Susan Settlemyre Williams
is the author of Ashes in Midair, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Contest (now out from MMM Press), and a chapbook, Possession (Finishing Line Press, 2007).
Her poetry has appeared in Mississippi Review, 42opus, Shenandoah, the Marlboro Review, and diode, among other journals, and in the anthologies Best New Poets 2006 and Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-po Listserv (Red Hen Press, 2008).
Her poem “Lighter” won the 2006 Diner Poetry Contest and was selected for Best New Poets 2006. She is book review editor and associate literary editor of the online journal Blackbird and lives in Richmond, Virginia.
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Albuquerque, Your Ashes in Midair
for Rebecca Gault
Your brown empty city. The desert’s out
of flower. Nothing holds it, grain
on grain. Light as sky in my palm,
in a blue ice cream carton, I hold the gray
soft feathers of your ash. Which will be set
in the brass pan against the other brass pan
that holds the feather of truth. Weighing,
nothing on nothing—I’m wrong, it’s the heart
that’s weighed. Your dust doesn’t balance
anything; it hangs a long time in the heat,
lifts on an updraft. In storm season once
I flew through desert thunderheads rising
in giant chimneys, miles above
the plane. I don’t understand weightlessness
or perfect balance, the boy hired to take out
my half-uprooted, leaning pine, how
he roped himself to it, walked upright its tilting
height. Left-handed, he chain-sawed
a branch on the left, then right-handed, one
on the other side, stood on their stumps and slashed
limbs, one hand and one hand, and balanced
on those stumps, and the dust
didn’t fall at all, it seemed, sand-colored,
only hover and lift, until I couldn’t watch him
step onto sky, how he swung himself
out on his rope and glided to earth, in three
strokes brought down the armless trunk.
The sky had no clouds, and the limbs
were slow and brown, but the ground shuddered
each time one came down on the tattered
chrysanthemums. The boy hung in the air
like his weight was nothing up there.
I don’t understand how the body can be burnt
into nothing, this little plume I let go.
When I dreamed of Suzanne come back,
she had no more weight than you, but she glowed
and her milk-blind eyes had turned
to aquamarines. I want you radiant like her,
not dust hovering in brown summer air.
[Originally published in DIAGRAM.4 and in DIAGRAM.2: The Second Print Anthology (Del Sol Press, 2006). Reprinted with permission of Many Mountains Moving Press.]
Artist’s Statement
I
consider “Albuquerque, Your Ashes in Midair” a milestone poem for several reasons. On a personal level, it came after a year of trying to write about my friend Rebecca—educator, romance novelist, earth mother, and inspiration, a woman so brave and vital she should have outlived everyone. I didn’t want a conventional elegy, for nothing about Rebecca was conventional, but I did want to suggest her strength and my grief.
In terms of craft, the poem also marked a turning point: I had long admired the way Larry Levis could, apparently without effort, weave together so many narrative threads in a single poem, but everything I tried along those lines was simply clumsy and labored. In “Ashes,” I seemed for the first time able to let go of linearity and allow subliminal connections to take over. Finally, as I was struggling several months later to create my first full-length collection, I realized that ashes in midair was a surprisingly useful metaphor for the human condition, and it became the organizing image for that collection (as well as the title poem).
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