Below you will find the two poems that comprise Packet 2. Remember, your first set of Q & C's are due for this Packet on Friday, Feb. 3. All out of class work must be typed and double spaced and in MLA format. Refer to your class notes, your course outline, and sample Q & C homework handout. And...remember to bring a print out of the poems to class on the day they are due to be read.
The second poem, "Flies," is considered a prose poem. You may not be familiar with prose poems but they are interesting because they do not follow the same format as free verse or rhyming poems. They read more like a very short short story and even though there are stanzas, each stanza is prose that runs from the left to the right margin, as all prose does.
As we discussed in class...
about question and comment homework...
you must write a separate question (optional) and comment (mandatory) for EACH of the readings in the packet.
For example,
for Packet 2, there are two readings, so you will have TWO separate question and comments to submit.
PACKET 2
"Arturo" by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
http://www.pccc.edu/home/cultural-affairs/poetry-center/maria-mazziotti-gillans-poems2
“Flies”
By: Donald Hall
A fly sleeps on the field of a green curtain. I sit by my grandmother’s side, and rub her head as if I could comfort her. Ninety-seven years. Her eyes stay closed, her mouth open, and she gasps in her blue nightgown—pale blue, washed a thousand times. Now her face goes white, and her breath slows until I think it has stopped; then she gasps again, and pink returns to her face.
Between the roof of her mouth and her tongue, strands of spittle waver as she breathes. Now a nurse shakes her head over my grandmother’s sore mouth, and goes to get a glass of water, a spoon, and a flyswatter. My grandmother chokes on a spoonful of water and the nurse swats a fly
In the Connecticut suburbs where I grew up, and in Ann Arbor, there were houses with small leaded panes, where Formica shone in the kitchens, and hardwood in closets under paired leather boots. Carpets lay thick underfoot in every bedroom, bright, clean with no dust or hair in them. Nothing looked used, in these houses. Forty dollars’ worth of cut flowers leaned from Waterford vases for the Saturday dinner party.
Even in houses like these, the housefly wandered and paused—and I listened for the buzz of its wings and its tiny feet, as it struggled among cut flowers and bumped into leaded panes
In the afternoon my mother takes over at my grandmother’s side in the Peabody Home, while I go back to the farm. I nap in the room my mother and my grandmother were born in.
At night we assemble beside her. Her shallow, rapid breath rasps, and her eyes jerk, and the nurse can find no pulse, as her small strength concentrated wholly on half an inch of lung space, and she coughs faintly—quick coughs like fingertips on a ledge. Her daughters stand by the bed, solemn in the slow evening, in the shallows of after-supper—Caroline, Nan, and Lucy, her eldest daughter, seventy-two, who holds her hand to help her die, as twenty years past she did the same thing for my father.
Then her breath slows again, as it has done all day. Pink vanishes from cheeks w3e have kissed so often, and her nostrils quiver. She breathes one more quick breath. Her mouth twitches sharply, as if she speaks a word we cannot hear. Her face is fixed, white, her eyes half closed, and the next breath never comes.
She lies in a casket covered with gray linen, which my mother and her sisters picked. This is Chadwick’s Funeral Parlor in New London, on the ground floor under the I.O.O.F. Her fine hair lies combed on the pillow. Her teeth in, her mouth closed, she looks the way she used to, except that her face is tinted, tanned as if she worked in the fields.
This air is so still it has bars. Because I have been thinking about flies, I realize that there are no flies in this room. I imagine a fly wandering in, through these dark-curtained windows, to land on my grandmother’s nose.
At the Andover graveyard, Astroturf covers the dirt next to the shaft dug for her. Mr. Jones says a prayer beside the open hole. He preached at the South Danbury Church when my grandmother still played the organ. He raises his narrow voice, which gives itself over to August and blue air, and tells us that Kate in heaven “will keep on growing . . . and growing . . . and growing”—and he stops abruptly, as if the sky had abandoned him, and chose to speak elsewhere through someone else.
After the burial I walk by myself in the barn where I spent summers next to my grandfather. I think of them talking in heaven. Her first word is the word her mouth was making when she died.
In this tie-up chaff of flies roiled in the leather air, as my grandfather milked his Holsteins morning and night, his bald head pressed sweating into their sides, fat female Harlequins, while their black and white tails swept back and forth, stirring the flies up. His voice spoke pieces he learned for the lyceum, and I listened crouched on a three-legged stool, as his hands kept time strp strp with alternate streams of hot milk, the sound softer as milk foamed to the pail’s top. In the tie-up the spiders feasted like emperors. Each April he broomed the webs out and whitewashed the wood, but spiders and flies came back, generation on generation—like the cattle, mothers and daughters, for a hundred and fifty years, until my grandfather’s heart flapped in his chest. One by one the slow Holsteins climbed the ramp into a cattle truck.
In the kitchen with its bare hardwood floor, my grandmother stood by the clock’s mirror to braid her hair every morning. She looked out the window toward Kearsarge, and said, “Mountain’s pretty today,” or, “Can’t see the mountain too good today.”
She fought the flies all summer. She shut the screen door quickly, but flies gathered on canisters, on the clockface, on the range when the fire was out, on set-tubs, tables, curtains, chairs. Flies buzzed on cooling lard, when my grandmother made doughnuts. Flies lit on a drip of jam before she could wipe it up. Flies whirled over simmering beans, in the steam of maple syrup.
My grandmother fretted, and took good aim with a flyswatter, and hung strips of flypaper behind the range where nobody would tangle her hair in it.
She gave me a penny for every ten I killed. All day with my mesh flyswatter I patrolled kitchen and dining room, living room, even the dead air of the parlor. Though I killed every fly in the house by bedtime, when my grandmother washed the hardwood floor, by morning their sons and cousins assembled I the kitchen, like the woodchucks my grandfather shot in the vegetable garden which doubled and returned; or like the deer that watched for a hundred and fifty years from the brush on ragged mountain, and when my grandfather died stalked down the mountainside to graze among peas and corn.
We live in their house with our books and pictures, writing poems under Ragged Mountain, gazing each morning at blue Kearsarge.
We live in the house left behind; we sleep in the bed where they whispered together at night. One morning I wake hearing a voice from sleep: “The blow of the axe resides in the acorn.”
I get out of bed and drink cold water in the dark morning from the sink’s dipper at the window under the sparse oak, and fly wakes buzzing beside me, cold, and sweeps over set-tubs and range, one of the hundred-thousandth generation.
I planned long ago I would live here, somebody’s grandfather.
