, the cage bumping against my ribs, I stand in the road, the noise an anvil hammered, hammered, hammered. I open the door but the canary is afraid, does not fly. It is afraid of my hand, small in the cage. For a moment I hold it crumpled like yellow paper. I draw out my hand, a bird, throw it, a fist, uncaged, into the sky. Naming Marjorie, my father said. My father, cleanshaven, just out of a bath, putting on his khaki shirt, his khaki tie, naming his baby in front of the mirror in the bathroom, buttoning buttons, looking for his glasses, his boots, catching the bus to the base. My son, two years old, climbing a ladder, his head appearing over the edge a matter-of-fact child at two, coming to help, my father looking up from pounding nails, his eyes surprised, his fingers holding a nail, hammer hanging in his hand, seeing the baby at the edge of the eave, talking to him, calm on the outside, talking him steady, keeping him from falling like a hammer. The heft and plumb of my father's voice keeping things where they should be. The child at the top of the ladder seeing things from a new point of view: the joists, the colors of wood, the house in the making. My father coming like a spider over the rafters, his feet in his old leather shoes softly across the open spaces, his dry cracked hand closing on the boy's arm as on a handle. My father's voice calling my name, as if naming. At the top of the ladder, squatting like an acrobat on a wire holding the boy's arm. A child at a height in the quiet morning, looking at what can be seen, at things to come, as if receiving names: Common, jack, rafter, valley, hip. Heel, bird's mouth, pitch, rise. Facia board, rake, soffit. Tab nail, sixteen, eight-penny, ring-shank, galvanized. Ceiling joist, ridgepole, dormer, peak. Bearing wall, truss, claw, shakes. Two-by-sixes. Two-by-eights. Two-by-tens. About Marjorie Saiser Marjorie Saiser was born in El Paso, Texas, and grew up in north central Nebraska, near the Niobrara and Keya Paha rivers. She earned her Master's Degree in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1980, winning the Vreelands Award and the Academy of American Poets Award. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Georgia Review, Cream City Review, Laurel Review, Zone 3, Crazy Horse, and numerous other journals. Her work has been anthologized in Leaning Into the Wind (Houghton-Mifflin), The Plains Sense of Things, (Sandhills Press), Wellsprings, (University of Nebraska-Kearney), and in Adjoining Rooms (Platte Valley Press). She is currently the author member of the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association and is speaker for the Nebraska Humanities Council. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her husband Don. They have two children and one grandchild. Review of Bones of a Very Fine Hand by Laurel Johnson, Midwest Book Review Marjorie Saiser is a Nebraska wordsmith. Whispers of the Niobrara, Keya Paha, Platte, and prairies run rich through her poems. I felt a poignant fullnes in my heart while reading this book, because the author sees life as it was and is. Nothing blocks her view of beauty, joy, despair, the supernatural or commonplance when Ms. Saiser puts her words to paper. In "Once", she tells of her father taking her mother's picture. It's a picture the young husband will carry with him to war: ...crossing the equator, a plains boy in New Guinea carrying among the baby pictures my mother young and true and lovely, long legs bared to the sun. Learning of her daughter's pregnancy in "We Get the News" far outstrips the news of car bombings and business as usual: Flower in my daughter's narrow body, I want to think there is that which prevails. A deformed chick is the object lesson in "I Let My Daughter Down": ...Something happened, I say, in the egg. My daughter's eyes are lovely. Fairness. A chance for everybody. She names him Pegasus. Marjorie Saiser sees love everywhere - in old photographs and letters, in fields, mountains and oceans, by the perfume counter at Dillard's, in once strong hands that falter - and shares that love with us. Ms. Saiser writes - creates - with a very fine hand. |
