Indiana Law Review Indiana Law Review Volume 44 2011 Number 3 The Poetry of Mary Barter Mitchell Nothing to Do with Dionysus Rather than go to my dying mother's bed, I write an inconstant poem for her. What reason? What is it I am? If you drink from the sun, if your tongue scalds, the pain must form on something, the form of which saves you. Because in ancient Greece the actors left the stage to switch their masks and voices, a chanting chorus covered the changes, they say. I say the art of the sons and daughters is all that holds us, crossing, re-crossing, treading out tragedy. One dance across the stage becomes one line of a poem, the verse where the dancers turn. Millennia pass. A sadness without myth climbs into the lines as into a lap. Between the stanzas the mothers are inconsolable. If the words do not turn and call us back the poems break out and dance up the mountains, their feet moving under the snow. 676 INDIANA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 44:675 Irrational It was a pretty little pie I gave my mother: fluted crust, red cherries in sugar. O, she did love sweets! O, we loved her, all her children! When we gathered 'round her bed- nice family! — and she died, in a twinkling changed and left us, I was thinking of the pie she never ate, how it pertly sat unwrapped, how it now was changed forever, little circle, sweet pretty little pie. Shell Game If it is true that at death's instant some aura escapes from the body and is visible, briefly, then is gone, I will never be quick enough to love that soul before it leaves this world. I will be lingering on the lips, not for words but for cushion, the hands' stars, crumpling, the ears for their maze of sticky valleys and not for any admittance, the feets' crusty bones, the chest for its still precious heft and hollows, after the looping air has raveled away, even the skin folded thinly over the eyes I will kiss. I plan already to hold for as long as I can 2011] THE POETRY OF MARY HARTER MITCHELL 677 to the still shape, the literal unhinged from eternity; and though thereby I may miss some pure essence lifting like morning fog, like the top of a metaphor carried off, what else can we love, being human, but this hull, this bass note, this altar of stones? It is more to us than any bright everything up into which a soul can pour. At fairs I never could follow the pea hustled under the three scuffling shells; I was always amazed; I was always tricked. That's what made the game pay. When the jig is up we might as well be changed into something vaguely shining. Yet when the fingertips' whorls- why in heaven's name so singularly wrought?—stiffen and drain, what earthly consolation can we find in new whorls brightly spinning on the sun's old face? Mary at the tomb would have stroked the hands' stars; she would have spat out holy wafers onto the ground. Profile They tend to not be loners. Their neighbors usually know who they are. They tend to not traffic in weakness. They probably never were very hungry for food. 678 INDIANA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 44:675 They know about weapons and politics. They almost always think in packs. They like to be known as someone not to be f . . . ed with. They are usually religious: when provoked they like to take a deity off its shelf and set it on the table to be handled. They tend to not hear voices. They are usually conventional; they often talk and dress very well. It will do no good to report them to authorities. They probably are the authorities and even if not you would turn them in and come back later to fmd them sharing coffee and jokes with the other powers and everyone wearing nice shoes. You should know they are extremely dangerous. Retribution Fisted, go from the execution, the missile crater, the body count — uncrumple your hand, it is still empty, and the red hole in the muscle of your heart is still a red hole in the muscle of your heart. 2011] THE POETRY OF MARY HARTER MITCHELL 679 Clearness In the meeting-room plain as a close-eyed face, pure of symbols, undistracted, we worship in pews squared to simple walls and windows of almost invisible glass. But this morning someone has set in our view a glass globe crowded with zinnias and cosmos. We sit and consider the flowers. Their stems arch crazily over each other and over their jutted leaves. They are red and orange and pink. The sun tips into the room and through their wheels of petals. Under the water the sturdy stems are covered with tiny bubbles. Over the water the colors tremble with seed. The flowers are just the flowers. We sit and see where the cut green life of them pierces the tender membrane between worlds, the level skin where air sits on water. One could live like this. Palm Sunday Hosanna! It's a rollicking damn-good time. We cheer, we shout along the streets, we wave the life lines, love lines, laugh lines of our unbroken palms. OGod, we are guilty of such innocent, innocent times. Burning Bush This is the one miracle you must believe: past the pain that shuts the mouth is another pain that opens the mouth, the burning alive becomes both a screaming in 680 INDIANA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 44:675 and a sign. Some say it was yellow leaves or the low sun. From my blackened tuft of sticks I open my mouth, I say no, no! the leaves were green as young mint and it was fire. Creation I hold with those who say the world begins in fire on ice, a day like today, in a word exhaled warmly onto a mirror of polished silver awareness — our work to be weaving with all we sense, hemming with all we love, fine fabric to drench in the wet breath of the open Mouth. Fish ribs bleach and dissolve in a lake of sky, sun dazzles over the rolling brightness of snow, a blue is sunken like ink into the downs both shallow and deep, and from cold pasture trees muscle up raw iron, gray, thinly gilt, and weeds are caught like brown needles in the softest white cloth. November a wide gray lowers over what is left in the cold whole fields of hollow stems rattling in ragged rushes and leaves their many browns broken even to dull red and yellow broken in waves across whole shaken fields 2011] THE POETRY OF MARY HARTER MITCHELL 68 1 poor scavenge a wind ahead of the snow drives into our faces the children start coming home from school in the dark something old in us wants to store hard things in close places—cellars, shelves pour dry seeds shooshing into sacks heap shells and sheaves in rooms, near but out of the wind for a heaviness pulls at us now we swallow cider the color of bloody gold sweet, sweet as cold apple blossoms we wait we live hard by the counter-weight of the store we live hard by Poet I pressed Clara's flowers in the unabridged dictionary years ago in the pink and yellow times and have just again found them in the press of words. She danced on a luminous stage in pale pink slippers, youngishly tossing our hearts, and afterwards her grandparents gave her yellow carnations, which she has forgotten. This is what I do: I close and open the book. It is a slow career, but I do it: I press and then look to see what holds. 682 INDIANA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 44:675 April, Contracts Class, First Year of Law School* In law school you are learning what to sight and it should move you. In other life, sighting a robin is something you can do, but in law school, it seems, you have to cite what someone who is not you has seen. In other life, you can taste and smell what nourishes. See April. See also love. But cf. you decide this spring how many classroom windows to leave open. In other life promises, covenants, can be deeply part of who we are; but here we make a brief-long study of broken promises by people — we don't know who they are, Party A, Party B, appellations — about widgets—^we don't know what they are. See Corbin, Williston, Murray. See also Moses, Mohammed, Mao. It is time, past time, to wonder what I am doing here, because I have tenure, and it scares me to be so secure (and doesn't that sound just precious to a worker newly fired from the factory moving where it's cheaper), and also because criticism is cheap behind these sturdy walls; see, e.g., feminism, Marxism, critical legal studies, critical race theory, and the voices that haven't yet made it even into the footnotes. But see, e.g. , should a feminist prefer, to that label, an autobiography? Should she talk about her children? Should she ever profess an interest in family law? Should she smile and speak softly and nurture across her desk with its vase of flowers? Shouldn't she rather kick ass, 1. Originallypublishe(lin52 J. LegalEduc. 312,312-13 (2002). Tht Indiana LawReview thanks the Journal ofLegal Education for granting permission to reprint this poem. 2011] THE POETRY OF MARY HARTER MITCHELL 683 get off on the Uniform Commercial Code, and computerize her outline of the role of contract law in Western civilization (roman numeral two sub A, sub seven, where does family go? where does love meet work in the linear outline? sub children hyperHnk)? I do not profess to understand all the abbreviations: e.g., someone I love is dead and every birthday I have now is a going away. See also children growing up; country long gone to war; and hatred, finely tailored as a lawyer, going to political conventions. See also too many students want it all in declarative sentences, of one piece, whole, with handles, as if that would be truer. Cf. what we, wrung out, would settle for now as good enough law. Finding myself here — "professor" — what to profess? to build a career, or a life, on the urge that only some people have to drop their eyes to the footnotes? to make a community among those journeying between the text and the questions: by what and whose authority? and what else is there to say? and even then to dispute the whole like a mystic (not everything is in sight)? finally to profess in all the voices that 1 have: yes, this is what we are doing? For now. But see: