THE SEGREGATED HEART, cont.

Second Home

I have lived in rented houses, where I learned
to stare at walls at 4 a.m., with a sick child
sprawled across my lap, a husband asleep in another room,
while I considered the interior decoration of walls:
which pictures I would hang in the blank spaces
if I could choose. I began to understand the manners
of walls: to pretend I didn't see that they were there.
I began to refuse, would not sew or hang the curtains,
left the windows bare, unveiled, and watched the light
spread over the sills, out to its limit on the floor.

I studied the history of walls: the cement blocks,
the windowless brick of a factory where I once sewed
with a hundred other women, black and white.
(But white men only were allowed to cut the cloth.)
I studied the sociology of walls: the rotten boards
crumbling like bark on a fallen log, dropping
from the outside of Laura's house in the quarters;
the chain-link fence seen by women from where they
stood ironing their uniforms in the prison laundry;
the cracked plaster ceiling stared at by a woman
in a bed in a cubicle on Hay Street rented by a pimp.

I learned the anger of walls: they had kept me from myself.
Before I left, the live oak in the front yard fell on the porch.
I saw with satisfaction the crushed bricks and mortar:
his house, not mine. I kissed another woman and felt
as if I stood outside on a clay bank after a heavy rain,
as if the ground slid under my feet to settle in another place.

But I was surprised when my mother called to tell me
a tornado had come like a hundred freight trains,
rolled over her hill, lifted the roof from the house.
She said the trees were gone: the water oaks, the blackjack oaks,
the sweetgum and poplar, the magnolia grandiflora.
I had wanted motion and now I had no home. I was left
in a place I had never been, where the slope lay open and dry,
spiked with purple nettle and wild lettuce, the few trees left
standing dead, bark scaling from their sides,
like woods I'd seen strip-cut for the saw mill.
My family were strangers from another country. They spoke
from a long ways away and in a different language.

I learned the grief of walls: to leave where I could not stay,
to bend myself to change, was to leave where I also loved.

Later my mother wrote that the kudzu was taking the hill.
(After rain the vine spread, green veins held together the red dirt.)
She wrote that the storm had set out canna-lilies.
(They flourished, broke open into red fragile lobes of bloom.)

Third Home

from Minnie Bruce Pratt,

The Sound of One Fork

(Night Heron Press, 1981),

Revised 2001