These are powerful and lucid poems, alive with true sentiment, but

never sentimental, about that inexhaustible . . . subject: family.

Thomas Lux, winner of Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, author of
God Particles (2008)

Clela Reed has many stories—folksy, sensuous, arresting: her

father listening to clouds, her mother in dementia where “within
her walls all seasons blur.” Such moments come with a vivid
context of the physical world.
Linda Taylor, poet, professor of English, Oglethorpe University

The warm bloodline in these twenty-six poems extends not only to

family—pioneer ancesters, ailing parents, siblings, husband and
sons—but also to her Southern homeland, victims of Pompeii,
characters from Little Women, trees and flowers and birds. . .
Therese L. Broderick, prize-winning poet, workshop leader,
author of Within View

Bloodline
Poems by
Clela Dyess Reed
Evening Street Press
Dublin, OH
Bloodline
Poems by Clela Dyess Reed

Evening Street Press

Dublin, Ohio
 Evening Street Press

September 2009

Dublin, Ohio

Cover photo of family heirloom portrait by Lee

Reed: Clea’s grandfather, mother and Uncle Dan,
circa 1921

All rights revert to the author on publication

© Copyright 2009 by Evening Street Press.

ISBN: 978-0-9820105-2-5

Printed in the United States of America

www.eveningstreetpress.com

2
 Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the editors of the following

journals, book, and anthology where these poems first
appeared: ―Essence‖ in Anderbo.com Literary Journal (Winter,
2007), ―Ascension,‖ ―The Gift,‖ and ―More‖ in Clapboard
House Literary Journal (Spring, 2009), ―Adrift‖ and ―Legacy‖
in The 2004 Winners Section and ―The Last Pretend‖ in the
2005 Winners Section of The Reach of Song (Georgia Poetry
Society Anthology) and ―Adrift‖ and ―Legacy‖ in Dancing on
the Rim by Clela Reed, Brick Road Poetry Press (July, 2009).
 Contents

Genealogy . 1

Adrift . 2

The Last Pretend . 3

Sister Betty is Saved . 4

Little Women . 5

The Proof . 6

Gladiolus . 7

Grace . 8

My Father Listened to Clouds . 9

Flight . 10

Above the Singapore Rainforest . 11

Spent . 12

A Walk in the Park . 13

Caravan . 14

In Wilderness . 15

Essence . 16

4
Morning Routine . 17

Once Winged . 18

Legacy . 19

Prediction . 20

Worlds Apart . 21

Denouement . 22

Ascension . 24

Homestead . 25

The Gift . 26

More . 27

Capri . 28
6
 Dedication

For my parents Betty and William Dyess

With deep appreciation to all my family members,

especially my brother Bill, for their support and
inspiration and to poets Sarah Gordon, Toi Derri-
cotte, and many others for their guidance and en-
couragement.
Genealogy

I am an earth-forged being, no riblet carved from man;

my genes, too, prove smooth-clay sturdy.
Seasons of loamy procreation: Scottish farmers,

British potters and miners all

(leave the muddy shoes at the cottage door
wash the grime from your weary body)

bequeathed to me in grit and gasps

the yoke-broadened shoulders, the plow-thickened calves,
and hands shape-sure eager from the pick and pottery wheel.

But I—whose father sought the clean of green forests,

lifting his gaze from furrows of brown—I,
while rooted in that certain soil, found my soul,

like web worm nesting, silk-spun but strong,

flapping light against the washday sky
in the highest limb of the tallest catalpa.

1
Adrift
-for Barbara

This is the lazy sea we loved—

Gulf-green waves free as then
of jelly fish and seaweed, building gently
to the satisfying crest and plop and
foamy spill a few yards from the shore.

In waves like these we‘d launch our yellow

float, lift our shiny ribs and brand new breasts
across a common side, kick out to sea,
but not too far, just before the breaking point
or after, depending on your view.

We always stayed there much too long, bobbing

on our own encapsulated breath; easy talk rose
and fell—girlish stuff—unaware, it seemed,
of sunburned backs, of freckling cheeks.
Away from brothers, parents, we had so much to say.

Before we found what lay ahead, (what now absurdly

is our past, the leaping joys and biting pain in complicated
living) we hung suspended—dangling hips and legs
beneath the sea we thought we knew—cloudless skies
high above us and the shoreline just a wave away.

2
The Last Pretend
-for Helen

―Let‘s play jungle.‖

―You want to?‖ (her freckled frown swept and held
the cornfield)
―Sure.‖ But I wasn‘t,
watching myself, it seemed, from some cloud.

Pretend had kept us sane through summer.

Slipping on and off our cowgirl selves (or pioneer
or nurse) as easily as pop-it beads or hula hoops,
my cousin and I passed that longest Southern season.

Under the camphor trees we played house

with dolls and dishes, played nurse with candy pills.
In the weedy acre between our houses, we boarded planes
or circled wagons. And in the L-shaped cornfield on the hill,
we deliberately got lost, drank warm canteen water,
relished the disorientating maze.

But not this day of our twelfth summer.

Reaching what we thought was middle field,
dapple-shadowed by ten-foot stalks, their sheaths
already full, we smelled our sweat and tasted dust
and lost all child illusion. We saw each other brightly.
In new awareness, Eve rushed to clothe herself, but we,
grinning newfound shame, threw off our camouflage,
began the silent serpentine that would take us out again.

Something had happened (my watching self took note),

but emerging from the corn that day, all I felt was
how vast and blue and empty
the waiting sky had turned.

3
Sister Betty is Saved

When she broke the cold river‘s surface that day,

born again with spotless soul (amen, amen),
no holy-ghosty dove fluttered above my mother,
no sweet smile curved her prayerful lips,
no prayerful lips.

My mother, over two hundred pounds,

had approached her baptism with faith,
faith that the young minister‘s arm
could retrieve her from the river‘s depths,
for Mother couldn‘t swim—at all—fearing
any body of water beyond her bath tub.

Slow of flow and tree-lined, much like

those in our Sunday School pamphlets—
Yes, we gathered at the river,
the beau-ti-ful, the beau-ti-ful ri-i-i-ver—
our river was a friendly place where at less
holy times, we children laughed and splashed.

But when she breached the river that day,

gasping, choking, my mother broke loose
from the calm-mouthing preacher
and began wading, wild eyes focused ahead,
robe dragging in the current, eager
as a muddle-minded whale
to reach the sure salvation
of the blessed shore.

4
Little Women
-for Mother

You wanted me to be a Jo, I know.

The spunk and grit, the take-charge
way that was your own. You wished
for me a stiffer spine, a firmer hold
on what I knew and who I was and
how I‘d script my life and make it
strut the stage on self-reliant legs.

Hence the doll, a Christmas gift,

your perfect choice for the nine-year-old
who‘d read the book three times.
Jo, your favorite, dressed in red, dark hair
captured in a bun. She moved into my room,
sat upright on my old chenille with a sigh
I could almost hear. Or maybe it was mine.

I still have the doll, boxed in the basement,

the only one from all the glass-eyed chorus.
She wears the satin dress of lace and lilac
I sewed for her when in my teens (remember?)
I painted my room lavender, trimmed white.
Then I loosed her hair and after that she
wasn‘t Jo. She became—of course—Meg.

Surely you knew your shy, fat child

with braids and over-bite, thirsting long
for loveliness, would embrace Jo‘s pretty sister,
the romantic one whose struggling charm bound
my heart with ribbons, and binds it still, despite
your firm dismissal, your steady voice insisting
always I straighten up, dry my eyes, lend a hand.

5
The Proof

That day, a Saturday bright and brazen

as a cartoon grin, lured us out to play.
We kids with bikes, bats and balls
left TV for shirt-sleeve fun in winter air
that shimmied in like spring.

When we heard the back door slam

and saw my mother bursting forth,
we froze in place, our minds
check-listing what we‘d done,
waiting for the bolt of admonition.

But Dad, quick on the heels

of the oxford shoes she always wore,
laughed helpless in a dog-eyed way
we didn‘t know, big man wagging
sweet in acquiescence.

Then our heavy mother, who could not

skate nor ride a bike nor dance nor even swim,
said, ―Just watch this!‖
as she broke into a lumbering run
toward the barn, took a dive
with arms outstretched like Superman‘s
and turned our world upside down
with a perfect-ten handstand.

6
Gladiolus

In deep-tilled soil of my childhood fields,

farmers set the fattened corms, puckers up,
in row after row, the best, side-dressed
with 8-8-8, under skies that held a pledge
of rain sucked from the nearby Gulf.
The gladiolus quickened in early spring.

Farmers‘ need for green of legal-tender

outweighed their eyes‘ delight. If sun,
rain and soil proved right, they slashed
the swords at proper time for shipping
North to invade again the Yankee shops,
the city lofts, the stolid marble halls.

And only if the harvest came before the color,

for if the petals peeked at all, the glads were left,
not shipped with spikes asparagus-tight. Then
we children gleaned the fields, a necessary joy,
glad glad in abandoned stalks, we picked until
the bundles made us stagger; then took them home,

stems of loosening buds compromised with color.

And girls spilling into womanhood plucked
the blossoms for their hair, a beckoning in pink
and peach to buzzing boys. Amid their ruffled
punctuation at our graduation teas, we talked
of college plans or city jobs and pitied in whispers

those girls who had to stay, were in that way, who,

pleasing with first blush, gave up their wrapped
tomorrows and rushed the flowering season.

7
Grace

This is the way catastrophe is born;

this is the way bloodlines end:

She misses the sign that had to be there

somewhere along the mountain highway,
the one that forecasts the change
in lanes from four to two-way; she thinks
her north-bound lanes diverged from
southbound and now impresses friends
—fused in electric riffs, in laughter—
by driving on the edge, left or right, as her car
serpentines the ascension faster than she would
have driven alone, around one curve and another,
pleased the road lies smooth and empty.

After the third, it straightens, steep-steady grade

toward vanishing turn. When the truck appears there,
rushing down at them like a bull in full charge, like
a mindless train, like desire, she has just time to swerve.
Heart pounding her throat, she breathes, ―My God.‖
Her passengers echo, fall silent.

This is the way catastrophe is born—or aborts,

and the blood that did not pool on black that day
now flows within their children.

8
My Father Listened to Clouds

They scared him, he said, when he listened

as a boy, and that frightened me, thinking
he meant the clouds had words. But no, it was
the wind inside, he said, and not blowing the cloud
but in the cloud, frowning his point, the loss of quiet,
for a boy today can‘t hear the sounds in clouds.

I see him lying on a hill, cumulonimbus

piled high in blue above him, bare-foot
child of the Great Depression loose in overalls
and tired from fieldwork his stepdad snatched
him from school to do before he joined
the Navy, before the War and Mother and me.

I see the amber-green of his eyes, my eyes,

survey the sky as he feels the sudden cool
and hears the clouds‘ big sucking currents
rumble deep like grievances beyond
my father‘s knowing but surely something
fresh from the airy mind of God.

And I wonder if the whoosh of that cloud-bound

wind, the updrafts, downdrafts, struggling high
within, ominous vapor darkening the base, charges
building toward the clash; I wonder if that wind
that he recalls from eighty years ago and more
didn‘t sound, for all the world, like his future.

9
Flight

If I could be that bird

singing there
in the meager garden
beneath this hotel‘s window,
it wouldn‘t matter
that I‘m sometimes misplaced,
that the blood and fiber of me
stiffen
in response unnatural,
even discordant,
with my world.

I‘d fly.
I‘d find the field or woods
where my song
could not flatten against concrete,
could not meander lost in shrieks of traffic.

Or—at the very least—

I would know nothing of calls
like the one just received
(rural roots, deep-bound,
vibrate at my mother‘s voice),
telling of my uncle‘s imminent death,
the uncle I scarcely know,
but whose nose and cheek bones,
like my father‘s, I share;
the uncle who—the stroke revising his mind
—tried to flee his newly-strange world
with the strong and urgent flapping
that repeatedly thrust
into his breast
the sharpest
kitchen knife.

10
Above the Singapore Rainforest

That it came suddenly was the thing.

Like a stroke or a blink, like desire,
the storm was there, and so

the storks were caught—white flotilla

on a green sea, riding the waves as one,
tossed on currents of sky.

From our high-rise window we watched them—

faltering; swallowed in troughs of trees; emerging
above crests like tattered sails on hollow hulls

until they disappeared finally with dusk,

in gray veils like those—half a world
away—that claimed with stroke
my mother's mind,
her thoughts beating in confusion,
trying to fly home.

11
Spent

Before this April—fully past the century

of my birth—I would have told you
with conviction how I knew Spring,
how I loved her season after season,
breathed in her wet-earth smells,
sang to her beneath the wisteria arbor
of my childhood, and walked with her
in fields of daisies, dotted-swiss on green.

This April I watch azalea blossoms fall

and mound—bruised pale from a week
of cold rain, tissue-thin, more onion skin
than petals. In careless wind they drift
beneath my mother‘s shrubs; and while
she naps in kind oblivion of that illness
rooted deep and blooming in her brain,
I note how Spring‘s pink has failed
and how, thousand-fold, her petals
merge to mock the very shade
that has become my mother‘s cheeks.

12
A Walk in the Park

She always did things the hard way,

childbirth to chilblains, scrubbing
with brushes to pin curling perms.

I remember the park in San Francisco,

that great rotating sprinkler. I was ten,
and when the water began, the others escaped,

but Mother held me, a good-mother grip,

ignoring my squeals as, unknowing,
she followed the sweep of the spray,

which soaked us, our clothing, our hair.

Later she laughed at her error as we stood
shivering. And, now, it's no different.

Confused in the spiral, she holds me,

dementia directing along the cold path
she follows, and I can't break away yet,

nor do I want to, until she enters the clearing

that releases us both.

13
Caravan

My dad remembers when he was six, swinging

dusty feet from his aunt‘s porch, that he stopped,
amazed, seeing what was coming on the far dirt road.

Today at eighty-five, weary caregiver, he shakes

his head and laughs at his young-fool self, gazing,
mind agape, across those empty fields.

They plodded through, shuffling dust, empty-eyed,

mouthing sounds he‘d never even dreamed before.
Giraffes and rhinos, elephants and hippos drummed
the country road, shook the cane, and set the hounds
to baying. Working mules stopped their trudge,
and sniffing, lapped the air to clear away their fear.

All day the circus passed, he said,

(through farmland flat with time and resignation)
toward the eager towns, animals and lumbering wagons,
detoured from the steaming tar of federal road, shaping,
cooling hard mile by mile under dampened gunny sacks.

He remembers wishing his mother could see it.

(But she was gone a week, ending widowhood in a bond
of mutual need.) She would when charmed, he smiled,
surrender laughter like a sword. And those animals,
they‘d ‗ave charmed her.

My father smiles again, ―Damnedest sight...‖

and turning, catches my Mother‘s empty stare as she
prods her walker through a strange and distant room.

14
In Wilderness

My mother‘s mind is freed of time.

Within her walls all seasons blur
with custom warmth, conditioned air
that cheats the autumn chill and mutes
the honeysuckle call of spring.
Her calendar is now a desert waste,
where marks on days as though of snow
melt quietly into sand
which grain-by-grain descends
the fragile stem of her distorted glass.

And I, surveying empty dunes,

am left to write with deeper strokes
messages I hope endure
or later learn to carve large-writ
cries of HELP to catch the scanning eye
of some nomadic god.

15
Essence

The six bottles of unopened perfume I found last night

in my mother‘s dresser and brought to the nursing home
were plucked up readily by her hovering aides.

Earned tips, I reasoned, and so did they, no doubt.

I‘ll imagine them circling this new resident‘s
wheelchair, a dark green flock in the Avon scent

my mother kept forgetting she‘d bought when

the woman who came to her door for twenty years
showed up again, sweet-dealing free samples.

Mother‘s sense of smell had driven her—

missionary of cleanliness, sergeant of fresh air
and light, she sniffed out the slightest mildew,

the earliest taint or sour or funk that to her alone

screamed spoiled. The odors of our house oscillated
from Clorox to gardenias, from Windex to casseroles.

At four she would bathe off the day. Emerging

from steam and powder into a cotton housedress,
she‘d brush out pin-curls and lipstick a smile onto lips

she‘d lift to kiss my father home. Doris Day cheery,

Betty Crocker smart, my mother relished her clean-wife role,
weighing compliments on her house and on her skin as equal.

Now I wheel her through scents that betray failing bodies

she does not, will not note, and when I kiss her stale forehead,
she looks up and smiles, hanging out the clean past in the sun.

16
Morning Routine

Our talk is made of mundane things,

the dog, the grass, his weight, my car,
but Dad and I keep in touch—
his coastal plains, my foothills joined
by telephone and promise. And he tells me
each time of Mother, too, his latest visit,
her knowing him, or not, her temperament,
her eating, the others at the home.

I use the time to make my bed—the act

a cue to make the call, keep moving
in a useful way, tasks blending into one.
Holding phone to ear, I trot the U from side to side
while I smooth the sheets, rid the bed of two
impressions, tug and tuck the blanket,
square the duvet‘s rosy border in a manner
less awkward now, one hand learning
to manage without its partner.

17
Once Winged
-for Adam and Dan

The recurrent ache under shoulder blades

I‘ve passed on generously to my sons.
The wings, we tease, just cutting wings,
as we rub each others‘ backs, inner curve,
beneath the blades, the very place that wings
would sprout if we were sky-borne beings.
Not angels. Sainthood escapes us.

But birds! Maybe hu-avians. And what if

we belonged to a whole society of fellow
hu-avians? It occurs to me how things
would have to change. Our shoes would go,
and cars, perhaps, (but no—the groceries
and those bags of fertilizer and long, rainy trips),
so beside the driveway, a soft landing pad.

Wires once on poles would be buried. Hovering

cross guards would protect tiny flocks as they
flew to and from school. Traffic lights would shine
out in all directions, and above the pokey flutterers
or those with fledgling wings too downy for the heights,
an express level for the quick-flitting.

A new etiquette would be hatched: No preening

in public. Adjusting one‘s wings in mixed gender,
so improper. Opened wings indoors, most impolite.
And fashion! The hottest colors in wing dye,
the latest way to wear the fold, wing rings, feather glitter
and feather conditioner, and tiny wingle bells.
We would embrace our winged state with commercial zeal,
soar and dip in new futures, never look back.

But how fine to be taken actually under someone‘s wing,

and how divine at the end of the day to shower off the sooty sky,
use the wing dryer, and tuck one‘s head into familiar down
to rest and dream of clouds.

18
Legacy
-for Dan

Now listen, Son,

and I‘ll tell you something about women.

When your great, great grandmother Eliza

stole away from home at fifteen,
wearing her brother‘s boots
(soles sturdier for
the miles of Utah prairie),
carrying what she could in a cotton flour sack;

when she knew that in lifting the latch

(oh so quietly)
and stepping out into the full-moon light
of that chosen night
that her leaving meant rejecting
her family and her religion
forever;

when she knew too well the prod

of conviction and disgust
that drove her away from a betrothal that
would make her a fourth wife
and toward a destiny
she could not imagine;

(could not imagine—for instance—that

somewhere in Colorado at that moment, perhaps, your
great, great grandfather shifting on the rough pallet
in his father‘s West-bound wagon, smiled in his sleep)
when Eliza lifted her skirts to climb over the fence
(to cheat the squeaking gate),
leaving all she knew in her past
to avoid a future she couldn‘t abide,
her only certain faith, the faith in herself,
now there, Son, there was a woman.

19
Prediction
-for Adam

One day miles and years from here,

I‘ll look at you and you‘ll look at me
and we‘ll comprehend as one.
We might be at a game or park
or sitting in a hall, or maybe just
unloading bags or pulling weeds
from flower beds, but of this
I have no doubt—we‘ll be watching
some child of yours, listening too,
perhaps, and in a blink that spark
we always thought was there
will flare and burn upright;
we‘ll recognize the glow: Character
emerging, the stonier path preferred
for the pilgrim journey, his or hers, unique,
as sure as fingerprint or iris scan is true.
And then you‘ll know—and I‘ll know
you know—what I‘ve felt in watching you.

20
Worlds Apart

My dad‘s two worlds stand side by side.

I dusted them today and wondered why
he keeps the old, the one whose lines
and names have slipped into the past,
maps of yesterday.

I gave the new one months ago

when his grandsons
moved to countries yet unformed
on globes like his. But he won't throw
out the old, and when I ask,
his answer (sturdier stand, smoother turn)
annoys this one-who-meant-to-please,
who shares his love of maps,
of geographic fact. He just prefers the old.

At eighty-six, he spends his days

in the buzzing quiet of the nearly deaf,
his deep nights dreaming life back
into those long gone, those who
linger with him through breakfast
like the steam above his cup.

He knows the boundaries have changed,

the old terrains reshaped. Oceans
he once knew, young sailor in the time of war,
swells of fear and pride, are lapping now
some odd-named shores of faded brown,
lands with no refrain on this new world,
spinning faster, horizons hurtling toward him.

21
Denouement

That winter when my heart went

wandering off the set and couldn‘t
find its script, when Dad‘s weary
marrow at last forgot its part,
and Mom‘s mind looped clips
of other times (those seamless times!)
before the strokes‘ corrupting edit,
her hands still knew their role.

With skin as thin as lingerie

revealing shameless veins, tendons
gripping bones disrobed of modest fat,
her hands performed in pantomime
the chores they‘d always known—folding,
sorting, sewing, scrubbing—on the stage
of sheet before her.

We had in common this—hands that

caught the eye. When asked to be hand
models some twenty years apart,
both laughed in our refusals,
unable to conceive a world
where posing hands defined us.

They paused when I appeared that day

in my mask of all-is-well, cheery voiced,
devoid of what I left outside her door.
―Your hands,‖ she frowned
and shook her head.
Sure she saw me as her college kid,
which she often did, I smiled and said,
―Yes, they‘re getting older, Mom.‖
―No,‖ she said, and cupping hers,
held them forward as though
to offer something.
Confused, I did the same.
She shook her head in sadness,
crumpling back into the pillows.
―Too much,‖ she said.
―Too much to carry.‖

22
That visit was our last,
and so I now rewind, replay
the scene that haunts me,
the questions with no answers.
Was the burden that overflowed
cupped hands that day
hers or mine to carry?
Or was she passing hers to me,
intent on lighter travel?

23
Ascension

When they knew the ladies of the church

were sending waves of food,
my mother‘s neighbors fished for other needs
as I hung there, caught like a trout
on her corded phone,
until they asked, ―What about paper goods?‖
and I leapt at the easy bait, more than once.
I didn‘t mind that on the funeral day
a growing flock of perpetual-plastic bags
perched everywhere—on the fridge, the washer,
the toaster—some light as angel down,
all with contents pure.

That night I dreamed of my mother–

she who found humor in the absurd,
delight in irony,
she who had to be hushed at wakes–
ascending in laughter on a bright path,
thousands of Styrofoam plates
cobbled into the white and narrow,
stretching upward into clouds,
cups curbing both sides, rim-to-rim,
each with a paper napkin
and a plastic fork
tucked neatly inside.

24
Homestead

Calico cat and a c-moon‘s glow

to halt me on my walk at dusk,
their accents sharp as yellow strokes on this
dim world, deep blue balancing green,

a canvas filled with paths and shapes

that could be animals or bales of hay.
I‘m sure the cows with eyes that take in
everything have left the fence by now.

Within the low-lit house where I was born,

my failing father, listening with his one good ear
to music from the 40's, spirals above the scene,
already somewhere else entirely.

Chagall could have done this justice.

This house, the moon, the animals and man
would swirl from his brush into happy levitation,
no memories to well his eyes and choke him.

25
The Gift
-for Dad

Windows etched with branches

and sparrows at the feeder,
the sun too heavy to rise much
above the rattling tops of trees.
Late-fall days. The chill deepens.
Yet a gray bird on a limb
(nearly dissolved into drab sky)
lifts into flight and transforms,
a flash of white underwings
charging the air.

And I think of my father at breakfast

that day, his quiet routine shifting
to make room for me, for my bustle,
my insistence on vitamins and hope,
my smile that reminded him of Mother.

When I joined him, he was staring

out the window, holding his coffee
with both hands, palsied now, once able
to clear forests and slice trees into planks.
A man who strung words slowly on threads
of deliberation, he hadn‘t talked much lately.
―That bird…‖ he said.

―What bird, Dad?‖

He set down his cup and motioned
toward the window. ―There was a gray bird
on the wire there, just a plain gray bird,
but then when he lifted off to fly—
all that white under his wings…you know...‖

For weeks after his death, before insight

sparked this memory to warm me now
more than fire or flannel or even
the down of feathers, gray and white,
I wished I had said,
―And that‘s why I write poetry, Dad.‖
instead of just nodding,
naming the bird, smiling over my cup.

26
More
-for my brother

The house on the hill in Alabama

sits vacant beneath blue sky.
After the faces are lifted from its walls,
the shelves and cabinets cleared of their history,
the closets boxed up for the church,
cobwebs and memories siphoned from corners;
after we take for our own the photos and hats,
watches and thimbles, things that remind us;
after my mother‘s fabric and spools and plans
have flowed into younger hands; after the tub
of my childhood is scoured of stains and promise,
the dining room table, dependable center,
carted away from its prints on the rug,
and beds in pieces maneuvered through doors;
after the plants and the cat go on living with others
and my father‘s pecans mound deep in weeds;
after the heat is turned off and the curtains drawn;
after the hollow shutting of doors, and locking,
and driving away, what‘s left struggles in me
to mean more than a sixty-year-old house, empty
and still, facing the late sun across cotton fields,
bolls full, whiter than I can remember.

27
Capri
-for Lee

Once in a green haze of travel,

we were swallowed whole
into the blue belly of a grotto.
Lying low and close in the little boat,
our limbs contorted like those
of the fleeing bodies of old Pompeii
whose casts we‘d seen the day before.

That family, escaped from the fiery flow

and facing the wall of cooling ash
that bound their home,
began to burrow out
through the darkness of their layered
orchard where August shade
once called them, through the heat
of tree trunks
turned to powder.
With unspeakable yearning
for sky,
they pushed through dust
until time
and breath
ran out.

Our family, floating

on luminescence,
cool black above the glow,
let the oarsman sing us
back
to the circle of light
where we knew
with no thought of knowing
we‘d find sky.

28
Clela Dyess Reed holds an MA in English from the
University of Georgia and was a teacher of English and
facilitator for the Gifted for many years. She left the
classroom in 2003 to focus on her writing. Since then
she has won poetry competitions sponsored by ByLine
Magazine and the Georgia Poetry Society and has had
poetry published in Clapboard House, Caesura,
Colere, the Kennesaw Review, storySouth, and other
literary journals. She is the author of Dancing on the
Rim (2009), a book of poems published by Brick Road
Poetry Press. She served as Vice President and
Program Chair of the Georgia Poetry Society from
2006-2009. She has attended writing conferences and
workshops at Bread Loaf, Sewanee, St. Petersburg
(Russia), and Palm Beach, and has traveled
extensively in Europe, Australia and Asia. She lives
and writes with her husband in a hardwood forest near
Athens, Georgia and is preparing for service in the
Peace Corps.

29
These are powerful and lucid poems, alive with true sentiment, but
never sentimental, about that inexhaustible . . . subject: family.
Thomas Lux, winner of Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, author of
God Particles (2008)

Clela Reed has many stories—folksy, sensuous, arresting: her

father listening to clouds, her mother in dementia where ―within
her walls all seasons blur.‖ Such moments come with a vivid
context of the physical world.
Linda Taylor, poet, professor of English, Oglethorpe University

The warm bloodline in these twenty-six poems extends not only to

family—pioneer ancesters, ailing parents, siblings, husband and
sons—but also to her Southern homeland, victims of Pompeii,
characters from Little Women, trees and flowers and birds. . .
Therese L. Broderick, prize-winning poet, workshop leader,
author of Within View

Evening Street Press

Dublin, OH