THE USES OF EMILY
by Maxine Kumin
Page 10
I'm going to close with the title poem from The Long Approach, and again, just before we came on, Mary told me, I think it was just before we came on, she said that she had done the poet-in-residency at Bucknell University, something that I had also done, and I didn't ask her how difficult it was to get back from there to Provincetown, but I can tell you how difficult it was to get back from there to Warner, New Hampshire. And I traveled in this plane called a Metro Swearingen, which I had never heard of before. It looks like a flying cigar. But there's something about traveling and going home, the going out and the coming back, I think all of us who are, I say this irreverently, but we are all in it together, those of us who are in 'Po Biz', come to understand rather more about our lives through the act of travel and the suspension of getting from one place to another. This is, I guess, kind of a love poem to our farm. It also fills me with horror to think that when I was a child in grammar school, public school in Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Stephen Foster's songs were taught in music period and that we sang all of those racist songs and I have a wind-up key in my back-I have them all by heart and they have washed over into this poem, so you will recognize them.
THE LONG APPROACH
In the eel-thin belly of the Metro Swearingen
banking in late afternoon over Boston Harbor,
the islands eleven lily pads, my life loose as a frog's,
I try to decipher the meaning of hope rising up again
making music in me all the way from Scranton
where the slag heaps stand like sentries shot dead
at their posts. Hope rising up in my Saab hatchback,
one hundred thousand honest miles on it as I speed
due north from LaBell's cut-rate autopark
to my spiny hillside farm in New Hampshire.
March 21st. Snow still frosts the manure heap
and flurries lace the horses' ample rumps
but in here it's Stephen Foster coming back to me
unexpurgated, guileless, all by heart.
'Tis summer, the darkies are gay, we sang in Miss Dupree's
fifth grade in a suburb that I fled long ago.
Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away
to--an allusion that escaped me--a better land I know.
O the melancholia as I too longed to depart.
Now I belt out Massa's in de cold cold ground
and all the darkies are a'weepin on route I-93
but what I think of are the french-pastel mornings
daylit at five in my own hills in June when I may
leap up naked, happy, with no more premonition
than the mother of the Pope had. How the same
old pump of joy restarts for me, going home!
What I understand from travel is how luck
hangs in the lefthand lane fifteen miles
over the limit and no cop, no drunk, no ice slick.
Only the lightweight ghosts of racist lyrics
soaring from my throat in common time.
Last week leaving Orlando in a steep climb
my seatmate told me flying horses must be loaded
facing the tail of the plane so they may brace
themselves at takeoff. Otherwise you run
the risk they'll panic, pitch over backwards,
smash their hocks. Landing, said the groom,
there is little we can do for them except
pray for calm winds and ask the pilot
to make a long approach.
O brace me, my groom. Pray for calm winds.
Carry me back safely where the snow stands deep in March.
I'm going home the old way with a light hand on the reins
making the long approach.
