Leatha Kendrick
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Leatha Kendrick lives and works in Kentucky. She is the author of three volumes of poetry, the most recent one, Second Opinion (2008). Her poems and essays appear widely in journals and anthologies including
What Comes Down to Us –Twenty-Five Contemporary Kentucky Poets; The Kentucky Anthology—Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State; Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, and I to I: Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists, and others. She co-edited Crossing Troublesome, Twenty-Five Years of the Appalachian Writers Workshop and wrote the script for A Lasting Thing for the World—The Photography of Doris Ulmann, a documentary film. She leads workshops in poetry, life writing, and writing to heal at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, KY, as well as at workshops and conferences in Kentucky and elsewhere. She is at work on a novel that centers on sisters, small town life, relinquishment and adoption. |
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Shadow
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. --Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii
So much she does not know, now that she’s reached
the cusp of Age. Past the apex of that Renaissance
bell curve – the seven ages Shakespeare preached,
the ones she once rejected, so certain that
she had to stay the same. This spring she fights
just to stay erect. Her father’s losing weight,
like a Jenny Craig success. A sly grin lights
his face when the doctor’s scale edges
down and down – one seventeen – he fights
to reach a hundred pounds. He’s eighty-eight.
She thinks he wants to disappear, sick
of his crabbed reflection in the glass, the weight
of living. She’s relieved to leave him. The peace
of her own place, a balm broken
by a cardinal pecking at the window glass.
“That bird ought to put her strength
into making eggs,” a guest opines
on the second day. The woman thinks
of her unborn grandson, safe, reclining
in her daughter’s womb. When she calls
her father, he’s forgot to eat again.
This man who named her world cannot recall
the name of the white flowers that star
his April lawn. All day the bird flies, full
force, at her double. Undeterred, far
from her abandoned nest. She’s young. She still
believes her image, its power
to define, devour her. Enraged, she’d kill
it to defend her space, though it is herself
she duels in truth. The shade she cannot still.
--Leatha Kendrick
First published in The Heartland Review, Spring 2010.
******************************************
Letters Full of Weather
My grandmother’s letters were full of weather.
No maritime mists or damp ocean breezes,
but the Midwestern rush of summer
passing over, over. The wheat not yet
hardened, she looked for Canadian highs,
drying weather past amassing clouds.
“Who has seen the wind? Neither you
nor I,” she crooned to each of us in turn,
heiring her delight. Intimate with air,
she measured the likelihood of storms
against the ache in her bad wrist-- the pain
each bend gave her long hand,
undulating like a flag. At the picture window’s
glass expanse, piles of stationery on her desk,
she wrote to us at camp or college,
“Rain last night. Too wet to thresh.
Sunny weather forecast.” The old home-place
waited by the river, three hundred acres ripe,
ready to bring in. “I’m so proud of you,”
she’d close. Her letters swept the miles.
The corn sighing like a sea, she looked for sun.
Letters, tasting of skies, prophesied
some good in our disordered lives,
a promise in our harvest.
-- Leatha Kendrick
First published in Imagination and Place: Weather, 2011.
Forthcoming in Almanac of the Invisible, Larkspur Press, 2014.
*******************************************
Animal Husbandry
In the suburbs it’s leashes and feeders,
shivery walks, bags of thistle. Not much,
such keeping as we do, compared to
mucking stalls or endless water carried --
even to the nightly stop you used to make
at our red barn, my love, to feed the cattle, check
the swollen nannies, intent to drop their kids
in January. Even the dog’s too much sometimes.
Not human enough—too prone to animal need.
Which is why I keep him near: to be forced
into the cold, to feel how the morning is
and know the wind, intractable,
the ground underfoot. To be brought
against how alien, how utterly
familial each creature is--
not us, nor made by us –
and not forget the need
to feed and be fed by
what we cannot own.
--Leatha Kendrick
First published in Appalachian Journal, 2011.
Forthcoming in Almanac of the Invisible, Larkspur Press, 2014
******************************************
Detail: Garden Path
A weavery of stones, sand
between, and two curled leaves--
we stoop and aim.
My daughter sets
the lens toward her toes and snaps.
“Great idea,” I say. “Let me
take one of your foot.”
She laughs,
“Oh, Mom, I’m glad you
like silly things like me.” She angles
her foot, sandaled on the brick
and I zoom in.
On the path,
plump white toes, a canvas
strap, fat lines of moss,
echo of her laugh.
--Leatha Kendrick
First published in Still, an Onlne Journal, Autumn, 2012
Forthcoming in Almanac of the Invisible, Larkspur Press, 2014.
***********************************
What Falls Away
What falls away is always. And is near.
--Theodore Roethke
Nothing speaks from the next room.
It is past – the high pitch of it,
the words still soft around the edges,
lopsided, taking shape. The lean fingers of it,
the pudgy palms and bare feet
on stairs – they are away. And always
falls down skins a knee, leaves for college.
Go home, I think – but where? I think it
in my car while in the city or in the house
we built on a hillside twenty years gone now.
Everywhere’s a motel, I think – even trees
grow fast as always falls. It’s going somewhere
I can’t see—this tree next to my window--
and my window moves out of then
to no place past now. Still it moves.
You can’t get ahead of yourself,
though the mind’s eye will strain
to make out landscapes way out there. Nothing
speaks or giggles or cries out from these
places we are leaving.
--Leatha Kendrick
First published in Science in Your Own Back Yard, Larkspur Press, 2003.
Collected in Second Opinion, David Robert Books, 2008.
******************************************
Second Opinion
We’re four women waiting among a shifting set of others
in radiology’s store-front lobby--three daughters
and a mother linked by blood and laughter
over Cosmo Girl’s “most embarrassing
moments” (trail of toilet paper from the back of slacks,
the inevitable period started when you’re wearing white,
a student asking her teacher, “If your quizzies are hard,
what about your testes?”) Lyda loves that last one--
my funny last one--she’s the performer, the mime.
Thank god, she’s mine, feeding me one-liners.
The middle one, Eliza, brought my x-rays here,
and parked the car. She works the crossword,
all attention like her father but she’s part of me,
my watching self. And Leslie, eldest, watches over us all,
rails against this three hour wait, tries to breach
the impersonal walls of disinterest in our fate. She was first
to nurse from this right breast, that pressed and prodded,
and later slicked with gel will echo sound onto a screen
to show the probable malignancy. I’m going to lose it--
the breast--and along with it the cancer, too, I hope.
The receptionist gives us a hard look when we laugh.
We’re linked, silvery with a happiness
glinting out even in this waiting place.
I finger the necklace I’ve just bought, touch
the curative moonstone, murmuring “hope”--
I want to believe in sudden remission,
in some way to avert what we are certainly
headed for. What I can believe in
is the healing of their fingers laced through mine.
--Leatha Kendrick
First published in The Voice of Breast Cancer in Medicine and Bioethics, 2006.
Winner, Jim Wayne Miller Poetry Prize, 2001.
Collected in Second Opinion, David Roberts Books, 2008.
Reprinted in What Comes Down to Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets, 2009.
*******************************************
Costume. Fakery. The Sell.
On Watching TV two weeks post-mastectomy
Excuse me while I grow bald and fat.
Sorry to offend the eye with my
one breast. I’m female. I apologize.
I fake two breasts, but know this half-flat
chest. I’ll take chemo and a wig,
touch my losses secretly. No big
deal! I never have and never will
fit anyone’s ideal. And I’m no starfish:
won’t regenerate. Fiberfill
and silicone help to hide the scar.
This new shape won’t fill t-shirts, sell a car.
I’m served up on the half-shell. Turn off
the TV. Its cleavage shouts, “Are you buying?”
Avert your eyes. I’ve one soft side. I’m off
the market. Alive! Tender, I’m not hiding.
-- Leatha Kendrick
First published in Science in Your Own Back Yard, Larkspur Press, 2003.
Reprinted in The Voice of Breast Cancer in Medicine and Bioethics, 2006.
Collected in Second Opinion, David Robert Books, 2008.
Reprinted in What Comes Down to Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets, 2009.
*********************************
Tonight Weaving
Tonight, weaving in threads
on the afghan I've finished,
I am far from the safe night
sounds of the creek, where
dark's held in the ridge's
long embrace, the weight of earth
halfway up the sky.
Whatever shape defines despair,
I don't find it here where light
reaches, the sky breathing
steady hours blue and yellow.
Death’s weight is earthen,
its smell muddy. Cancer
that keeps coming back,
part of my smell – absorbed
in skin and hair, molecules--
turns into just another way
of being. Healed,
I am diseased. Despair’s alive:
anything alive I can leave behind,
stare down, if I have to.
I can contemplate a corpse –
even my own – an exercise
worth imagining – if I don't
let fear get the better of me,
if I can sit through the sweet
stench until it's dry
bones, whitening. The worm
in the rose is only life
craving more of itself,
devouring the folded heart,
growing fat. And red wine –
those toasts to more life!--
takes the soft living organ,
makes it clay, hard and yellow
at our center. O we are Passionate
for our demise. We are
as grass--who dies? I wonder. Who
weaves these threads?
--Leatha Kendrick
First published in Shenandoah, Spring 2005.
************************************
Zen Laundry
Mornings, pulled earthward, I approach
these Buddhas, white and squat, female
openings accepting what is placed in them--
the weight of denim, heft of wet towels.
All passes through them, brought by water
and the heat toward an original state.
A friend of mine once claimed she survived
the dying of her child by doing laundry.
And though I’ve never had to face that kind
of death, there have been days of crying babies,
everlasting viruses, and loss
when life seemed somewhere else, and the wash
was all I could get done. Over and over
I wonder aloud, “What has this labor
added to the world?” Like purple dresses
or a dark blue shirt, the question fades.
Nighties rumpled full of sleep smells,
t-shirts stained and jeans survive,
demanding to be laundered yet again.
Love has put me here, I muse.
The fairy tale’s real end. A cinderella inside out,
I sing, “My love! My endless – laundry.”
Among the piles of clothes, I am
a blankness opening
to admit the insufficiency of thought.
The Way of Wisdom.
Go now and wash your socks.
-- Leatha Kendrick
First published in Cincinnati Poetry Review, 1996.
Collected in Heart Cake, Sow’s Ear Press, 2000.
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. --Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii
So much she does not know, now that she’s reached
the cusp of Age. Past the apex of that Renaissance
bell curve – the seven ages Shakespeare preached,
the ones she once rejected, so certain that
she had to stay the same. This spring she fights
just to stay erect. Her father’s losing weight,
like a Jenny Craig success. A sly grin lights
his face when the doctor’s scale edges
down and down – one seventeen – he fights
to reach a hundred pounds. He’s eighty-eight.
She thinks he wants to disappear, sick
of his crabbed reflection in the glass, the weight
of living. She’s relieved to leave him. The peace
of her own place, a balm broken
by a cardinal pecking at the window glass.
“That bird ought to put her strength
into making eggs,” a guest opines
on the second day. The woman thinks
of her unborn grandson, safe, reclining
in her daughter’s womb. When she calls
her father, he’s forgot to eat again.
This man who named her world cannot recall
the name of the white flowers that star
his April lawn. All day the bird flies, full
force, at her double. Undeterred, far
from her abandoned nest. She’s young. She still
believes her image, its power
to define, devour her. Enraged, she’d kill
it to defend her space, though it is herself
she duels in truth. The shade she cannot still.
--Leatha Kendrick
First published in The Heartland Review, Spring 2010.
******************************************
Letters Full of Weather
My grandmother’s letters were full of weather.
No maritime mists or damp ocean breezes,
but the Midwestern rush of summer
passing over, over. The wheat not yet
hardened, she looked for Canadian highs,
drying weather past amassing clouds.
“Who has seen the wind? Neither you
nor I,” she crooned to each of us in turn,
heiring her delight. Intimate with air,
she measured the likelihood of storms
against the ache in her bad wrist-- the pain
each bend gave her long hand,
undulating like a flag. At the picture window’s
glass expanse, piles of stationery on her desk,
she wrote to us at camp or college,
“Rain last night. Too wet to thresh.
Sunny weather forecast.” The old home-place
waited by the river, three hundred acres ripe,
ready to bring in. “I’m so proud of you,”
she’d close. Her letters swept the miles.
The corn sighing like a sea, she looked for sun.
Letters, tasting of skies, prophesied
some good in our disordered lives,
a promise in our harvest.
-- Leatha Kendrick
First published in Imagination and Place: Weather, 2011.
Forthcoming in Almanac of the Invisible, Larkspur Press, 2014.
*******************************************
Animal Husbandry
In the suburbs it’s leashes and feeders,
shivery walks, bags of thistle. Not much,
such keeping as we do, compared to
mucking stalls or endless water carried --
even to the nightly stop you used to make
at our red barn, my love, to feed the cattle, check
the swollen nannies, intent to drop their kids
in January. Even the dog’s too much sometimes.
Not human enough—too prone to animal need.
Which is why I keep him near: to be forced
into the cold, to feel how the morning is
and know the wind, intractable,
the ground underfoot. To be brought
against how alien, how utterly
familial each creature is--
not us, nor made by us –
and not forget the need
to feed and be fed by
what we cannot own.
--Leatha Kendrick
First published in Appalachian Journal, 2011.
Forthcoming in Almanac of the Invisible, Larkspur Press, 2014
******************************************
Detail: Garden Path
A weavery of stones, sand
between, and two curled leaves--
we stoop and aim.
My daughter sets
the lens toward her toes and snaps.
“Great idea,” I say. “Let me
take one of your foot.”
She laughs,
“Oh, Mom, I’m glad you
like silly things like me.” She angles
her foot, sandaled on the brick
and I zoom in.
On the path,
plump white toes, a canvas
strap, fat lines of moss,
echo of her laugh.
--Leatha Kendrick
First published in Still, an Onlne Journal, Autumn, 2012
Forthcoming in Almanac of the Invisible, Larkspur Press, 2014.
***********************************
What Falls Away
What falls away is always. And is near.
--Theodore Roethke
Nothing speaks from the next room.
It is past – the high pitch of it,
the words still soft around the edges,
lopsided, taking shape. The lean fingers of it,
the pudgy palms and bare feet
on stairs – they are away. And always
falls down skins a knee, leaves for college.
Go home, I think – but where? I think it
in my car while in the city or in the house
we built on a hillside twenty years gone now.
Everywhere’s a motel, I think – even trees
grow fast as always falls. It’s going somewhere
I can’t see—this tree next to my window--
and my window moves out of then
to no place past now. Still it moves.
You can’t get ahead of yourself,
though the mind’s eye will strain
to make out landscapes way out there. Nothing
speaks or giggles or cries out from these
places we are leaving.
--Leatha Kendrick
First published in Science in Your Own Back Yard, Larkspur Press, 2003.
Collected in Second Opinion, David Robert Books, 2008.
******************************************
Second Opinion
We’re four women waiting among a shifting set of others
in radiology’s store-front lobby--three daughters
and a mother linked by blood and laughter
over Cosmo Girl’s “most embarrassing
moments” (trail of toilet paper from the back of slacks,
the inevitable period started when you’re wearing white,
a student asking her teacher, “If your quizzies are hard,
what about your testes?”) Lyda loves that last one--
my funny last one--she’s the performer, the mime.
Thank god, she’s mine, feeding me one-liners.
The middle one, Eliza, brought my x-rays here,
and parked the car. She works the crossword,
all attention like her father but she’s part of me,
my watching self. And Leslie, eldest, watches over us all,
rails against this three hour wait, tries to breach
the impersonal walls of disinterest in our fate. She was first
to nurse from this right breast, that pressed and prodded,
and later slicked with gel will echo sound onto a screen
to show the probable malignancy. I’m going to lose it--
the breast--and along with it the cancer, too, I hope.
The receptionist gives us a hard look when we laugh.
We’re linked, silvery with a happiness
glinting out even in this waiting place.
I finger the necklace I’ve just bought, touch
the curative moonstone, murmuring “hope”--
I want to believe in sudden remission,
in some way to avert what we are certainly
headed for. What I can believe in
is the healing of their fingers laced through mine.
--Leatha Kendrick
First published in The Voice of Breast Cancer in Medicine and Bioethics, 2006.
Winner, Jim Wayne Miller Poetry Prize, 2001.
Collected in Second Opinion, David Roberts Books, 2008.
Reprinted in What Comes Down to Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets, 2009.
*******************************************
Costume. Fakery. The Sell.
On Watching TV two weeks post-mastectomy
Excuse me while I grow bald and fat.
Sorry to offend the eye with my
one breast. I’m female. I apologize.
I fake two breasts, but know this half-flat
chest. I’ll take chemo and a wig,
touch my losses secretly. No big
deal! I never have and never will
fit anyone’s ideal. And I’m no starfish:
won’t regenerate. Fiberfill
and silicone help to hide the scar.
This new shape won’t fill t-shirts, sell a car.
I’m served up on the half-shell. Turn off
the TV. Its cleavage shouts, “Are you buying?”
Avert your eyes. I’ve one soft side. I’m off
the market. Alive! Tender, I’m not hiding.
-- Leatha Kendrick
First published in Science in Your Own Back Yard, Larkspur Press, 2003.
Reprinted in The Voice of Breast Cancer in Medicine and Bioethics, 2006.
Collected in Second Opinion, David Robert Books, 2008.
Reprinted in What Comes Down to Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets, 2009.
*********************************
Tonight Weaving
Tonight, weaving in threads
on the afghan I've finished,
I am far from the safe night
sounds of the creek, where
dark's held in the ridge's
long embrace, the weight of earth
halfway up the sky.
Whatever shape defines despair,
I don't find it here where light
reaches, the sky breathing
steady hours blue and yellow.
Death’s weight is earthen,
its smell muddy. Cancer
that keeps coming back,
part of my smell – absorbed
in skin and hair, molecules--
turns into just another way
of being. Healed,
I am diseased. Despair’s alive:
anything alive I can leave behind,
stare down, if I have to.
I can contemplate a corpse –
even my own – an exercise
worth imagining – if I don't
let fear get the better of me,
if I can sit through the sweet
stench until it's dry
bones, whitening. The worm
in the rose is only life
craving more of itself,
devouring the folded heart,
growing fat. And red wine –
those toasts to more life!--
takes the soft living organ,
makes it clay, hard and yellow
at our center. O we are Passionate
for our demise. We are
as grass--who dies? I wonder. Who
weaves these threads?
--Leatha Kendrick
First published in Shenandoah, Spring 2005.
************************************
Zen Laundry
Mornings, pulled earthward, I approach
these Buddhas, white and squat, female
openings accepting what is placed in them--
the weight of denim, heft of wet towels.
All passes through them, brought by water
and the heat toward an original state.
A friend of mine once claimed she survived
the dying of her child by doing laundry.
And though I’ve never had to face that kind
of death, there have been days of crying babies,
everlasting viruses, and loss
when life seemed somewhere else, and the wash
was all I could get done. Over and over
I wonder aloud, “What has this labor
added to the world?” Like purple dresses
or a dark blue shirt, the question fades.
Nighties rumpled full of sleep smells,
t-shirts stained and jeans survive,
demanding to be laundered yet again.
Love has put me here, I muse.
The fairy tale’s real end. A cinderella inside out,
I sing, “My love! My endless – laundry.”
Among the piles of clothes, I am
a blankness opening
to admit the insufficiency of thought.
The Way of Wisdom.
Go now and wash your socks.
-- Leatha Kendrick
First published in Cincinnati Poetry Review, 1996.
Collected in Heart Cake, Sow’s Ear Press, 2000.
