The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Apples in the Cellar of Dread and Desire

May 21, 2011

Lately, we have been overborne
with news of Nature's cataclysmic
ways: aftermath of a mine collapse
in Chile, earthquakes in Haiti
and the Orient, a tsunami's
waves washing over Japan's leaking
nuclear plants, radioactive fish
imagined to be flashing toward our shores.

Now one disaster close to home:
tornados roll through Alabama
into Georgia, destroying Ringgold
a town my father loved, disturbing
grounds of Berry College in Rome
twenty miles from where my mother's
tornado dread told her a thousand
times that any minute she'd be dead.

In a storm's approach she could see
black crows clawing air and cawing doom
come to take her breath away. She swore
no sucking wind should slay her like
a cat stealing an infant's breath
one way her Irish kin believed
the stern-faced Father in Heaven
might reclaim what He had given.

Beatrice was her name. She didn't
know her namesake Beatrice
object of Dante's immortal
desire, and was not in her own eyes
the great love of anybody's life.
My mother learned early that she
likely would not perish from some
common violence caused by man:

neither a hearth fire that consumed
baby William her brother nor
when she was five, by tongues of flame
from a wood stove that licked off her dress
and burned her tender thighs, forever
mingling dread and desire, nor even
when she was grown and married
and told the Law where to look for whiskey

traps that hid her husband's father's
hooch, the gunshot that struck the well
windlass where she stood drawing water
warning her to hold her tongue. No, it
was Nature she feared anytime
a clear day turned cloudy, reminding
her that creatures could be thunder-struck
or speared by lightning's crack and flare

or worst of all, blown by outrageous winds
out of nesting places and undone.
Not long after I was born, wanton
winds rushed in from the peach orchard
toward our small house. She wrapped me
from head to toe and pushed through corn
stalks that clutched her clothes, stumbling
all the way to the Big House

where my uncle shook from me a sharp
intake of breath, a second birth.
Despite these frequent shocks that proved
the chaos of her world, she lived
eight decades exposed and vigilant
while she watched for wind to rise
and paced from door to door, retreated to
her childhood fear, entered the cellar there

and knelt in darkness smelling of apples
dried for sauce and cakes, keened
Ah me! Oh my! until the wind died
and she was free again to breathe, again
to love her life. I am glad
these late titanic twisters blew in
a decade after her peaceful death
or shapeshifting dread surely would

have bullied her fugitive heart
to a less dignified stopping.
Now, while I write these words, floods
cover Mississippi. Cynics
watch news of apocalypse collapse
into a joke on an old man who
predicted the world would begin
its end today in global quakes.

Like the cynic, he does not know
that soul is where worlds rise, fall
and rise again to build a bridge
between dread and desire.
Watching my mother's fretful way
of rehearsing death released me
from her drama of dread and let
my own desire find living room.

Now, when winds uproar and dark
clouds gather, when thunder cracks
and rain soaks soil, I inhale
a deep draught of apple-scented air
from the cellar of my mind, open
the door, breathe the world and let it
breathe me, knowing that I will die
someday, but never dreading that, never.