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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Law Amidst the Rest LEE ROBINSON _______________________ Run After the speech, alone in the family den- October, 1962, I was fourteen- I lay on my back against the cold linoleum and closed my eyes, imagining how it might be to kiss the President- our prince, so elegant and serious, so sure of himself. I loved the way he said Even the fruits of victory will be ashes in our mouth. Later my father led us to his basement, until that day a place off limits to the girls. Beyond his workshop, deep in the dark, his flashlight lit the shelter, that little bunker of our innocence, complete with cans of soup, water jugs, blankets, Scrabble and Monopoly. Remember what Kennedy had said? We must transform the history of man. Next day my mother took me for the test. Run, she said, You'll have half an hour to make it home. And run I did, all the way from the high school to the shopping center, through neighborhoods of split-levels, spindly pines, streets like kinfolk who never spoke to each other: Twisted Laurel, Laurel Lake, and finally my own Laurel Spring where with the taste of blood in my mouth I opened the door three minutes too late to save myself. [557]
Zack You remember Zack, whose mother danced naked in their living room? She'd turn the lights down low, play classical stuff on the stereo. We'd watch her at night, through slits in the drapes. At first we almost choked on our giggling-she was so cool and quiet when she drove carpool. Later we fell in love with her, that black hair flying loose, those long arms spinning. One by one the rest of you stopped coming until it was just me out there in the dark, kneeling in the bushes. You remember Zack. Nobody else had a mother like that. He went off to New York and never came back. [558]
The Garden Now that the teenagers have taken the house- long legs, loud shoes, sarcastic tongues, their paraphernalia winding from chair to floor to stair like some perverse unstoppable vine-I retire to the garden. Nothing here talks back. I learn a language the children don't speak: lantana, hosta, portulaca. I have gloves but seldom use them. I like the dirt under my fingernails, the roughness that comes from pulling weeds, churning the soil for new beds. It's time to pitch the rusty swing set, to rid the shed of punctured volleyballs, old bicycles, a decade of water guns, time to fill it with peat moss and new tools: spade, trowel, rake, all shiny, all mine. [559]
Work The girl who knelt in that suburban sea of grass, the girl who combed St. Augustine for weeds, a penny apiece, what did she learn? That the hues of green are as many as the million grassy fingers tickling her palm, that it takes a hundred weeds to make a dollar. The girl who worked at the branch library, the girl who shelved books at the library all summer after seventh grade, what did she learn? That books are very heavy, even the slim ones. They smell of sex and death. That there is never enough time to read. The sophomore who served breakfast in the college dining hall, who stood like a good soldier before the field of bacon and eggs, what did she learn? That six in the morning comes too soon and disappears always too soon, that the faces of strangers are full of grace. The senior in the nighttime cleaning crew at the Farmers' and Merchants' National Bank, Boston, 1969, punching the clock in her blue uniform, what did she learn? That the restrooms of men are messier than the restrooms of women, that wastebaskets overflow with secrets. The graduate teaching English in the middle school, whose grammar screeched like a frightened animal pinned against the blackboard, the graduate at 21 before her class of 35, what lessons did she learn? That nothing is black and white, that Black and White is everything. The lawyer just out of law school, tending to the indigent, the indicted, the three time housebreaker, the ungrand larcener, to the man who denies he put his cock inside his daughter, what did she learn? That guilt is what we breathe, as plentiful as air. That innocence is rare and far more frightening. The lawyer in her middle age, in her little cage of suit and stockings, her arms filled with the files of the deserted, the divorcing, the unsupported and the unsupporting, what did she learn? That no story is the same as any other, that love is ever ingenious, always uniquely disappointing. [560]
And the woman who sits at the kitchen window, the woman who is finished with offices, who sits at the table, whose window is the world and whose work is this poem, what does she know? That this is her fortune-this poem, made word by word, beginning with the girl who kneels in the grass, beginning with the girl on her knees in the grass. [561]
The Rules of Evidence What you want to say most is inadmissible. Say it anyway. Say it again. What they tell you is irrelevant can't be denied and will eventually be heard. Every question is a leading question. Ask it anyway, then expect what you won't get. There is no such thing as the original so you'll have to make do with a reasonable facsimile. The history of the world is hearsay. Hear it. The whole truth is unspeakable and nothing but the truth is a lie. I swear this. My oath is a kiss. I swear by everything incredible. [562]
Grounds for Divorce These are our grounds, says the lawyer, as if they could share this grief. The client's eyes find the window behind his bobbing head. First, adultery: Out there, a garden of delights, everything green, about to flower. Primitive, Rousseau. Eve sings to the snake and neither cares about Adam, who is this fellow in the three-piece suit, this lawyer lecturing. Physical cruelty, he says, is difficult to prove. A sudden tempest blows the window shut. Rain beats the glass. We'll need to show repeated abuse, or short of that, a life-threatening attack. Outside, in what was once the garden, wind rips the grass from its roots, sucks whole trees into the sky. Afterwards, the bruised earth sleeps and for mile after mile there is nothing but loss, like the eerie streets of de Chirico. Habitual drunkenness, he continues, hissing the last syllable, includes drug abuse. His eyebrows rise into question marks. Are you hot? I'll open the window. Below, on the bench in the littered park, a wino drains the last of his wine, throws the bottle into the street. At the sound of glass splintering she is her schoolgirl self again, the smallest one in the group at the museum, faint at the sight of the absinthe drinker's face. [563]
Now, he says, I've saved the easiest for last. It's what we call ‘no fault'- a year without cohabitation. He checks his notes, the form she filled out in the waiting room. Looks like we're almost there! Through the window she can see the sign blinking from the restaurant: Open. Inside, she is the only customer, a figure more alone than even Hopper could imagine. There she will wait for the year to be over. The waiter looks oddly like her lawyer. He fills her coffee cup and takes her money. She knows without asking he doesn't want to hear her story. [564]
Finding the New York Times Book Review at the Bowman Truck Stop The business here is fuel: diesel, sweet tea, meat and three vegetables, choice of cornbread or dinner roll. Not much time for talk, and if there is it's how are the kids and the bad wreck up the road. Then what is Stephen Spender doing here, John Irving imagining Bombay circuses; Gail Godwin, Yitzhak Shamir, perverse desire and the politics of art, all here at my table, Exit 165 off I 26, halfway from Charleston to Columbia and about as near to nowhere as you can get? Once my half hour here was a respite from the fast lane, a greasy way station in my low fat life. With my plate of chicken, rice and beans and turnip greens I could be as sloppy and happy as the pot bellied truckers licking real butter off their fingers. So tell me who left Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe exposed at my table, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil spotted with grease, down this week from Number 2 to Number 4? [565]
Deliverance There's no such thing as the necessary poem; that's what saves poetry from a life like ours, from desire and striving. That is not to say a poem can't yearn for something it isn't yet, can't crave a meal of only apricots or want a one way ticket to another country. It can. We know how a poem can need so much it turns to mush, and how sometimes even out of mud and mildew rise the most fantastic flowers. No, what I mean is different. That the poem is redeemed by indifference, that before it's written, the world does very well without it. Therefore it is free to be what it wants to be or not to be at all. That's its deliverance, its saving grace, and why when it decides to speak we listen to a language that is ours, but so unlike us. [566]
Rehearsal at Bread Loaf Behind you in the blue parlor voices without faces rehearse a madrigal. They sing and stop- sopranos off-and sing again. Sometimes the tenors fly like angels, sometimes fall flat. This goes on for days. How long have you been looking for your life as if it belonged to someone else? Suppose this is all there is: Vermont, the porch of an inn, green wooden chair, your feet and beyond your feet the road, the hayfield folding itself into the river, the hill and her family of trees, and over and over, the madrigal? [567]
The Heaven of Hats Now that the self has been shed, he knows who he really is, this sweet oblivion as familiar as the black suit they buried him in. At ease at last with his forgetfulness, he remembers and is remembered. The hats come, each one floating up to greet him, these old friends left in airport lounges, in moldy closets of cheap apartments, in hotel rooms he borrowed for lust and left for love. Each one finds his bald head and hugs it: the red knit, the Irish cap, the battered panama. He thinks Why hats? And then, remembering he's dead, he lets the question go where all unanswered questions go. Alone again, he is oddly comforted. All the lost hats have been found. All the lost hats have come home. [568]
Moving She can't wait for it to be over: the boxes, the bending, the goddam tape splitting as she pulls it from the roll, the decisions-what to keep? what to throw away? - the garbage too heavy for her to haul alone though she does it anyway as a sort of penance before the movers come. This is what she dreaded, but when she's done, her debris on the street a mountain of broken promises, it's the emptiness of the house that catches her off guard, each room a testament to her vanishing, each echoing how fast a woman can disappear. [569]
Black Swallowtail She hovered over the thistle's furry globe, her wings trembling from the engine of her appetite, her costume of black velveteen and sequined blue almost too elegant for work. I thought, I would like to be like that, this butterfly for whom delight and duty are no different. Being would be my only business. Neither pride nor despair would weigh me down. I wouldn't dread the shadow darkening the grass, the stranger stalking me, and when the time came I'd turn into the wind and let it do the work it wants to do. [570]
A Dream of Horses In the dark they left the barn together, the old gelding following the younger to the far pasture. The moon was full, the field like snow. They stood for a long time looking into the sky, lifting their heads as if listening to the stars. A shiver ran the length of the young one's nose, along his ivory blaze, then rippled down his back, and because they were so close, traveled to the other. Deep in the cedar the waxwings felt it, awoke to see the flash of light, the waves of muscles rolling like a silvered sea, a pounding of hooves in air, then the silent pas des deux of flesh and fur, bone and sinew, reach and curve, one leading the other (now the younger, now the older) until the sky could hold them no longer and they were gone. [571]
Lee Robinson grew up in the Carolinas and practiced law for over 20 years in Charleston, South Carolina, where she served as the first woman president of the Charleston Bar. Her poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies. In 2000 she received a Poetry Fellowship from the Texas Writers League. Her novel, Gateway (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), is the story of a custody battle told from a teenager's point of view. Hearsay, her collection of poetry, was published by Fordham University Press in 2004. Robinson is now retired from the practice of law and lives on a ranch outside San Antonio. She and her husband, Jerald Winakur, a physician, co-teach courses in medical and legal ethics at the University of Texas and the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics in San Antonio. "The Garden" was first published in Yemassee, "Work" and "The Rules of Evidence" in Texas Observer, "Finding The New York Times Book Review at the Bowman Truck Stop" in Point, "Deliverance" in Southern Poetry Review, "The Heaven of Hats" in The Hollins Critic, and "Black Swallowtail" in Appalachia. All of the poems here are from Lee Robinson's Hearsay (Fordham University Press, 2004). |
