Thrall

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

I

Elegy

II

Miracle of the Black Leg

On Captivity

Taxonomy

Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or, The Mulata

Knowledge

III

The Americans

Mano Prieta

De Español y Negra; Mulata

Mythology

Geography

Torna Atrás

Bird in the House

Artifact

Fouled

Rotation

IV

Thrall

Calling

Enlightenment

How the Past Comes Back

On Happiness

Vespertina Cognitio

Illumination

V

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright ©
2012
by Natasha Trethewey

All rights reserved

 

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215
Park Avenue South, New York, New York
10003
.

 

www.hmhbooks.com

 

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Trethewey, Natasha D., date.

Thrall : poems / Natasha Trethewey.

p. cm.

ISBN
978-0-547-57160-7

I. Title.

PS
3570.
R
433
T
47 2012

811'.54—dc23

2012017321

 

e
ISBN
978-0-547-84042-0
v1.0812

To my father

What is love?
One name for it is knowledge.

                                  
—Robert Penn Warren

 

 

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

                                  
—T. S. Eliot

For my father

 

I think by now the river must be thick

    with salmon. Late August, I imagine it

 

as it was that morning: drizzle needling

    the surface, mist at the banks like a net

 

settling around us—everything damp

    and shining. That morning, awkward

 

and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked

    into the current and found our places—

 

you upstream a few yards and out

    far deeper. You must remember how

 

the river seeped in over your boots

    and you grew heavier with that defeat.

 

All day I kept turning to watch you, how

    first you mimed our guide's casting

 

then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky

    between us; and later, rod in hand, how

 

you tried—again and again—to find

    that perfect arc, flight of an insect

 

skimming the river's surface. Perhaps

    you recall I cast my line and reeled in

 

two small trout we could not keep.

    Because I had to release them, I confess,

 

I thought about the past—working

    the hooks loose, the fish writhing

 

in my hands, each one slipping away

    before I could let go. I can tell you now

 

that I tried to take it all in, record it

    for an elegy I'd write—one day—

 

when the time came. Your daughter,

    I was that ruthless. What does it matter

 

if I tell you I
learned
to be? You kept casting

    your line, and when it did not come back

 

empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights,

    dreaming, I step again into the small boat

 

that carried us out and watch the bank receding—

    my back to where I know we are headed.

Pictorial representations of the physician-saints Cosmas and Damian and the myth of the miracle transplant—black donor, white recipient—date back to the mid-fourteenth century, appearing much later than written versions of the story.

 

1.

 

Always, the dark body hewn asunder; always

    one man is healed, his sick limb replaced,

placed in the other man's grave: the white leg

    buried beside the corpse or attached as if

it were always there. If not for the dark appendage

    you might miss the story beneath this story—

what remains each time the myth changes: how,

    in one version, the doctors harvest the leg

from a man, four days dead, in his tomb at the church

    of a martyr, or—in another—desecrate a body

fresh in the graveyard at Saint Peter in Chains:

    
there was buried just today an Ethiopian.

Even now, it stays with us: when we mean to uncover

    the truth, we dig, say
unearth.

 

2.

 

Emblematic in paint, a signifier of the body's lacuna,

    the black leg is at once a grafted narrative,

a redacted line of text, and in this scene a dark stocking

    pulled above the knee. Here the patient is sleeping,

his head at rest in his hand. Beatific, he looks as if

    he'll wake from a dream. On the floor

beside the bed, a dead
Moor
—hands crossed at the groin,

    the swapped limb white and rotting, fused in place.

And in the corner, a question: poised as if to speak

    the syntax of sloughing, a snake's curved form.

It emerges from the mouth of a boy like a tongue—slippery

    and rooted in the body as knowledge. For centuries

this is how the myth repeats: the miracle—in words

    or wood or paint—is a record of thought.

 

3.

 

See how the story changes: in one painting

    the
Ethiop
is merely a body, featureless in a coffin,

so black he has no face. In another, the patient—

    at the top of the frame—seems to writhe in pain,

the black leg grafted to his thigh. Below him

    a mirror of suffering: the
blackamoor—

his body a fragment—arched across the doctor's lap

    as if dying from his wound. If not immanence,

the soul's bright anchor—blood passed from one

    to the other—what knowledge haunts each body,

what history, what phantom ache? One man always

    low, in a grave or on the ground, the other

up high, closer to heaven; one man always diseased,

    the other a body in service, plundered.

 

4.

 

Both men are alive in Villoldo's carving.

    In twinned relief, they hold the same posture,

the same pained face, each man reaching to touch

    his left leg. The black man, on the floor,

holds his stump. Above him, the doctor restrains

    the patient's arm as if to prevent him touching

the dark amendment of flesh. How not to see it—

    the men bound one to the other, symbiotic—

one man rendered expendable, the other worthy

    of this sacrifice? In version after version, even

when the
Ethiopian
isn't there, the leg is a stand-in,

    a black modifier against the white body,

a piece
cut off
—as in the origin of the word
comma:

    caesura in a story that's still being written.

Being all Stripped as Naked as We were Born, and endeavoring to hide our Nakedness, these Cannaballs took [our] Books, and tearing out the Leaves would give each of us a Leaf to cover us . . .

                
—Jonathan Dickinson, 1699

 

At the hands now

    of their captors, those

           they've named
savages,

    do they say the word itself

savagely—hissing

 

that first letter,

    the serpent's image

           releasing

    thought into speech?

For them now

 

everything is flesh

    as if their thoughts, made

           suddenly corporeal,

    reveal even more

their nakedness—

 

the shame of it:

    their bodies rendered

           plain as the natives'—

    homely and pale,

their ordinary sex,

 

the secret illicit hairs

    that do not (cannot)

           cover enough.

    Naked as newborns,

this is how they are brought

 

to knowledge. Adam and Eve

    in the New World,

           they have only the Bible

    to cover them. Think of it:

a woman holding before her

 

the torn leaves of Genesis,

    and a man covering himself