Kate Daniels, "Crowns"

Crowns  

  for Philip Levine
Around the time I first read the poetry of Philip Levine,my teeth were fixed. Two or three hundred bucks(I’ve forgotten now) purchased a brand new me,two porcelain crowns. In the dentist’s chair, my midgetcanines were filed down to sharp, bright pointshardly larger than the bronzed end of a Bicpen, then crammed in the black-backed capsof two hardened, china fakes. No morecovering my mouth to obscure the evidenceof faulty genes. No more tears at imagesembezzled from graduation picnicswhen Darrell Dodson picked me up and slung mein the pool, and someone took a pictureof my lips slacking back to reveal my gumsin what appeared to be a scream. No more breezeswinding through the gappy pickets of my ill-grownteeth and down my throat. No more worryingsome boy would snag his tongue in the zigzagged bulkheadof my upper row, and bring us both to blood.
I’ll love Levine forever for confessing his own struggleswith orthodontia, his rot-plagued “Depression mouth,”a dentist called it, his cavities and root canals, his occipital pain,for his photograph in Antaeus, the summer of ’78,the stained and crooked slabs parked compellinglybehind his grin. Our teeth connected us before the poetry,he, from the immigrant onion-eaters and temperate tipplersof Manischiewtz. I, from a long line of tannin-stainedIrish Catholics who smoked themselves to fragilestates of calcium depletion, and a recent run of Carolinagritballs, too poor to brush, too ignorant to care their teethretired in early middle age. I can see them now, perplexedbefore an apple’s crispy rind, frustrated by a succulent, stringy rackof pork ribs barbequed in the side lot of Earlene Worsham’sgas station south of town. Levine would have understood my uncles,enthroned on plastic-covered kitchen chairs patched with tape,their work boots kicking up mucky clouds of chiggery dirt,their pick ups parked nearby, shotguns in the rack,sucking on cheap beers and harsh cigarettes,their nails starved by nicotine to yellow curls, the car greaseembedded permanently in the creases of their hands.
When I met him, he was such a mensch, massivein my mind, but in the flesh, something touchingabout his shoulders in the worn tweed jacket, somethingvulnerable in his feet in an ordinary pair of soiled, white sneakers.He opened his mouth to laugh, one side rising uplike it does, in that derisive gesture that seems, at first, a sneer,and I remembered my mother flexing back her lips to removedelicately, with two stained fingers, just so, a fleck of tobaccolodged between her teeth, and saw again my father flossing at the tablewith the torn off cover of a paper book of matches,then stubbing out his butt in the yellowed, oily pod of broken yolkthat was hemorrhaging across his breakfast plate.
I can face those images now without the shameI carried in the days before the poetry of Phil Levineliberated me. I can look at anything now, because I keephis picture in my mind and his poems in my pocket.I can stand my life because I wear the crown he constructedfor people like me — grocery checkers, lube jobbers, truck drivers,waitresses — all of us crowned with the junkyard diademsof shattered windshields and rusty chains, old potswith spit tobacco congealing inside, torn screen doorsand gravestones in the front yard, just five short steps from life to death…
So there is my family with their broken beer bottlesand patched shoes, their mutts chained in a back yardcarved from a stingy pine woods, on cheap landout near the county dump where the air swells with the perfumeof trash, a circle of them playing poker in a trailer somewherein the woods, or razoring the state decal from the windowshieldof a ransacked wreck to transfer to my brother’s car.Or cleaning fish on the back porch and throwing the gutsto the tick-clogged dogs, or frying venison in a cast-iron panand stinking up the house with that heavy smell, showingthe buck’s big balls in a plastic cannister that once held salt.Or burning tires in a field some autumn, scummingthe sky with a smoky, cursive black they can’t even readbut inhale poisonously again and again.
And there I am, walking along tolerantly now, with Phil Levine,his poems in my pocket, his good rage gathered in my heartand I can love them again, the way I did in the years beforeI saw what they were and how the world would use themand accepted the fact they were incapable of change.We’re in a field I used to love, a redbone coonhound running aheadher ears dragging the edges of the goldenrod till they are tippedin pollen, like twin paintbrushes dipped in gilt. And the worldis hunting dogs and country music and unschooled voicesbending vowels and modest kitchen gardens where late tomatoesare tied up with brownish streamers of old nylon hose.The vast way your chest expands when the sun gradually setsin mid-fall in central Virginia. The tobacco barns glimmeringin last light, the chinks darkening now, the slats solidifying at the close of dayand your mind opening up like the pine forest swishing fragrantly overheadway up in the dark that is coming, but remains, for the moment, beautifully at bay.                
                                                                                                 -Kate Daniels
Thanks to Eva H.D. for introducing me to Kate Daniels' poetry. "Crowns" is in her collection A Walk in Victoria's Secret. Here's a link to Daniels' conversation with the poet Philip Levine. and another to Daniels talking with Tony Hoagland. (We've posted several Hoagland poems on AL, including one of my favorites, America.) Will be posting some Philip Levine soon.