Gothic author Feral Kenyon reads The Sound of One Fork by Minnie Bruce Pratt.
The Sound of One Fork:
Through the window screen I can see an angle of grey roof
and the silence that spreads in the branches of the pecan tree
as the sun goes down. I am waiting for a lover. I am alone
in a solitude that vibrates like the cicada in hot midmorning,
that waits like the lobed sassafras leaf just before
its dark green turns into red, that waits
like the honeybee in the mouth of the purple lobelia.
While I wait, I can hear the random clink of one fork
against a plate. The woman next door is eating supper
alone. She is sixty, perhaps, and for many years
has eaten by herself the tomatoes, the corn
and okra that she grows in her backyard garden.
Her small metallic sound persists, as quiet almost
as the windless silence, persists like the steady
random click of a redbird cracking a few
more seeds before the sun gets too low.
She does not hurry, she does not linger.
Her younger neighbors think that she is lonely.
But I know what sufficiency she may possess.
I know what can be gathered from year to year,
gathered from what is near to hand, as I do
elderberries that bend in damp thickets by the road,
gathered and preserved, jars and jars shining
in rows of claret red, made at times with help,
a friend or a lover, but consumed long after,
long after they are gone and I sit
alone at the kitchen table.
And when I sit in the last heat of Sunday, afternoons
on the porch steps in the acid breath of the boxwoods,
I also know desolation. The week is over, the coming night
will not lift. I am exhausted from making each day.
My family, my children live in other states,
the women I love in other towns. I would rather be here
than with them in the old ways, but when all that’s left
of the sunset is the red reflection underneath the clouds,
when I get up and come in to fix supper,
in the darkened kitchen I am often lonely for them.
In the morning and the evening we are by ourselves,
the woman next door and I. Still, we persist.
I open the drawer to get out the silverware.
She goes to her garden to pull weeds and pick
the crookneck squash that turn yellow with late summer.
I walk down to the pond in the morning to watch
and wait for the blue heron who comes at first light
to feed on minnows that swim through her shadow in the water.
She stays until the day grows so bright
that she cannot endure it and leaves with her hunger unsatisfied.
She bows her wings and slowly lifts into flight,
grey and slate blue against a paler sky.
I know she will come back. I see the light create
a russet curve of land on the farther bank,
where the wild rice bends heavy and ripe
under the first blackbirds. I know
she will come back. I see the light curve
in the fall and rise of her wing.
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About The Sound of One Fork:
"My first book of poetry, The Sound of One Fork, came out of the women’s liberation and lesbian/gay liberation movements of the 1970s. I had written poetry in college, and had stopped-when I had married a poet. Like so many other women of my generation, I married the person I wanted to be. But in graduate school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, I got to know feminists and lesbians involved in early women’s liberation organizing. I started to do short book reviews for a local movement publication, the Female Liberation Newsletter. And then I began to write poetry again when I fell in love with another woman, in 1975. I returned to poetry not because I had "become a lesbian"-but because I had returned to my own body after years of alienation. To be a poet, whose raw material is the sensual details of life, I had to be fully alive in my own flesh. In 1979 I became part of the Feminary collective in Durham, North Carolina; we were a group of anti-racist, anti-imperialist Southern lesbians. Others in the editorial collective, during the time I was a member, were Susan Ballinger, Eleanor Holland, Helen Langa, Deborah Giddens, Raymina Y. Mays, Mab Segrest, Cris South, and Aida Wakil." - Minnie Bruce Pratt
About the author:
Minnie Bruce Pratt is an American educator, activist and essayist. She is a Professor of Writing and Women’s Studies at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York where she was invited to help develop the university’s first LGBT Study Program.
Become a Creature
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Carrd: feralkenyon.carrd.co/
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