Alicia Costello

                          The Doorway

When the Browns' wagon wheeled away from Tennessee,

the sun sang silent rhapsodies,

beckoning with its flicks and licks, hypnotizing

with opportunities in each new rising

until Kansas.

The fading sun gleamed prosperity

when, with remarkable clarity,

a firm-faced red man rode up, pressing

his well-used Smith and Wesson

against Mrs. Brown’s tired heart.

They made no fight, but obediently gave

the Indian what he wanted with that depraved

evil look in his eye, what he lusted

down to every old rifle rusted.

The sun fell below the earth.

A trying, tumbling storm began rumbling.

On his orders, they stumbled past the grumbling,

disgruntled dark man possessing

the black and slimy Smith and Wesson.

The dark man stared and despised

through beady and greedy, unnatural eyes,

as he watched them walk west into the space

seen as America’s vast liminal place,

the deep, obtrusive “other” of goals unfulfilled.

Penniless.  Homeless.  Robbed. The sun stopped coming

alive with new hope and fortune, instead, drumming

of tired heartbeats and tired souls starved

the couple as their anguished feet carved

fresh footprints in the landscape.

They entered California, America’s promised land,

and built the little store they had planned,

they lived comfortably cozy the rest of their days

living under the sun’s sufficient and plentiful rays,

their valleys forgotten on mountaintops.

 Alicia Costello

Creation Account

To begin writing this poem, I went back to my old scraps of a few rhyming couplets and random poetic sentences I had come up with several years ago.  They always come when I’m driving, and I write them down and never do anything with them, believing the poem will find them when it’s time.  One of these sentences I wrote so long ago I can’t tell you even what year it was penned was “Sweet cadences of summer silent rhapsodies”.  I think I wrote down this sentence because I loved the word “cadence” and it gave me a mental scene of a prairie field with the grass gently wafting, bathed in sunlight.  My mind stuck on the prairie, but quickly ditched most of the sentence when I was reading Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid” and I came across the sentence “…and there was fear and trembling.”  That sentence rumbled in my brain, and I was obsessed.  I, of course, already love the phrase “Fear and Trembling” as the title of Kierkegaard’s most famous text, and maybe that’s a little bit why it stuck out to me (apparently, it’s a Dutch thing, this fear and trembling.)

Without thinking very much, I wrote the first line and the next three lines about the dark man with a Smith and Wesson.  I remembered one of my favorite descriptions of all time, in John Dos Passos’ 1919 where he describes JP Morgan as having “magpie eyes”.  Obviously I don’t want to rip off Dos Passos, so I put “beady” and “greedy” came on its heels.  I inserted the word “unnatural” to convey a wild, unacceptable, slightly nationalistic message a la Caliban in “The Tempest.”  I also have been learning the concept of liminality and wanted to include that, as the plains of the Central United States was seen as simply a 1,000 mile space in between the places you want to go, between two rooms if you will.

After I fleshed out the enemy, an Indian, I began to flesh out the “they”.  I first wrote them in an early preface as “The Browns of Boston, of respectable degree / set out for the west in 1873.”  Ever since then, the Browns have stuck with me in some form.  At first they had children.  I then limited them to simply a young couple.  The sun, a beacon west to the land of new prosperity, became something hypnotizing like the Star that leads the wise men to Bethlehem.  (One of the early drafts read “It called them / Like wise men to Bethlehem.”)    Then, I ditched that rhyme because it was really cheap.  I was rewarded by managing to squeeze in a reference to Star Wars: A New Hope.  Whenever I can fit anything incredibly nerdy in poetry, I celebrate.  Plus, you know, Star Wars is kinda like a journey with a goal…I guess…maybe Mr. Brown’s first name is Luke or something.     

Another cheap rhyme I ditched after fighting it a little bit more was a line that was supposed to go after “Smith and Wesson”:  “My ma, I told her / he musta stole it off a soldier.”  This was a really cheap rhyme, and obviously from the point of view of a child, and it added colloquial speech, but in the end it brought down the rest of the stanza, so it had to go.

This is where I submitted it to the class and got back at least 20 pages of feedback. 

Most had the same problems with it—they would appreciate a fleshed-out story, they wanted more concrete images, most loved the image of the feet carving in stanza 3.

I set out with revision. The first thing I tackled was stanza 1, lines 4 & 5.  Most didn’t appreciate how concrete images suddenly became abstract there, so I did a little internet research to discover an appropriate image that would convey my abstract idea.  Lines 4 and 5 became:

Promising with each new rising

A farm to

A fresh farm to call their own

320 acres of fresh farm land

Abundances of fresh farm land.

Then I set on adding more time-appropriate images of the time for the first stanza to put the reader in the correct time period, because the classmates wanted me to. Of course, I obliged, as I like to make the audience happy.   I changed line 1 to “As the Brown’s wagon wheeled away from Tennessee”—this also puts the journey aspect in the beginning of the poem.

I then set the poem aside for a couple of days and decided to iron out a setting for the robbery, so I changed lines 4 and 5 to “With opportunities at each new rising. / Until Kansas.”  I think line 5 adds the drama I was trying to create with “there was fear and trembling” which everyone thought was weak.

As many of my colleagues suggested, I put in more references to the sun and set the mood with the image of this and the added storm. 

At this point I set to introducing the scene and the Indian with more details, so I added stanzas 2 and 3.  I also made the Indian more evil, which will win me no friends with the American Indian crowd, but accurately takes in many stories of the day…many settlers were robbed or killed by Native Americans. 

The first line of the long stanza was an issue.  I tried to make the image more concrete with “They trembled with fear”, but then it didn’t rhyme, so I tried to add the drama of the night with added drama of a storm.  It would also explain why their footprints were carved in the landscape later on.  It now reads “A trying, tumbling storm began rumbling”  Except for changing some articles from ‘a’ to ‘the’, I left the rest of the stanza alone.

I also left the fifth stanza alone because I just love it so dang much.  A lot of people commented on how they liked the whole starved/carved thing, so I had support about leaving it.

Then I wrote the 7^th stanza, adding the component of the sun again and wrapping up the story with them getting to California.  I also added a landscape metaphor to the sun and storm emotion in the last line that references a terrible poem I wrote five years ago.  At least in this poem it’s on it’s mountaintop.