A man pining for a woman dead on a slab at St. James

                                By Natasha Trethewey

Geography

1.

At the bottom of the exit ramp

my father waits for us, one foot

on the curb, right hand hooked

in the front pocket of his jeans,

a stack of books beneath his arm.

It's 1971, the last year we're still

together. My mother and I travel

this road, each week, to meet him –

I-10 from Mississippi to New Orleans –

            and each time we pull off the highway

            I see my father like this: raising his thumb

to feign hitchhiking – a stranger

passing through to somewhere else.

2.

At Wolf River my father is singing.

The sun is singing and there's a cooler

of Pabst in the shade. He is singing

and playing the guitar – the sad songs

I hide from each time: a man pining

for Irene or Clementine, a woman dead

on a slab at St. James. I'm too young to know

this is foreshadowing. To get away from

the blues I don't understand, I wade in water

shallow enough to cross. On the bank

at the other side, I look back at him as if

across the years: he's smaller, his voice

lost in the distance between us.

3.

On the Gulf and Ship Island Line

my father and I walk the rails south

toward town. More than twenty years

gone, he's come back to see this place,

recollect what he's lost. What he recalls

of my childhood is here. We find it

in the brambles of blackberry, the coins

flattened on the tracks. We can't help it –

already, we're leaning too hard

toward metaphor: my father searching

for the railroad switch. It was here, right

here, he says, turning this way and that –

the rails vibrating now, a train coming.

From Natasha Trethewy, Thrall (2012).