KY: Kentucky Arts Council - Poet Laureate Jane Gentry Vance

A Garden in Kentucky

Under the fluorescent sun
inside the Kroger, it is always
southern California. Hard avocados
rot as they ripen from the center out.
Tomatoes granulate inside their hides.
But by the parking lot, a six-tree orchard
frames a cottage where winter has set in.

Pork fat seasons these rooms.
The wood range spits and hisses,
limbers the oilcloth on the table
where an old man and an old woman
draw the quarter-moons of their nails,
shadowed still with dirt,
across the legends of seed catalogues.

Each morning he milks the only goat
inside the limits of Versailles. She feeds
a rooster that wakes up all the neighbors.
Through dark afternoons and into night
they study the roses’ velvet mouths
and the apples’ bright skins
that crack at the first bite.

When thaw comes, the man turns up
the sod and, on its underside, ciphers
roots and worms. The sun like an angel
beats its wings above their grubbing.
Evenings on the viny porch they rock,
discussing clouds, the chance of rain.
Husks in the dark dirt fatten and burst.

Gentry, Jane. "A Garden in Kentucky." A Garden in Kentucky. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. 3.

A Human House

To have a task that takes you
below ground to the basement,
feeling your legs spring under
you as you descend the steps
to pull the shirts, dry, off
the clothesline by the furnace.
Then to fold them, and the towels,
and ascend through the rooms
of the house, with the perfume
of cleanliness rising
in your nose. To see sunlight
falling on the rug of the upstairs
hall, to feel the June air
move across the bedroom
as if you walked in the head
of a tree. To climb
to the attic closet carrying
winter clothes, wool scratching
your arms. To fling open
the windows to release
the stale air. Then to sit
in your chair on the porch,
reading maybe, or writing a letter
you’ve owed for months;
to watch the shifting sky
through the thinning branches
of the yellowwood tree.
All day to inhabit!
Like a fox in her den,
a bird in a knothole,
an ant in its tunnel,
I belong here. My house
is as real in the world
as water or air,
as the bird’s clear vowels
that rise through fading
light at the day’s end.
And then after night falls,
to stand in the dark backyard
looking into the golden light
of the rooms you inhabit i
n the house that is your
body’s body, and to see
on the kitchen table
the voluptuous wine
in the dark mysterious bottle
which you at supper all but emptied.

Gentry, Jane. "A Human House." Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 3-4.

Diana, of a Certain Age, Takes a Bath

My body is drifting out of its familiar shape
like a great, slow cloud in August.
My muscled calves deflate,
my cheekline sags,
my waist fattens.
After the chase
I still enjoy my bath, the luxury
of perfume on my breasts,
my neck, my thighs,
as Nofretete did, or Cleopatra,
just as in my salad days.

But sometimes in the mornings now,
fresh from sleep, I skin off
my gown before the mirror
and the girl I used to be,
my flawless pearly body,
suddenly appears to me,
rises tranquil as the moon
gliding out of clouds,
and strikes me breathless
as at the forest pool
when I spied Actaeon in his blind
(his arrows useless in his quiver),
drinking in new quarry:

the shining of my body,
fulsome and deadly as his hunter’s eye.
Terrified as the deer I turned him into,
I, too, am dogged by what I know is coming.

Gentry, Jane. "Diana, of a Certain Age, Takes a Bath." Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 15.

Leaving the Shades Up

In the long twilights of November,
both evenings and mornings,
I like the shades up.
I like to see the gray world
looking in at my looking out.
I like to watch
the slow balancing of light
inside the house and out:
the shy stars returning,
becoming public, or fading
into the daylight sky
as when death came
to my father’s eye.

Gentry, Jane. "Leaving the Shades Up." Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 29.

Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig

At sunset on a November day, the world unrolls
itself beside the Western Kentucky Parkway.
Gilded in sunlight, bronze as a baby shoe,
the dead leaves burn on the trees, red, gold
black, spread rich as an Oriental rug.
Green flames of side-lit cedars burnish all.

Then, over the short horizon appears the hero,
alien as brontosaurus, strange,
but of a multitude: white pigs,
a field full, eating, all snouts
to the ground they’ve rooted up, plowed
like furrows in the cognac-colored light.
That earth should take the form of this
strange beast, should eat itself and shift
into this shape! The bows of their backs
gold-leafed: snout and mouth to golden earth,
as hungry as one breath for the next.
Unnatural as Midas’ kingdom
in the sideways sun, what other
brutes could translate this
bright dirt? This heavy
light? These showers of gold?

Gentry, Jane. "Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig." Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 47.

The Drum Majorette Marries at Calvary Baptist

She goes blind down the aisle.
Candles prick the twilight
banks of gladioli, fern, and baby’s breath.
Abloom in polyester peau de soie,
she smiles a starlet smile, clings
to her wet-eyed daddy’s beef.
The organ metes her steps in groans.
Her mother wrings a tissue in her lap.
The groom, monolith to the white cloud
she is, waits at the altar. His Adam’s
apple bobs. He is a straight, black
prop incidental to this script.

Outside, night falls over the tableau
the flashbulbs freeze as the couple
ducks through showers of seed
and runs for the idling limousine.
Before the door clicks shut on all her gauze,
in the strange light the white dress
seems to drift like petals piece by piece,
until out of the net the drum majorette
pumps her knees. Her trim boots dart,
her white gloves slice
at cacophonies of dark.
Her silver whistle flashes, shrills.

Gentry, Jane. "The Drum Majorette Marries at Calvary Baptist." A Garden in Kentucky. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. 4.

Kentucky Arts Council
500 Mero Street
21st Floor, Capital Plaza Tower
Frankfort, KY 40601
502-564-3757
Toll Free: 888-833-2787
FAX: 502-564-2839

Page Updated: 06/26/2008