Where I'm From (2007 version)

I am from the mountains and forests of north central Georgia, from the slanting foundation of Sorrells Springs Primitive Baptist Church, from Wild Turkey Trail and picnics in the Baldwin Street Cemetery, from the old Floyd homeplace on Dog Lane, from drinking Dancing Goats coffee with lots of sugar on College Square, from breaking curfew at North Georgia and from the greening energy of California’s Central Valley in springtime. I am from late night walks on the shores of Lake Herrick, from climbing the fire tower at Lake Conasauga, from the wall at Fort Mountain and the boom of Kennesaw cannons. I am from wild turkeys at my mother’s grave, from rose-hued sunrises over Sharptop’s spire, from go-cart paths in the pastures and from buying sweetgrass lotion at Chipa’s powwows. I am from the streets of New York City, from Big Sur and Wupatki, and from Namaste on the path at Mingo Falls. I am from wading in the Studdards’ creek, from long intellectual harangues at the Globe, and from In the Night Café. I am from the Dollar Tree and from the musty stacks at Jackson Street Books, from discount CDs at Ruthless Records and from vintage brooches found in thrift store sale bins. I am from Spanish moss on the ghost beach at Jekyll and from the tabby ruins of old Darien, from Brunswick stew and dolphins, and from Christmas fireworks over the square in Ellijay.
I am from the scent of woodsmoke at Trackrock, my grandmother’s teacakes baking, my mother’s Wind Song perfume, from Nag Champa incense and patchouli oil, from the summery funk of lakewater and mud at the Braswells’ bass pond, from the poignant waft of sweetshrub and honeysuckle through my open window in springtime, from the grittiness of Athens city streets at three a.m., and from leather and hay in the tackroom at the barn.
I am from Johnny Cash, from Radiohead, from REM playing incognito at the 40 Watt Club, from Gospel Jubilees on Sunday mornings on my grandma’s television set, from the Andy Griffith theme song, and from the haunted calls of whippoorwhills in the dusk over the soybean fields. I am from Two More Bottles of Wine, from Neal Pattman’s one-armed blues genius on Wednesday nights, from Smells Like Teen Spirit, and from my stairway settling in the wind on a cold January night. I am from silence and bluegrass, from grunge and discourse, from Southern drawls and crickets chorusing in the hardwoods. I am from Leonard Cohen and Patty Griffin, from Kind of Blue and Nighthawks at the Diner, and from the snapping self-conversation of the Epiphany bonfire over by the lake.
I am from red-eye gravy and pancakes, from strong lattes laced with nutmeg, from Grandma’s creamed potatoes swimming in butter, from tomato aspic and mayonnaise at Thanksgiving, from pepper jelly and cream cheese, from sushi at Seal Beach, from Tut’s Chicken, and from peanuts submerged in RC Cola on a hot July afternoon. I am from my mother’s fried okra, from tentative sips of my dad’s Miller Lite, from lime fizzy water, from persimmons crawling with wasps at the edge of the woods, from the infinity of blackberries, from scorched campfire hot dogs, and from my grandma’s time-honored barbecue sauce saturating chicken breasts on Styrofoam plates.
I am from Doc, Ruth, Duff, and Marjorie, from Marvin and Kathryn and Joan, and from generations of Southern housewives and farmers. I am from revenuers and sheriffs, from artistry and shock treatments, from scandal and honor, and from quiltframes and pastels. I am from bitter divorce, from grace and forgiveness, and from climbing trees and building huts in the woods with Leigh and Lynn. I am from Betsy’s crush on Erik Estrada, from Azalee’s loyal insanity, from Big Gary and Wanda, from Louis and Carolyn, from Uncle Kenneth’s incessant rocking, and from my great-aunt Fannie Mae’s recipe chests and herbal teas. I am from Mr. Gorman’s third grade writing prompts, from Hitchcock on Friday afternoons, and from making peace with small town presence and absence.
I am from Chinook’s rocking canter across the Colquitts’ pasture, from Shellie’s pawshakes and Whitefoot’s atonal howls, from Connor the fighting tom with the milky left eye, and from litter after litter of April kittens birthed under the screen porch. I am from Tess’ grave at the foot of the mountainsteps, from Scoutcat Sorrells flying into the cedar tree, from rescuing the cedar waxwing, and from Bailey the chameleon. I am from the exploding aquarium at the Van Horne house, from taming Annabel, from hawk sightings over the athletic field, and from the bear on the deck during the drought. I am from five raccoons dangling from the bird feeder, from the ghost possum leaning against the glass door, and from the jackrabbit in the desert.
I am from Ulysses, from Boo Radley saving the Finch kids on Hallowe’en night, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, from Julian and Lao-Tzu, and from the journals of Thomas Merton. I am from haiku and metaphor, from Yeats and Eliot, from Conrad and Hurston, from Where the Wild Things Are, Encyclopedia Brown, and A Wrinkle in Time, and from rediscovering my seventh grade diary in my dad’s attic when I was thirty-five. I am from Christabel and Blake’s Tyger, from Charlie Brown Christmas trees and Krishnamurti, from “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” and from One Hundred Years of Solitude. I am from Rumi and Issa, from Bob Dylan and Alice Walker, from Mary’s wild geese and Robert’s Mending Wall, and from Lyra and her daemon. I am from teaching Antigone to kids who can barely read, from The Highwayman and Annabel Lee, from Frankenstein and Tupac, and from reading Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes aloud to my students during Black History Month. I am from Wayfarers in Walton and The Bone People, from Sherman Alexie and John Steinbeck, and from student essays and poems crowding my dining room table.
I am from Kurosawa and Kubrick, from Little House on the Prairie and Tuesday nights with mom and The Gilmore Girls, from Georgia Backroads and Prairie Home Companion, from Sesame Street and The Electric Company, and from endless reruns of Northern Exposure. I am from Wild Strawberries and Lone Star, from The Last Waltz and Night of the Hunter, from Land of the Lost and Charlie’s Angels, from Hee Haw on Saturday nights and Law and Order episodes back to back on a rainy day. I am from the peace sticker on my battered old Ford sedan, from riding bikes to the corner, from the passenger seat of the blue go-cart, and from cutting my hand open on the hood ornament of my dad’s antique Buick.
I am from the warmth of flannel shirts in winter, from pinestraw beneath my bare feet, from magnolia pods crunching underfoot, from hearthheat and firewarmth at the Cove, from the gold plaid seats of my Chevy Nova, from comfort and struggle, from running through the sprinkler and inhaling chlorine water at the country club pool, from the Atlantic Ocean in December and from Pacific tidal pools crowded with black oystercatchers. I am from travel and stasis, from longing and contentment, from passion and solitude, and from loneliness and intense joy. I am from grief and connection, from remembrance and yearning, and from the celebratory richness of the journey.

----lks 2007

This Book

This book is a paper sailboat careening into the spires of cypress knees.

This book is a barn burning, erasing the beams that stood in front of the big yellow moon.

This book is a microscope, rescued from a box in the attic of your childhood.

This book is a tender young beech leaf yearning to know the sun.

This book is a grandfatherly archetype, playing games with magic in the middle of the night.

This book is a wanderer. It likes to go places without names, places in between the places on the maps.

This book is neither a telegram nor a text message.

This book is a skinny bear emerging from the grotto in the forest, hungry for grubs and cat food.

This book is an alligator’s leg pushing away from logs in the courtyard pond.

This book is a wild thing trying to be tame.

This book is something like a mystery or a riddle. Its pages are neither gray nor blue. They carry a texture like depth, a seriousness that gets behind language and shoves it around.

This book is a foxtail with a bristly tip, given as a gift.

This book is a cloud of brown-headed cowbirds full of corn and winter.

This book is a travelogue, a clumsy try at keeping track of all the ways to talk to people in between the towns of Appalachia.

This book is a city skyline bristling with bridges.

This book is a bridge tagged with blue.

This book is the furl of tarpaulin beneath the bridge, a rectangle of chill in January.

This book is a labyrinth, a web of careful bricks edged with stiff tufts of leftover grass.

This book is an empty suit of armor on display in a place where no one knows its story.

This book is a carpenter’s cat’s paw with nothing to nudge loose from beams or siding.

This book is the slender bleachy jawbone of a fox or dog, found settling into tar on the traintracks near Talking Rock Creek.

This book is a mug of jasmine tea, remembering how sweet it was to be a flower.

This book is the place where poems go to be alone when no one wants to read them.

This book is a monocle, always hot from starting tiny fires in checkout lines.

This book is the big old wind that tears down limbs from oak trees and sings to itself in the cove.

This book is cousin to the Eastern Forest Field Guide under the seat in the truck.

This book is a superhero’s diary, full of hyperbole and mischief.

This book is the unwritten thing that has no synonym, no nomenclature to show itself to others. It sings its little song of consolation. It whistles past the graveyard in the moonlight. It is a cliché, a cannonball, a memorized stanza from high school, an excuse, an homage, a playground, and a whisper. It got lost once but found its way back with nothing missing. You looked and looked, expecting to see a chunk of font cut away from the middle with someone’s tiny scissors, but everything was there, all the words that courted you and made you write them down for some unspoken reason you aren’t sure exists.

This book is all topography, all raised edges showing you what to see and how to get around it.

This book knows your name but won’t say it.

This book is the last story you’ll ever need: a simpleness, a foundling, a caress, a stumble, a woodsplitter, a pillow, a koan, a dream half-remembered in the morning, a plate of scrambled eggs with lots of pepper, an afterthought, a raincoat, a weathervane, a kiss.

-----©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

White Lily

Last week I was looking through old notebooks and ran across a 2008 journal entry written in response to a prompt about a food from my childhood. I had written about these little freezer rolls my Grandma Sorrells made, which were actually rather bland but took on the texture and flavor of whatever you ate them with in a really fine and singular way. I remember how butter and homemade fig preserves turned them into islands of sweetness and flake. I remember how my grandma rarely made biscuits, at least not that I recall. When I found out later in life how dangerously good a big old buttered cathead biscuit could be, I thought about the little rolls and how Grandma used to bake them by the dozen for us and for her best friend, an African-American woman named Claudia with whom she worked at the local primary school cafeteria. I wish I knew how to bake them myself. Possibly my father has the recipe. I will have to ask him.

Thinking about the little rolls got me to thinking too about White Lily flour. It’s the best flour you can bake with, the Southern foodways people I know assert. It’s supposed to yield fluffier cakes, more perfectly textured bread. Lighter biscuits?  Maybe. I’m not sure, though, that biscuits are meant to be light. I think of them as intense and substantive, dense and strong. If they were light, maybe they’d lose some of their heft and power. Maybe I just haven’t had the right biscuits yet. I don’t eat them much anymore. Hardly ever,  really.

At any rate, White Lily flour does have a luster and pearly softness that make it sweet to touch on tabletops, and other places, too. I’m not any sort of expert so I don’t know what makes it like that, what turns it into a sift of loose satin, like something a Vermeer model might choose to bake bread with. My grandma was an expert, though. Her reverence for the gentle softness of flour and the alchemy surrounding it makes me think now about cornmeal and its holiness, about the scatter of it around the dancing katsina spirits at Hopiland several summers ago. I think about the flung goldenness of it on a warm September wind at the Etowah Indian Mounds, and about my dear old friend John, who flung it, and who died last June at the age of 52.  Ceremonially, White Lily has a sacred quality to it that I surmise is borne of its capacity to bring sustenance, to make a meal, to build up blood and bone and brain and vision. It’s the raw stuff of spirit despite its tangible delicate softness. It becomes a tribute, maybe even a conduit, for those who use it to mark sacred time and honor ancestors. It brings things into an awareness of their commonality in a Body. I think about White Lily and wonder how odd it would seem if I headed out to the big old rural cemetery where my grandma is buried, north of Monroe, and dusted a fine skein of flour around the flat metal plate that marks her grave. I don’t think I’ll do that, but not because of the strangeness of the act or of what anyone might think about it. It just doesn’t feel like my grandma is there, beneath that grassy space with its dozens of unperturbable little memorial flags and lopsided flower arrangements made of plastic and cheap cloth. A better spot to put the flour would be around the steps of the old two-room schoolhouse at Sorrells Springs where my grandma went to school and graduated from the eighth grade in 1926. (It was as far as she got with her education; her family was large and far from wealthy and needed her to help work in what she referred to as “the field.”) The silkiness of the flour would hang around beside the concrete steps and the stones holding up the foundation of the old schoolhouse until rain fell or wind dispersed it. I doubt it anyone would notice. Not very many people visit the schoolhouse now. Still, it’s the place where my grandmother, Ruth Williams then, won her school spelling bee and received a bright blue ceramic bell edged with goldleaf as a prize. I don’t know what else she did there. Maybe she played with her dog Jack, shared a secret with a friend, or smiled at my grandfather or another boy. The milkweed and dandelions beside the old schoolhouse feel like a place where soft pale petals of floursilk could settle, a mattress of feast for ants and hornets in summer. A feeding hole of remembrance and acknowledgment bowing to the Body of ancestry that led people in the neighboring church to wash each other’s feet in big bowls or maybe in the running water of the spring. The flour-body would become a blessing, a way of saying with reverence and love, “All my relations!” before settling shyly into the waiting cimarron clay.

©Laura Sorrells 2012

all rights reserved

A Lace of Everything

To approach
the landscape of spirit,
choose the bone
of attention’s
treacherous blossom.
Serve the tricky ceremony
of exhalation.
Emerge from the fertile nothing
of winter’s bed
and disperse the season’s
messages—
a lace of everything,
a margin of crows and roses,
sinuous,
sharp,
and inseparable.

--lks 2011

Those Shoes

I’ve been thinking about getting rid of those shoes. Last week I had to have a pipe fixed in my basement and I went down there to clear some space for the plumber to get through. As I walked through the door, just over to my left was the sagging, cracked plastic barrel of laundry basket where the last ones live. There was a pair of dark blue Keds on top, a tiny fraying eye of hole appearing just below the big toe on the left one. I tear up my canvas sneakers the same way. Or used to. I don’t really wear them anymore. My feet are too tough on things. I sometimes wish they could be more delicate, less determined. My mother’s shoes show those things too. There aren’t any high heeled stilettos in this beige plastic latticed broken barrel. Heelless Clarks loafers, yes, and Birkenstocks with the soles going soft. And a pair of burgundy New Balance walking shoes with the laces knotted short and tight. I wonder if she pulled those off over her ankles, the way I do? One of those heedless rushing habits we might have shared.
When I saw the basket of shoes I began to pull them up out of each other. I kept coming back to the blue Keds. They seemed to strain mutely to go back into the heap. A spider turned out to be living in the arch of one of them. It scuttled out when I dropped it, a comma of legs and fat round center angling for safety under an old chest of drawers. For some reason I waited for a skittering confetti of spider babies to come after it. I’d read about that happening and about how infant arachnids will fill up all the space around them like a pulsing carpet of potential web. When nothing showed up I shook the sneaker vigorously, but only a furl of graying lint, shaped like some obscure piece of punctuation I didn’t recognize, fell out. I plucked at the hole in the side of the left shoe and threw it back into the barrel.

Standing

For M.

It’s midsummer and I’m standing in line at the airport, waiting for someone to check my bag. I burn my mouth on strong Italian coffee and try to read a letter I found on my car seat before I left home. The purple silk scarf tagging my luggage tickles my bare calf. I remember when I bought it, years ago when you and I still knew each other. It smelled like sandalwood then and you stole it from me for no good reason. It lived in the hall closet with your ties and an old woolen overcoat. You sheltered me under the deep arm of that coat when I called you from bars to walk me home through bad neighborhoods. One night I found the scarf in the coat’s deep pocket when I stuck my cold hand down inside it. I took you to task for your thievery but you didn’t want to hear it.
I remember the time I picked up a cookie from a chipped yellow plate on your kitchen table and held it to my face, inhaling the cinnamon and nutmeg. It was New Year’s Eve and I wore a short skirt and the purple silk scarf but no coat. You were sober and I was not. We listened to Jerry Jeff Walker and took a walk downtown. You told me a story and I tried to listen. We looked at some fireworks behind a clock tower and burned our tongues on hot chocolate in white paper cups. You held my hand and I played a joke on you, a rare moment of successful sleight of hand that made me laugh and stagger. But you didn’t think it was funny.
We sat on an old wooden bench near the post office and I ripped my red fishnet stockings on a splinter.
The dry air was cold, and a little boy laughed up in my face when the year turned. Not a mockery but a happy child’s shout in the street. A banner of laughter that I wish I could hear when I play with the edge of this fabric, but which hides from my fingers and doesn’t smell like anything much just now.

©Laura Sorrells 2007/2009
all rights reserved