Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

There are poems that need to be seen on the page because the placement of each word, each punctuation mark, each space is part of the poem.

There are other poems that ride on the tongue, and must be heard, because they have the lithe muscle of the dancer and the breath of the singer in them.

Judy Grahn (1940 –  ) writes poems so out loud they will stagger you.

When I first read The Common Woman Poems, and a woman is talking to death, they were in thin smudgy chapbooks of reproduced typewriter manuscript, but they made me get up and move as I spoke them aloud. It was the 1970s, and elegant computer-driven self-publishing wasn’t even a glint on the horizon.

But the long line of ancient poet-singers who predate the written word by centuries would recognize her.

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from The Common Women Poems

II.

Ella, in a square apron, along Highway 80

She’s a copperheaded waitress,
tired and sharp-worded, she hides
her bad brown tooth behind a wicked
smile, and flicks her ass
out of habit, to fend off the pass
that passes for affection.
She keeps her mind the way men
keep a knife—keen to strip the game
down to her size. She has a thin spine,
swallows her eggs cold, and tells lies.
She slaps a wet rag at the truck drivers
if they should complain. She understands
the necessity for pain, turns away
the smaller tips, out of pride, and
keeps a flask under the counter. Once,
she shot a lover who misused her child.
Before she got out of jail, the courts had pounced
and given the child away. Like some isolated lake,
her flat blue eyes take care of their own stark
bottoms. Her hands are nervous, curled, ready to scrape.
The common woman is as common as a rattlesnake.

III.

Nadine, resting on her neighbor’s stoop

She holds things together, collects bail,
makes the landlord patch the largest holes.
At the Sunday social she would spike
every drink, and offer you half of what she knows,
which is plenty. She pokes at the ruins of the city
like an armored tank; but she thinks
of herself as a ripsaw cutting through
knots in wood. Her sentences come out
like thick pine shanks
and her big hands fill the air like smoke.
She’s a mud-chinked cabin in the slums,
sitting on the doorstep counting
rats and raising 15 children,
half of them her own. The neighborhood
would burn itself out without her;
one of these days she’ll strike the spark herself.
She’s made of grease
and metal, with a hard head
that makes the men around her seem frail.
The common woman is as common as a nail.

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