Kate Daniels, "Crowns"

Crowns  

  for Philip Levine

Around the time I first read the poetry of Philip Levine,

my teeth were fixed. Two or three hundred bucks

(I’ve forgotten now) purchased a brand new me,

two porcelain crowns. In the dentist’s chair, my midget

canines were filed down to sharp, bright points

hardly larger than the bronzed end of a Bic

pen, then crammed in the black-backed caps

of two hardened, china fakes. No more

covering my mouth to obscure the evidence

of faulty genes. No more tears at images

embezzled from graduation picnics

when Darrell Dodson picked me up and slung me

in the pool, and someone took a picture

of my lips slacking back to reveal my gums

in what appeared to be a scream. No more breezes

winding through the gappy pickets of my ill-grown

teeth and down my throat. No more worrying

some boy would snag his tongue in the zigzagged bulkhead

of my upper row, and bring us both to blood.

I’ll love Levine forever for confessing his own struggles

with orthodontia, his rot-plagued “Depression mouth,”

a dentist called it, his cavities and root canals, his occipital pain,

for his photograph in Antaeus, the summer of ’78,

the stained and crooked slabs parked compellingly

behind his grin. Our teeth connected us before the poetry,

he, from the immigrant onion-eaters and temperate tipplers

of Manischiewtz. I, from a long line of tannin-stained

Irish Catholics who smoked themselves to fragile

states of calcium depletion, and a recent run of Carolina

gritballs, too poor to brush, too ignorant to care their teeth

retired in early middle age. I can see them now, perplexed

before an apple’s crispy rind, frustrated by a succulent, stringy rack

of pork ribs barbequed in the side lot of Earlene Worsham’s

gas station south of town. Levine would have understood my uncles,

enthroned on plastic-covered kitchen chairs patched with tape,

their work boots kicking up mucky clouds of chiggery dirt,

their pick ups parked nearby, shotguns in the rack,

sucking on cheap beers and harsh cigarettes,

their nails starved by nicotine to yellow curls, the car grease

embedded permanently in the creases of their hands.

When I met him, he was such a mensch, massive

in my mind, but in the flesh, something touching

about his shoulders in the worn tweed jacket, something

vulnerable in his feet in an ordinary pair of soiled, white sneakers.

He opened his mouth to laugh, one side rising up

like it does, in that derisive gesture that seems, at first, a sneer,

and I remembered my mother flexing back her lips to remove

delicately, with two stained fingers, just so, a fleck of tobacco

lodged between her teeth, and saw again my father flossing at the table

with the torn off cover of a paper book of matches,

then stubbing out his butt in the yellowed, oily pod of broken yolk

that was hemorrhaging across his breakfast plate.

I can face those images now without the shame

I carried in the days before the poetry of Phil Levine

liberated me. I can look at anything now, because I keep

his picture in my mind and his poems in my pocket.

I can stand my life because I wear the crown he constructed

for people like me — grocery checkers, lube jobbers, truck drivers,

waitresses — all of us crowned with the junkyard diadems

of shattered windshields and rusty chains, old pots

with spit tobacco congealing inside, torn screen doors

and gravestones in the front yard, just five short steps from life to death…

So there is my family with their broken beer bottles

and patched shoes, their mutts chained in a back yard

carved from a stingy pine woods, on cheap land

out near the county dump where the air swells with the perfume

of trash, a circle of them playing poker in a trailer somewhere

in the woods, or razoring the state decal from the windowshield

of a ransacked wreck to transfer to my brother’s car.

Or cleaning fish on the back porch and throwing the guts

to the tick-clogged dogs, or frying venison in a cast-iron pan

and stinking up the house with that heavy smell, showing

the buck’s big balls in a plastic cannister that once held salt.

Or burning tires in a field some autumn, scumming

the sky with a smoky, cursive black they can’t even read

but inhale poisonously again and again.

And there I am, walking along tolerantly now, with Phil Levine,

his poems in my pocket, his good rage gathered in my heart

and I can love them again, the way I did in the years before

I saw what they were and how the world would use them

and accepted the fact they were incapable of change.

We’re in a field I used to love, a redbone coonhound running ahead

her ears dragging the edges of the goldenrod till they are tipped

in pollen, like twin paintbrushes dipped in gilt. And the world

is hunting dogs and country music and unschooled voices

bending vowels and modest kitchen gardens where late tomatoes

are tied up with brownish streamers of old nylon hose.

The vast way your chest expands when the sun gradually sets

in mid-fall in central Virginia. The tobacco barns glimmering

in last light, the chinks darkening now, the slats solidifying at the close of day

and your mind opening up like the pine forest swishing fragrantly overhead

way up in the dark that is coming, but remains, for the moment, beautifully at bay.

                

                                                                                                 -Kate Daniels

Thanks to Eva H.D. for introducing me to Kate Daniels' poetry. "Crowns" is in her collection A Walk in Victoria's Secret. Here's a link to Daniels' conversation with the poet Philip Levine. and another to Daniels talking with Tony Hoagland. (We've posted several Hoagland poems on AL, including one of my favorites, America.) Will be posting some Philip Levine soon.