Issue 3:2 | Poetry | Sebastion Matthews
 |
Two Poems by Sebastian
Matthews
previously published in Rivdendell 4: Native Genius, 2007 www.rivendelljournal.org, & in We Generous (Red Hen Press).
Here
What I know
of this place
doesn’t go
far
beyond what
you see here—
rainy
mountains, blue
wrapped in
mist—
and even
that you could say
I don’t
know, not as if
I’d grown
up here:
a
rhododendron rooted
in this red
earth:
moonshine
stories and blue-
grass. I’ve
grown up
in
mountains like this,
sure, and
walked days
on end in
just such
a mist, if
that counts
for
anything, so what
I can tell
you must come
from
somewhere—not
bluegrass
but high-bush
blueberries;
not barbecue
but other
nourishment:
roadside
doughnuts
and strong
diner coffee.
The kind of
food you get
when you’re
going
from there
to there,
and here is just a truck stop
& all
music a song
on the
jukebox. Otis Redding.
Allman Brothers’
“Melissa,”
church-soul
from the Rev. Al Green.
That’s what
I can tell you
about this
place—it ain’t Seattle,
ain’t no
seacoast town
with indigo
roofs
and lobster
boats
for tourist
eyes.
& the
music
I know is of this place
because I
play it on my stereo.
Old Dylan
records
with
Appalachian ballads
poking
through their clothes
like ragged
undershirts. Jazz
is my
bluegrass. Coltrane
my
moonshine. If I went
to church,
I’d go to his,
maybe camp
out
on the blue
notes of sidewalk,
let the
wind scatter
my prayers
into the tornado-
yellow sky.
That’s where
you’d find
me. & I guess
you can
call that home.
Easter
Sunday in the Catawba View Missionary Baptist Church,
Old
Fort, North Carolina
Afterward Jesus appeared in a different form to two of
them
while they were walking in the country.
—Mark 16:12
The pastor
turns to the end of Mark,
the Old
Testament’s long withheld promise
of
resurrection, and sets his glasses
high up on
his now sweating face,
Jaron
leaning out of his 12-year-old huddle
to whisper,
“Here comes the long part.”
He’s been
highlighting the service, entry
by entry,
with a yellow marker, a prisoner
marking
time. I am a guest here, awkward
in my
Sunday best, unpressed, my pagan
green
tucked neatly away. Outside, morning
fog rests
lightly on the front steps,
a silent
knock on the door. The semis pour
down the
mountain in a stink of rubbed brakes.
We’ve had
three songs from the choir,
small for
this small church, a block
of half-hearted testifying; only Miss Fanny,
the
congregation’s elder, able to stir
the place
with the witness of her faith.
Even that I
suspect is not new—not like
fresh rain
after months of draught.
I’ve put
five dollars (borrowed)
into the
basket. The place is close
to full:
young families trickling in,
their
children an excited murmur.
A little
boy’s been waving to me half
an hour,
smiling back at the surprise
of my white
face. The pastor has already
taken Jaron
aside to tease him
for being
twelve and looking pretty
in newly
done-up cornrows; the old women
already
pressed their leathery dry palms
into mine,
fulfilling a church duty
as old as
the rituals we’ve been enacting
with more
or less enthusiasm.
Which is
exactly what the pastor’s been
getting at,
his diction positively MLK,
his
streetwise I-Have-Been-Redeemed persona
honed to a
routine, when he reads Mark:
how first
Mary Magdalene then two disciples
report
encountering Jesus, alive and well
and back
from the dead zone, only to be
rebuked by
mourners unable to rise
out of
grief to witness a miracle.
They’re
church folk, he
says, pausing
for effect.
Just like us. He
goes on
about the
moral urgency pulsing
at the
heart of belief (out from under
her hat,
Miss Fanny pairing each call
with a
responding A-men),
dipping in
and out of
song, half testimony,
half James
Brown. Church-folk,
the pastor
shouts, throwing the words
together
like dice, like you and me,
ringing the
“e” in “me” as a bell
at the back
of his voice. Do YOU believe?
The
congregation musters a lackluster
A-men. Jaron looks over, his face blank,
weighted by years he has yet to grow into.
Do you?! Did the two young souls, startled,
fingers
laced, follow the bird’s path
into the
cloud-jammed sky? Were they
left alone
with the palpable vision? Did rain
dump down
as they raced home, made
vivid in
the rush of thunder? Rife
with the
ache of coming alive in rebirth.
I’ve
stopped listening to the pastor,
follow
Jaron’s boyish daydreams
skipping
out the side-door of desire.
I join him in the branches
of the
giant oak, go down to the river,
throw hooky
stones at the fish
propelling
their shadows
deep into
the future.
