Two Poems from In My Father’s House: A Field Guide to Shedding (a work in progress)
Photo by Donald Berinati.
By Gailmarie Pahmeier
Wire Stripper
General Description: A pair of crossed metal handles connected by a pivot pin…
Primary Use: Removing a controlled length of insulation…without nicking or damaging.
How to Use: Place the wire into the notch of the strippers. Squeeze the handles together. Examine the stripped wire to make sure it isn’t nicked or scraped. If it is, adjust the strippers for a shallower bit and try again.*
Before the committee meeting officially
begins, colleagues chat amicably about
their jobs prior to the luxury of academia.
This sort of earnest comradery,
found so often a skillset of younger
faculty, is admirable but baffling,
can prolong a meeting to spectacular
length. Sometimes I leave my body, travel
to places actual or imaginary.
But I’m curious: who’s slung hash, babysat,
walked dogs, pumped gas? When it’s my turn,
and I answer that I was a belly dancer,
before I became an artist’s model,
the room quiets. Here in Nevada,
the word dancer often means stripper,
and to have graduated to nakedness
before a studio of sculpture students,
just adds to this momentary lapse of chat.
They can’t imagine my youth, and these days,
nor can I on a grey day, like this one.
So as the meeting gets underway, I go
back to a June day, the day I heard
Blaze Starr had died, stripper extraordinaire.
I try to imagine when she was just
Fannie Belle Fleming, a teenage carhop
from West Virginia, discovered at the counter
of a doughnut shop, long before she met
the governor, set more than tongues wagging.
Daughter, carhop, counter help, burlesque queen,
stripper, mistress, club owner, gemologist--
all jobs, all work, all requiring an awareness
of craft. We all want to say at the end,
I regret nothing except not doing more of it,
which is a paraphrase of Blaze’s own words,
words worth believing in to get us through.
See the clock now? This meeting is almost
over. I don’t regret being here.
These are all kind people with stories to tell,
good workers who will linger here to talk
long after I’ve fluttered into neon.
*Note: Italicized language is from John Kelsey’s Field Guide to Tools, 2004
Lawn Mower
Primary Use: Cutting grass to a short, uniform length in a ritual known as “mowing the lawn.”
Operating Principle: The internal combustion engine works to turn the sharp blade at high speed. The blade cuts through most everything in its path.
How to Use: Pick a dry day to mow the lawn and a time when other folks are not trying to sleep.*
We’re the native Midwesterners here,
grantees born in Ohio, Missouri.
Margie teaches undergraduates
surrounded by corn and corniness
and I now live in Nevada, sagebrush
and scrub jay, rock, dust, rock, dust, rock.
This morning we can’t sleep, the Vermont
chill, the other residents already
up making poems and paintings. Last night
rain so razored it drove us to wine,
to sit inside and share stories we prayed
had some promise, a ritual known
common at colonies like this one
where everyone is mostly kind, knows
the critic’s blade will come in time. Not now.
Now we clink coffee cups and watch the boy
on scholarship who cuts the grass, doesn’t
seem to know what we know: don’t mow wet grass,
don’t wake up women who’ve had too much, too
little time left to matter, too much to fear:
the fledgling robin under the mower blades,
the potential of even the smallest
pebble, how easily an eye can go dark.
*Note: Italicized language is from John Kelsey’s Field Guide to Tools, 2004.
Photo by David Calvert.
Gailmarie Pahmeier’s Of Bone, Of Ash, Of Ordinary Saints: A Nevada Gospel (WSC Press, 2020) was nominated for the High Plains Book Award. In September of 2021, the governor of Nevada, Steve Sisolak, appointed her Poet Laureate, State of Nevada.