The You That All Along Has Housed You
Praise for The You That All Along Has Housed You: A Sequence
“A so lovely book, though lovely is probably the wrong word, it is a tougher book than that. I felt it a very wise book, and am impressed at the quality of Leslie’s attention, which felt inexhaustible. Reading it I felt envious of her deep connection to place, and how deftly that informs the poems, and how she always seems to know exactly what she’s doing. Her writing seems to flow naturally—at least that’s the feel of the work — the complete integration of the person and the life."—Karen Kevorkian, author of Lizard Dream and White Stucco Black Wing
Leslie Ullman is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Progress on the Subject of Immensity (University of New Mexico Press, 2013. Her first collection, Natural Histories, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and Slow Work Through Sand won the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is Professor Emerita at University of Texas-El Paso and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts.
Sample of the poetry
Facebook Question: “What Do You Remember About 1987?”
A divorce. My friends and I seeking
higher versions of ourselves in sweat-
lodges, hypnosis, and Sufi dancing.
Phyllis, Monica, Kelly, Ken.
Red wine days. Vegetarian days.
Madonna, Michael Jackson, and the noisy
hum of a Kaypro 16 as words flowed
through my fingers, in green, MS-DOS
the new frontier. A 40th birthday —
potluck with margaritas, friends
wandering into the nearby fields
with poems on their breath, and me
held briefly in the glow of new, perfect love.
Kathleen, Sandra, Terri, Renee.
I drove a Toyota Tercel and wore long
beaded earrings. Listened to a Walkman
while riding Burly along the mesa,
picking spines out of my heart
and moving under a shroud of promises
to myself I had broken. One night
I found a rattlesnake in my house.
Hollowed out and ready for re-birth
by the end of the year, I learned to
breathe out angers I could touch
and sorrows I didn’t know
had been hiding. The breathing
got deeper. The snake got away.
U-2, Whitney Huston, The Moody Blues.
The breathing was like digging with a sharp
stick. And the peeling away of masks.
Masks
Feathers in the hair. Midnight above
the lashes. Thigh-high boots. Rooms filled
with the shimmer of wind chimes, the anguish
of Coltrane, the water-and-leaf-filtered light of Satie….
I read The Story of O and didn’t like it
but something made me reach for the chords
it missed. Desire as a black diamond. Not-quite danger.
Sometimes I watched Lawrence Welk for a furtive
return to my mid-century childhood, embalmed as it was
in the syrup of his careful English, the accordions
and bland lyrics—so much smiling
and blondness, innocence tenacious as tar —
I cringed with embarrassment and longing.
My nature made no sense to me.
Nor did the future. I was like everyone I knew.
I preferred foods I couldn’t recognize—
bite-sized, jewels scattered on trays
in minimally-furnished salons I could only
imagine—even the hosts dressed in black
and ate standing up. Soft lighting soothed their
bisque walls from which my imagination
withdrew its clutter —I conjured places
where I could imagine starting over.
I Could Imagine Starting Over
in tree-scented air, eyes
cradled between cheekbone
and brow. Luminous as moonstone.
A face in which to start over.
In a dwelling set so far
into a field it almost touched
forest—a place where the mind
might become a canvas. And the hand
its accomplice, offering dried asters
and stones the color of waves, weathered
to translucence, oval, tumbling like coins
from the palm. Once, surrounded by
strangers, I picked up an ostrich egg
and couldn’t put it down. I’ve
been searching ever since
and finding more secrets revealed
through the hand and the tensile surface of eye—
the eye so in need of protection
but taking in the world.
The whole thing at once.
Taking In The World. The Whole Thing At Once.
This is what parents tell their offspring
not to do, viewing a child’s greed
as the mirror they must turn to the wall.
Don’t reach…. You’re not entitled….
But taking in, receiving, the brought-up self
backing off and leaving a wondering,
porous self—eyes, ears, nose, taste buds
like sea creatures swaying under water—
this is appetite that honors. And asks nothing.
Narcissism is the hole hollowed true
black, self’s need usurping others’
air and the light in their minds
and getting away with it. A blindness
to so much that gathers around us
whether or not we notice. I could give up
the me that curls like a slug
with salt thrown over it when someone
sucks all the air from the room
but not the noticing.
The Noticing
holds things in place
the way roofs clamp walls
to floors and corners, and trees
send invisible branches deep
into earth, steadying
the commotion of wind.
The noticing tosses the jacket
on the back of a chair.
Smooths it over the narrow ridge
of the present. Replays
the chair’s first coat of varnish
and the jockeying of legs
and seat through the doorway.
Every bike lying on its side, every
plastic ball or block left on the lawn
was last touched by a child’s hand
before the call to come inside—a hand
sticky with juice, or gritty from digging
a hole through the garden towards China.
Bouquet of spoons and spatulas in a jug,
papers stacked and weighted with a smoky
river stone—smooth, fist-sized—beside three pens
and a postcard from Morocco, clamshell
full of sea glass—all these still-lives left
by the hand in its gatherings and settings-down,
each one a moment. Each one a world.