#174: "Tourist's Attraction" by Jessica Garratt

~This poem was originally published in Western Humanities Review (2012).

Tourist’s Attraction

“‘But what is it all about? People loose and at the same time caught. Caught and loose. All these people and you don’t know what joins them up.’”

                              –Frankie, from Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding

Living by myself in this house

which others have called home and then

not called home, each for their own

good reasons, reminds me to wonder

if what I have is a tourist’s

attraction to love. I’m reminded

how hard a tourist falls

when she feels herself set a little apart,

when she feels that old ache

in the eye, to see clear through

the signage that drew her

in the first place. To see through

is her mania – to see down

to the sacred bones of a sacred site

and through the bones

of the others who traveled there

(even those who traveled with her)

and clutter the air with their bright

t-shirts, their voices flashing

with a present tense

so annoyingly unshadowed

it won’t survive the glib back-glance

of Tuesday. Can you blame her

for wanting to dig down

to a bedrock Now? But I do. I

blame her. Looking through

has something of a look away

in its heart. An old desire of the young

to strip things down – dear

things, some – to an essence, bared like teeth

of the no longer living.

I’m thinking

of Machu Picchu there, if you want

to know.  The skulls, the sacrificed

virgins’ bones, the unmoved sacred stones…

It’s on my mind because this morning I stood

out on the porch of this house in Georgia

where I’m living temporarily, and where

Carson McCullers (now dead) once lived

as a child, less (but still) temporarily,

and I set up a card table – a pretty good copy

of the card table my grandmother put out in the den

for Gin Rummy with my sister and I

when we were kids – and I sat there

on the porch with the deck of cards

I bought earlier this summer in Peru

for Rummy with my sister

on trains and in the airport,

but today (and all week) I’ve played Solitaire

in Georgia’s late-summer, late-morning

heat, and on each card I slapped down,

a new dull snapshot shone

of Machu Picchu, blue sky

an ageless tapestry behind it. White spackle

of clouds. In a few, tourists

who must each, in that moment,

have felt the unyielding ground

supporting their feet, the reliable arch

of the view as it poured in like concrete

to meet the clarity of their eyes,

and not known another perspective

made them small, then guarded

by a two of spades, a jack of clubs, a diamond,

some hearts. It’s September now and still

nothing’s lined up, not once,

on the Solitaire front, so I go on

with the contented mania

of a slot machinist, more at home

with disequilibrium anyway.

At Machu Picchu, I felt steadier

once we were off on our own,

my sister and I. We found

a grassy terrace, hidden

and narrow, with a view

of very few tourists. It looked sharply down

to the sappy twig of river – almost

a satellite view – and up

to Wayna Picchu, that dark god-

like peak, laced with Incan steps, risked now

by hikers (we see them from our perch)

dressed in bright “gear,” they call it.

At least two of them fall

from that pass each year. 

And what is the view from inside

that fall?  There’s no evidence

in the deck, or in the bones,

if they’re found –

                               no evidence

in that sunny afternoon at Machu Picchu,

my sister and I looking around

from our perch, talking idly

about the two men absorbing our separate

attentions, then some minor ruins

we spotted below. Then our parents

came up – the way

they seemed to be getting older… older

faster now.  A silence, a cautious peering

down. I wondered aloud

whether the bird there, making tight verticals

in the air, as it snatched some winged scraps

from the dizzy opening before us

was a species around

when the Incas lived here, in this temporary

hundred-year posting of theirs.

Manda had been wondering

just the same thing, she said,

and then, I bet two Incan sisters sat here once…

I bet they talked about

                                the same things as us…

You think? Uh-hunh, she said,

and we could feel the boldness of this assertion

like a giddiness of the height –

and it seemed right just then

to be brutal – not

about the truth (that binocular

virtue), but about our chance to feel

like members of something – of one thing

dilated far beyond itself –

before and beneath and ahead

of itself. We were sisters. We belonged

to each other, and so we belonged

to the world. It was

simple, and seemed important now

that we not throw sheepish glances

off the edge, at that mountain mirroring

this one, and see ourselves reflected back

as distant tourists, unrelated

except by category – our American

bones and money and bright

costumes, blooming

momentarily, unnaturally,

on this ledge. And was this foolish,

to have what could be called imperial

faith in –

what? – what was it

we believed in so perfectly right then? Our

impressions? Our right to make leaps

from the tangled nest of our

perspectives?

Was it a bit like Frankie’s

foolish faith? – Frankie, from

The Member of the Wedding, who fell

head over heels, up from the wide yawn

of her twelfth summer (which never held her

a member of anything), and

onto the ledge of a great consuming love

for her brother’s wedding, coming up in Winter

Hill, a town she pictured as pure, unearthly

white, and arctic as the heart

of Alaska, though truly it lay

a hundred miles north

of her home here in Columbus, Georgia.

Well, truly, Frankie never lived

here at all, in this town, in this green

and white house on Stark Avenue, where I sit now

at a card table that looks like Grandma’s,

on this high-ceilinged porch in Georgia

where today I write with sweat slowly climbing

steps down the back of my neck,

facing an unbelievably expressive bird

I hear but don’t see, who I think must perch

day after day in the same uninspiring tree

across the street, calling

to less precocious birds, farther

away, with such range, such insistence, such

grave, mutinous joy, I want to hold it

in my hands, and also sometimes

at bay – the way I wanted to hold

Frankie when she said to Berenice:

The world is certainy a small place. I mean

sudden … The world is certainy

a sudden place.  And later, in a different key:

The son-of-a-bitches – regarding

the neighborhood girls

who left her out of their club, their clubhouse

in the tree. No, this neighborhood

was not home to Frankie,

but she was born here, in a sense,

in the room on the other side of this wall

to my left. That was Carson’s bedroom,

where she wrote (as a small, ruined cathedral

inside which Frankie could live) her novel –

or bits of it, anyway, back home

from New York with the flu.

Carson, I’m told, never stayed anywhere

longer than eight weeks at a time.

She seemed to want her life set up like that –

like a card-table she could sit at

for a while, with companions or alone,

and then fold up and off

to another place. Though I imagine

the unspoken shape of the word return

rounding in her throat

as she left.

Still, in this house,

there’s a permanent collection of sorts

on display in glass cases in her old bedroom

for tourists to look through

when they visit. There are photographs

and a number of her belongings:

a pair of glasses,

a single white glove,

a single personal check, number 444,

her typewriter,

a box of stationery, personalized,

a tarnished silver lighter,

a child’s record player, opened like a small suitcase,

a watch, its hands stopped at 1:25 and 37 seconds,

a dinged-up metal trunk with her name on it,

a yearbook for Columbus High School,

laid open to the page

on which Carson’s face is half-way down

a staggered column of faces, and across

from her scowl, a quote she picked:

Music, when soft voices die,

vibrates in the memory.

                                 

It’s from a poem by Shelley,

and I swear to you – I could not

make this up – below her is another

Shelley – a fellow named Shelley

Swift – who might have rolled

his eyes up to his handsome hair

when he read that quote, and whose own

motto – oh, it’s grave – reads: “Fame

comes only when deserved.”

Sometimes I write in her bedroom.

I sit like a tourist among her things

and I make eye-contact with her life-

sized visage, a blown-up glower, propped

in the very corner the photo

depicts. The typewriter (now on display)

is in the photo too, a sheet of paper caught

in its works and smudging the wall

with its shadow. Her piano is out of range, but

present, I’m told – to the typewriter’s right.

I’m looking at that corner

right now: Where the piano was,

a display case instead, and in it

my own reflection.

                              And I don’t know

how much being here means

I know anything about her at all.

I don’t know the nature

of the trace we leave behind

when soft voices die, or if a trace is even

what we leave, strictly

speaking. But – I’ll say it

anyway: All of us, I think, are here –

Carson, Frankie, and I – an odd

triangle that looks nothing like a triangle

unless you’re sitting, just so,

in this very room. From a distance,

the spokes are hitched and undone

by a crazy wedding of dimensions. 

But here I can see and see through.

I’m caught         

and I’m loose.

Like these bits of a life let go

but here. Like the sun-baked, looked-at

stones, leaning together at the top

of a mountain, tourists

of the centuries as the centuries

pass. Like Frankie, old Berenice

and little John Henry West

around the table in the darkening

kitchen, playing 3-handed Bridge

with an incomplete deck

their last summer together. Caught

and yet terribly loose: Frankie

a tall winter ache,

lashing painfully against them and every

familiar edge, trying to scrape out

of her skin. And that last evening

in the kitchen, bound by nothing

and everything, their voices began all at once

to harmonize in a three-parted sorrow,

their crying caught up together

in the known dimensions of the kitchen,

but loose like a moment is loose

when you know for the first time

(it is always the first time)

that it will never come again. 

And I haven’t fallen from this knowledge,

but I think that if time really is

a long, straight measuring stick, with no give

or backward glance, what it must measure

and re-measure            

are the infinite dimensions

of a particular place. It must measure the inside

of each temporary view, where

the sight lines of temporary residents

tangle and loose endlessly

with each other, and then

(every so often) vibrate all at once

in a bright shiver of heart strings

when a certain key is struck. Here,

it’s September and evening

at 1519 Stark Avenue

and outside the windows of this room

the shadows press their long hands

together as they lean away.

*****

THE STORY BEHIND THE POEM

            I wrote this poem in Columbus, Georgia, while living in the childhood home of novelist Carson McCullers for three months. I had just returned from a trip to Peru, visiting my sister. Immediately before that, I’d left the town where I’d lived for 5 years and a relationship. Soon I’d be moving to Wichita, Kansas, but just for a semester. After that, I had no idea. I was—unsettled. In enlivening ways and in hard ways. I already loved Carson McCullers’ work—The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was one of my favorite novels—but, serendipitously, I read The Member of the Wedding for the first time while living in the Stark Avenue house. That novel has an unsettled heartbeat if I ever felt one. Its entire atmosphere is a question about belonging and home and what it means to be individual humans inhabiting a place and time together. And Carson wrote parts of it in the very house where I was living.

            The front porch felt like the right place for me to work most days. I was still sheltered by the house, but with the “company” of the neighborhood. It was early fall (still a little hot in Georgia, but bearable) and I sat out there from noon to 5 each day, pulled up to a card table. I think that in writing the poem, I was trying to carve out a kind of temporary home—an atmosphere to settle into. It needed to be intimate but big enough to live inside, and absorbing enough to hunker down in for a while. Its elements needed to converge in the strange, cross-dimensional ways that things converge within a single life. It needed to be a nest of space resting on a branch of time. And it needed to help me feel connected to something outside of my insides.

            I had never written a poem this long before, and a number of times I started to lose my nerve and wonder, Is this boring? Is it too much? Am I asking too much of some time-pressed reader? Can I really make all these different strands belong to each other? Luckily I had a couple readers who put some breath back into my sails when I needed it, so I kept going back to the porch each afternoon over the course of a month or so. The worked-up nerve to keep moving and to try to trust that the connections I was drawing could hold—these were little fires driving not just the poem’s composition, but its temperament too.

            I feel as much warmth and attachment to this poem as I’ve felt toward any of my own poems. Which makes it feel both exciting and a little vulnerable to have it reprinted in a medium where more eyes can find it!

*****

ABOUT JESSICA GARRATT

Jessica Garratt is the author of Fire Pond, winner of the Agha Shahid Prize in Poetry and published by the University of Utah Press in 2009. She is currently finishing her second book manuscript, and some of those poems appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Southwest Review, Crazyhorse, Memorious, Colorado Review, Western Humanities Review, and Literary Imagination. Jessica lives in Washington, DC, where she teaches creative writing classes at George Washington University and The Writer’s Center and works part-time as an editor.