Turning Point: The Art of Story

Sample Poems by Anne Harding Woodworth

1 In which Lacey offers a setting, high and low, old world and new

When you come from the mountains or come from the hills,
even the hills of Tennessee, no flat moves you
except if you see it from a ridge or a pass
or an airplane you jump from and land so that you
walk where marsh once drenched earth and now cotton grows tame.
Over Levadia’s plain in Greece—circling ’round
like that, you land, get dragged, walk back to the mountains.

The going up is easy though knee cartilage
is frayed like shoelaces, awning rope. It’s the walk
down that’s hard because your feet and ankles push up
into your shins into your knees into your heart
cavity, shoulders, neck, the wheeze of your throat, your
pituitary. Juices burn, they don’t relent
for your pain, familiar pain of common descent.

That’s Paul, not me. Oh, no. My knees are fine. Just fine.

The house next door is the color of dead leaves, oak
and tulip trees, clapboards like loose bark, roof slanting
both ways, shingled, sparkling with black and gray cinders
and copper flashing ’round the stone chimney that smoked
white on cold nights before Sybil died and husband
Gaddis was left free to try on her dresses, all
of her jackets, and look into the mirror with
a comfort at last, relief he’d not known before.
I know he loved her, he did, I’m so sure of that,
and once I saw him kiss the face in the mirror
tearful in the early days of widowership.

2 In which Gaddis reflects on mirror images

Paul was an insurance salesman,
took to it like fish to water,
knew terms like liabilities
indemnities, and acts of God,

which always seemed to me to be
arbitrary, temporary,
imaginary. Yet isn’t
everything imaginary?

I imagine me in mirrors,
glass that reflects vision less than
truthful, passing right for left, left
right. Opposites bespeak only

those appearances and seemings,
never in those verbs of being.