Michael Diehl, Magnolia
Cotton Gin, Mississippi Delta
The mint green building rises out of the fallow field
behind eight new silos, next to a rattling empty cage
once used to store the bales. We pull over, and my
partner whips out his camera to capture the eerie
scene, the rust running in strips across the metal
roof and in waves down the green sides; the green
vines that must blanket it in summer, now russet
twine choking the corners; the broken panes glint
in shattered halves and triangles and shards.
We cross a tangle of bramble to reach it, careful
of snakes even in winter, of catching a foot
in the sinewy briar. My imagination already conjures
a haunting. We reach the boarding dock, and peek
at the hulking machine, as large as the room, rusted
and dormant, its belts strewn on the floor like
flat rubber ropes. We enter to find tufts of ancient
cotton, stained orange, matted in the teeth of gears.
As the roof creaks above our heads and glass grinds
beneath our feet, we see the pickers
who fed this engine with their swollen hands
and arched backs; in the stillness, we hear
the churning at harvest, watch for the spewing
of cleaned cotton, the white woven gold,
bound in bales and shipped.
The wind clatters through, and we jump as light
shifts to shade in the spinning blades of the cotton
gin fan, twirling in the benign breeze. Behind it,
the empty space collects colossal tractor tires
and old futile cars that peer at us with open hoods like
hungry mouths and smashed lights like skeleton eyes,
staring as history leaks into the ponderous now.
___________
Anne Evans
Review by Kristen Staby Rembold
This poem’s greatest strength is the attentiveness of the speaker to the subject. It helps that the subject is a concrete object—the cotton gin—and that the speaker is all observation, open with a wide aperture (though I’m not certain that the actual camera is necessary to the poem). The speaker in this poem serves as witness and, instead of steering the poem, mostly* allows it to simply happen. (*more on that later)
Another element of this poem that works well is its structure: long lines in couplets that, to this reader, begin to resemble tines, the kind you see in old machinery. This affects the reader on a subconscious level. And one can’t help but think: machines with tines like that are dangerous.
One has to tread carefully in poems such as this one, which proceeds almost like a documentary, to maintain the “stare” and to allow mystery to emerge from the object itself, not from editorializing about the object. That’s where I have a few quibbles with this poem. The writer has to trust the reader to meet the poem halfway. So no to diction like “whips” (st.2, l 2) with all its suggestiveness. We don’t need to be told that “My imagination already conjures a haunting.” Nor do we need to take our eyes off the cotton gin in order to see the cars with hoods like hungry mouths and smashed lights like skeleton eyes. Fewer determinative adjectives and modifiers (e.g., fallow, rattling empty, choking the corners, the hulking, at harvest) would clear the surface of the poem and keep it from feeling overcrowded. Trust the reader!
My final observation: though most of the energy in this poem is lyrical, not narrative, even in a lyrical poem, something must change. An interesting way to read this poem is to follow the verbs. After the building rising from the field, the speaker is given agency, then the rust and vines and broken panes. Then there is imagined action (we see the pickers/who fed this engine) and finally, in the 13th stanza, the fan of the machine itself is animated. This is change enough. The reader and the speaker have been haunted without the word ever being spoken.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
Again, in this issue, the motif of how experience moves, translates, offers itself, echoes, and, done that, fades away. And the discussion on the vectors and the stage where this chain of apparitions enacts its script: to find it, we must move in the fallow field, in the empty space, free from distractions, we must conduct our search in an aesthetic of absence. We understand that this bare silence is essential to hear and see behind. Where the roof creaks and the glass grinds beneath our feet: with an operation that goes beyond simple industrial archaeology, this poem gives us the precise coordinates of where to look and how to approach the place where the past still speaks. No camera is needed.