Summer Poetry Award Winner: Louisiana Requiem by Heather Treseler
“Louisiana Requiem” hangs itself on your heart like Spanish moss. The poem expands with grace, like a full womb, from the first line to the last. Heather Treseler has earned the $2000 prize and Summer Poetry Award, because this poem, in language lush and maternal and profound, demands it. Leila Chatti and Aurora Masum-Javed—2nd and 3rd place respectively—will be published this week as well.
Louisiana Requiem
Eight months pregnant when your mother began hospice,
you sat in the driveway, belly ovoid as an imperial Fabergé
egg on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, or so you joked
with your dying mother whose love of metaphor shone
through the morphine fog and night air in Baton Rouge,
thick with magnolia three days gone and the sweeter
tang of silverbell: fecund humid buzzing air a soft coverlet
over your swollen limbs. You sat, mulling the bald
cypress trees older than your grandpa, who made the old
money selling insurance to the New South. A way,
he said, selling it, of investing in one’s blood, one’s kith
and kin, the next generation, whatever the Lord saw
fit to happen. Money, firm as a pillared manse, this grand
house turned palliative, which is to care for without
curing, cognate with pall and pallbearer, cloak and carrier
of the coffin before earth’s coverlet brings the body
home to its colder self. Just now, giving your mother water
and hummed song, you cushion the earthward journey,
her accession to gravity, longing in aqueous eyes, turned
inward and unseeing. All the while, the child inside
you assumes her own gravity, plotting descent, though her
head is stuck stubbornly under your ribs, her feet locked
against the pelvic gate. To carry a child, to bear the borning,
first labor of the endless labors, to concede to the gravity
of love’s body: those nights, sitting outside your mother’s dying
room, warm earth pressed against the backs of your bare
legs, your hand running over knobbed ribs of cobblestones
your father set down, years ago, in some Roman fancy
of having a drive like the Appian Way: timeless, enduring.
There, in earshot of the night nurse, you let night
envelop you in its perfume, blended scent a pagan incense,
the worship of nature and of the moon, rounding like
the child inside you, dimpling its impervious face as you
pray for the pain to recede from your mother’s body
and for the body, receding. And you are an entire country,
an America, stretched impossibly across a Mason Dixon
and two shores, nearing: the woman who bore you, daughter
you will bear, your body a hinge between its history
and future, an imperfect present tense. A scientist, dedicated
to the cool notice of detailed fact, resistant to the muddled
logic of metaphor, you nonetheless find yourself born
across by likeness in otherwise radical difference:
the shared violence that marks birth and death, mothering
the grade that governs the latitudes of the in-between.
Mother, no placid person or thing, but a rugged engine,
suing for peace: to bring forth a world from a fallen
world as a child from the long dark veins. Mother a river,
inexhaustible as water; a song of warmth and warning;
a map for the body, politic; a long cobbled road, umbilical,
built to outlast wreck and ruin, the death of empire.
Heather Treseler
Heather Treseler’s poems appear (or are forthcoming) in Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, Missouri Review, Southern Humanities Review, Obsidian, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salamander, and The Worcester Review, among other journals, and her essays on poetry appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Consequence, Boston Review, and in four books about American poetry. An associate professor of English at Worcester State University, she is a visiting scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and, in 2018-19, a fellow at the Boston Athenaeum, where she is completing a manuscript of poems, “Thesaurus for a Year of Desire.” Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives outside of Boston.
