Beth Kanell
Diatribe from Sophia Thoreau (His Sister)
The rapids of the Merrimack
roaring power of the icy waters
how the mills groan
someone took me north (don’t ask,
his name won’t ride your lips
the way his tongue rode mine)
to the wetlands, marshes, wild
Father said the beaver’s long gone
skinned for hats like his and yours
brother what kind of friend are you
I have come raw acquainted with escape
Dear Henry David
Brother, your spilled words cascade the page, scented like a Harvard
man with sweat and ink and determined absence of women (though
I must suppose they make your meals, wash your linens, lay the
next fire in the grate). As I always have, since I could stumble in
child’s petticoat across the wide board floor, I inquire for your good
health, your sustenance and studies. Enclosed (in father’s hand) your
cheque; the final zero endowed by my efforts. Stitching. Hemming.
I have hope: Uncle offers better pay. All for you, all for you, man
of the Merrimack. I make no other answer—
Sweeter waters in the woodland pond
moss like a man’s thick curls under my palm
I dip a finger into Walden water, suck
the vegetated broth of fish and frog oh yes
I brought our sister here once, she wept
I stretch my long arms unsheathed, my bare legs
shocking in their deliberate strength, no longer
little sister; woman whose pulse pounds
whose mind demands
whose eyes
follow the cloud of a summer afternoon, shadow
of the Southern Power, slavery’s stains
some shall not scrub clean
Dear Henry David, Brother,
I love the natural world you witness, pinned to paper. And yet,
false friend that I may be, I cringe at how you live: your fiscal
ease, your careless manly acceptance that no woman
could delight in wild pleasure without guild or ambivalence. Is this
how love of a brother manifests?—this denial, this despair.
Across a salt bay
the lamplit glow of bustling Boston
coal smoke seeping over the waters
fugitive riding a low barge
Mother made his bed
Frederick
his language rich with Southern vowels
black hair thick, protesting
God in his Moses eyes
the scent of wild places in his breath
saltwater baptism, midnight hymn
My brother’s gone to Canton, sir,
ink stains on his cuffs
the word “sir” writhing upriver
like shad returned to spawn
a man’s a man (my brother)
My age and desperation silence my feelings. Daily,
I witness that you have time to fall in love, to caress
your admir’d wood-thrush or frog with eyes and words:
embrace with your honeyed tongue a stem, a fin, a croak. While I,
bound to the broken children whose pain I witness, struggle to
braid their rope of rescue
earn another dollar for you
strip the outer membrane from my heart.
bread and butter carried
cold meat potted with a layer of fat
salt cod in a wooden tray
bacon in the beans
rum, cider, dark beer
offerings at your altar
Cain killed Abel
where went their sister? Bloodied
after battle, the reddened waters
congealing puddles
whose death now among Concord’s men
who fired the first shot
wore the wounds
unblessed
Kitchen and classroom, mend and manage, stretch
each shilling or penny. Forgive me, Henry David; tis not
your wooded life I despise, deplore, but mine. So it is
to be this woman. When Abolition at last succeeds,
when all enslaved are free, who will scrub the carrots
dice potatoes, chop meat, settle and battle the cow’s
sweet rich milk til butter congeals? I mistrust your reply
snarl like a beaver at your politics
belch at your prose. For you, brother, I’ll sell
a hundred hundred pencils, teach the unlettered,
mouth the back of my own fist, unkissed
Yr sister, bound and bellicose,
Sophia
Beth Kanell lives in northeastern Vermont. The National Federation of Press Women recently tapped one of her Vermont features with a First Place award. Her novels include This Ardent Flame and The Long Shadow (SPUR Award winner); her short fiction shows up in Lilith and elsewhere. Find her memoirs on Medium, her reviews at the New York Journal of Books, her poems in small well-lit places.
