Out of the space of supper plates
\npushed back, out of her all-night falling asleep
\nand waking up to arrange it on the tray<\/p>\n
under the hanging lamp, this perfect, twined
\ncircle of twigs and autumn leaves she collected
\nfrom the dirt driveway of our tarpapered
\ngarage-house. Out of the next day’s forgotten<\/p>\n
breakfast and lunch – no appetite now
\nbut for making it – this cardboard wish
\nof a house with a picture window, floating<\/p>\n
on the soft, unseasonable green
\nof Easter grass, with longer tufts of grass
\non each side of the front door, wide open
\nto let out a long line of pipe-cleaner kids,<\/p>\n
enough to make the women who’ll view them
\ntonight at the square dance club dinner laugh.
\nUnder her smile as she thinks of their laughter<\/p>\n
and turns the small world she constructs like a god
\nto glue on the kids’ paper dresses and pants,
\nthe sorrow of her own childhood
\nraising six younger siblings in the Ozarks,<\/p>\n
and pregnant now herself for the fourth time.
\nUnderneath the mother she has made
\nat the center of the centerpiece –<\/p>\n
a faceless clothespin woman that the children
\nconverge upon – who else but herself,
\nher endless chores on my stepfather’s would-be
\nfarm like the woman’s impossible chore<\/p>\n
of feeding with no hands a flock of jurassic
\nplastic chickens, nearly as tall as she is?
\nUnderneath this clothespin farmer leaning<\/p>\n
toward the woman with no way to touch her,
\nwho but my stepfather, the man now pacing
\nin the twilight and shouting that she’s taken so
\ndamn long with the centerpiece, the dinner<\/p>\n
is going to start without it? Out of the deep dream
\nmy mother goes right on dreaming, the wide
\nouter circle of vegetables from our family’s unhappy<\/p>\n
harvest in the black field: turnips and baby winter
\nsquashes and potatoes like gloomy hills
\nthe little family can’t see beyond. From her old
\ngrudges as a wife and the fights of her father<\/p>\n
and mother, from her life as the oldest child
\nfar from the town in the Ozarks, a pipe-cleaner girl
\nset apart, waving with a hold in her hand.\n
Follow McNair’s thinking about this poem through his revisions of it. (Line changes are highlighted in yellow; revised line breaks are indicated by yellow verticals.)<\/span><\/p> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\t\t