Haymon - Why the house is made of gingerbread: poems

Winner of the L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award for 2010

[ poems ]

AVA LEAVELL HAYMON

Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright 2010 by Ava Leavell Haymon
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing

Designer: Barbara Neely Bourgoyne
Typefaces: Scala Sans, display; Whitman, text
Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haymon, Ava Leavell.

Why the house is made of gingerbread : poems / Ava Leavell Haymon.
p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8071-3585-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8071-3586-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

I. Title.

PS3608.A945W47 2010

811.6dc22

2009021202

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

to my mother, who read me the old stories over and over,
as many times as I wanted, from the scuffed up Childcraft
with an orange cover, printed toward the end of the war
when there was no ink for color pictures

Why not be wholly changed into fire?
ABBOT LOT, fourth century

As this collection of poems underwent transmutation into sequence, some of the individual poems were significantly revised. Titles have changed, titles have moved from one poem text to another, whole poems have been divided and absorbed into others. The author thanks and humbly asks forgiveness from the editors of the following periodicals, in whose pages some of these words previously appeared in some form:

Bellingham Poetry Review: What Gretel Learned from the Witch, What the Smoke Knows (as Pose, Flammable); Crab Orchard Review: The Witch Has Told You a Story; Louisiana Literature: Heft and How One Became Two; New Orleans Review: What Gretel Learned from Her Father (much revised here and retitled What Gretel Learns from the Wind); Nightsun: Cradlesong; Northwest Review: What the Witch Wanted; Pleiades of the Stars: Cornbread (text appearing in several poems in this book), What Never Happened, (text appearing in several poems, primarily Autobiography), Lunch Break (as Invitation); Prairie Schooner: Cornucopia; Rose & Thorn: Every-girls Mandala, The First Wish, Riddle; Southern Review: Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread (text divided among several poems in this collection)

Chill Seeping Out of the Old Forest first appeared as Woman Alone in the Woods in the 1991 volume Kitchen Heat (Maudes Head Press). What the Smoke Knows was reprinted (as Pose, Flammable) in Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-po LISTSERV (Red Hen Press, 2008).

Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread

When Gretel was small, she told
the secret no one must ever tell.
The ironing board stood between

her and her mother, the woman ironing.
What Gretel remembers is this: the iron
sliding across the backs of her hands

and the freezing cold
that came at first and spread
up her arms to her chest

and how she stood back from the board
awed, the odd meat smell,
the womans long hair striking

the air like cottonmouths,
the single whir of the clock
and the way it did not proceed.

How Gretel herself seemed to grow
a little taller, sandals and sunsuit gone
and her clothes become a white wool robe

and how her hair went white blond
and floated straight and fine
on air currents the skin could not feel,

mouth falling open slow motion
in nothing more than surprise,
eyes fixed flat as an icons.

The iron made a clucking sound
and her handswhile she was staring
at them, cold as snow

ignited. Flamed up yellow-red
like fire forced before bellowsand
it was all she could see,

those burning hands. What might
they do? What could she touch
they would not destroy?

The clock lurched forward at last,
and she fell back and ran to the mirror.
She thought shed see the child

in white wool with burning hands,
but instead of one she saw two
twins, a boy and a girl.

The girl, with only a small diminishment
in weight, looked down at her hands,
opening and closing. She could see

every line, knuckle, scar, unmistakable
as initials. The boy felt quite hollow
and set about learning to do

all over again. He found
he was very clever
and always afraid.

That was a different mother.
That was before the story began.

Most cooking, even of elaborate dishes, is merely the
combining of a number of very simple operations.

The James Beard Cookbook

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN

Gretels kept it in the Christmas decorations
for years, setting it out every holiday season
with crches, nutcrackers, earnest clay blobs
the children painted in kindergarten.

This year shes decided to light it, strikes
a wooden kitchen match and holds it
to the wick, a twist of string
surfacing through paraffin snow

near the chimney. Several false starts
and it blazes up, crackles with surprise
at discovering its own function, settles in
to burn like any cheerful votive.

The flame steadies. A little puddle scoops
in the roof beam. The candle is a fire
now, confident of its own appointed fuel.
The house is burning itself down.

Gretel keeps it with her, after shes pushed
red bows and strings of lights onto the shelf
of an upstairs closet and the living rooms
quieted down, drafty and plain. She lights it

in the kitchen when she loads the dishwasher
and beside her on the counter where she writes
the thank you notes. Worrying how to make
the kids write theirs, she stares at it, half gone,

peaked gables glaring back hollow triangle eyes.
Fire crater halfway down, the windows
reveal themselves parchment under wax
not a sugar glaze at alland a guttering light

inside flickers through. Gretel
remembers a dark soot basement, herself
eight years old, the grates in a coal furnace,
red glow nodding through split sheets of mica.

The fire is at the bottom. Shredded walls
spindle around it, a collapsing well.
Where will the fire go now? Which part
the first to fail? It seems dangerous

to leave it alone, not to tend it constantly.
When the candle house is completely gone,
Gretel thinks to herself, the patient little flame
could spread anywhere.

Ordinary house, kitchen,
ordinary American city.
Gretel, whipping up a family
supper for the customary

husband, children, reaches under
the cabinet for her grandmothers
cast-iron skillet, and begins
remembering her childhood

and its not at all the way it happened.
Its the story with the girl
whose name was also Gretel, the one
everybody knows about, lost in the woods

with the boy, her brother. She was baking
strawberry tarts when the voice first spoke:
I learned this from the witch.
As today, careful not to lick the spoon,