Pioneer Women
My great-great
grandmother Theresa
homesteaded her own acres
after her husband died of
a headache.
She sent her children
away until
they were old enough to
drive a plow.
She was a Christian woman
and canny—
the other pioneer women
sent for her
when their times were
near.
Pioneer women had many
babies,
and many babies died.
They had hearts
to break. Once I stood on
a hill
surrounded by the graves
of pioneer women
and their children,
throwing handfuls
of my grandmother’s ash
into a wind
that is always present;
on every side
and below me ran straight
lines of crops
in need of more water
than the sky can give.
The crops are wrong for
the land,
which prefers the ancient
grasses.
In the lean years—or so
the story goes—
pioneer women ground up
grasshoppers
to make their bread.
They had meanness to
drive them on.
They could give up almost
anything
so they did. They were
offered land
if they could keep it,
and when they got it,
they put up fences. They
must have known
their presence was a
fence. While all around them
the dirty work of killing
to keep the land went on.
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I
appreciate the clarity of her lines, a lyric that plays with the accumulation
of straight phrases and its variations, such as the poem “The Ersatz Viking Ship,”
that begins: “I wake up. / I drink coffee. / I take the words of one language.
/ I put them into another language. / My goal is to keep the meaning. / What I think
the meaning is.” There is a practicality to the narrative voice she presents, a
pragmatism to these lyric threads: aware of what terrible things might occur
but refusing to be overcome by them, simply allowing for what can’t be changed,
and sidestepping what can easily be avoided. “my advice to you is / always the
same,” she writes, as part of “My Advice,” “check the lock by picking it /
leave the scabs on as long as you can stand / avoid whatever you feel / like
avoiding for as / long as that’s a workable strategy [.]” There is an optimism
that comes through as sheer perseverance and persistence, able to continue
through, because of and no matter what. “After giving birth it starts to hurt.”
she writes, to open the poem “Love Poem at Thirty-Seven,” “And then there’s no
drive left. / Like a spent animal who has outrun / her predator. No energy to /
seek it out. The flesh, the breath, / the deflated balloon of skin, the marks.”
Wessel offers directions through her accumulation that appear, at first,
straightforward enough, instead providing a sequence of turns, sweeps, bends
and even twists across the lumps and bumps of her narratives. I would love to
hear these poems read aloud, honestly. And the straightforwardness of her lines
offer a mutability that can play with expectation, always providing a safe hand
to hold through even the darkest places. As the poem “Sticks” ends: “It crashed
onto us, crushing what wouldn’t be penetrated. / What I mean to say is the
world kept ending, and we kept on / loving each other anyway. Isn’t that dumb. Isn’t
that just / the dumbest thing you ever heard.”
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