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.

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