DORINE JENNETTE CONTINUES THE CONVERSATION: JIM PETERSON
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“Dorine Jennette Continues the Conversation” is inspired by the format of Albert Goldbarth’s “Why All This Music?” (Winter 2009), in which the poet interviews himself with questions he draws from literary sources. Following Goldbarth’s lead, Jennette interviews a writer from each issue of The Georgia Review with questions drawn from that issue’s text. Pulling questions out of their literary contexts makes them nearly non sequiturs, and replies to such queries often generate a sort of verbal Rorschach test, revealing a mind at work. An issue of GR is a kind of conversation, a dinner party at which some of the guests are old friends, while others have never met. Jennette has found a unique way to extend that conversation, this time with Jim Peterson.
Jim Peterson’s approach is true to the Goldbarthian original, in that Peterson takes these “interview” prompts and turns them into writing prompts, producing new pieces rather than direct answers. Peterson rides this interview format farther than we knew it could go, chasing states of vision and altered consciousness that are difficult to capture on paper. Readers, hold on to your hats. . . .
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“Really a mask then, was it?”1
1.
The skin of my face takes the shape of each outward attitude I need, like the one for her after I ran away because I was scared of a strange man on our street and she found me huddled in the woods and pressed her hand on my chest to feel the rattling of my heart; like the one for him when I came home when I wanted to, which was way late, his hand unbuckling the belt and whipping it from around his waist, throwing out and uncoiling that black circle of himself until the backs of my legs gave up every last hope of ever sleeping and forgetting; like the one for those who gave me a place in the crowd at school to hide when I didn’t know who I was or what I was or where I might possibly go; like the one for her whose eyes shone through her mask to something in me that she saw and liked that I didn’t know was there but now I do; like the one for sky with white clouds passing over, black clouds passing, clear sky full of the mask of the sun pretending to be nothing and everything at once; like the one for catching rain and letting it in, the one for making a speech, the one for shaking hands; like the one designed to fit snugly in the palms of my hands when I need to hold it, to feel its exterior separateness, to feel through it inwardly toward a position that witnesses all of my masks and looks out through their eye-holes, seeing that deep witness in others that lives and understands from a place beyond the need for masks.
2.
What means to you a mask? the shaman asks, sitting on the floor cross-legged behind a small altar holding stones and feathers. I make them for money, she says, I create them to stay alive, to hold my dream faces in my hands, my powerful faces that cause the world to give and take. He says, Hmmm, that’s interesting. She says, I make them to sell in gift shops and galleries, all of my faces going out into the world and possessing the others, covering them, mastering them, becoming them, until I can take my mask off and lay it in the grass and walk away like it’s just another leaf that let go, blowing in the wind, flying over the shoes of strangers, disappearing in the woods where the deer curl up and sleep at night. He says, Hmmm, I understand.
He begins to rattle and sing, calling to the beings of light, the spirits of the sacred mountains, the condor and the puma, the being of the plant medicine that pulses green and shining in his veins. She falls, as if something is guiding her down, her body collapsing like a segmented tent pole but stretching out again on the floor. The shaman goes to her, strokes the long Condor feather over her again and again, flicking the tip as it passes over her feet. He keeps singing and shaking his rattle, and her body stretches and stretches, and flows like the part of a river seen through a gap in the leaves. She is the river of masks. She is the mask of the one river always changing.
“Is it brave? What’s brave?”2
A man sat down in his favorite chair. He was good at doing. He had made a complete study of his usual doings as he was doing them and he had discovered that they were as automatic as the rinse cycle of a washing machine or the bark of a dog. The man felt himself become very still outwardly. Inwardly he fell deeper into a well of letting go. He fell for a long time, letting go of every single thought and feeling and thing. He arrived at a quiet place where he could hear only his breath. He followed it with the same fascination with which he once watched the rolling in, the breaking, the unraveling of a wave onto shore, then the way the energy turns and withdraws into the great body, the way it turns again and curls up on itself way out there and starts back in. The man found the space in time between the uprising of the breath and the downward falling of it. This space was an emptiness that he could occupy, and he did, slipping in at the last second like a dog through the closing crack of a door. He felt himself in a room that was expanding, swirling with an inflowing energy like wind that nourished his awareness of himself. He felt more and more there.
The energy coalesced into a woman made of tightly wound strings of light, and she approached the man. When she spoke, the man felt her voice at the top of his head, a spiral of energy running down into all of the centers of his body, lighting them up one by one. He stood on a height from which he overlooked the universe of himself, vast and full of light. His body was sitting still in the big chair in his study. But his other body, his attention, stood as witness to galaxies. The woman said, “Now return to your old self, your body sitting in that chair far away. But you must also remain here. Only the bravest can go and stay at the same time. As the light expands inside of you, stand up from the chair, walk outside, and begin again.”
“Well, any radiance is good, isn’t it?”3
Each day, as she stepped from the light of the street into the darker realm beneath canopy, she felt she was entering a body. She had seen a map of this forest with its cold-water creek meandering at the bottom of a ravine, its rolling slopes of old oaks and maples and sycamore, its groves of cedar and loblolly pine. The map showed her the true shape of her friend, limbs extending for miles between subdivisions and even to the edges of town, though most people paid no attention to it, too rugged and steep at the center to be developed, forcing the town to build bridges and bypasses. The heart of these woods lay deep in the ravine where the creek pooled and gathered light from the ribbon of sky. The homeless sometimes made camp here. But she almost never felt afraid in the woods. She strolled, took in the fragrance of leaves, sometimes lay down in the path and spread her arms wide, as if to embrace the forest, or straddled a low limb like the back of a horse and gazed over the spangled hills like some new kind of animal. Still, she was frightened on some days, sensed someone watching her.
One day, she heard a movement behind her. She stopped and did a spinning jump, shouting “Hah!” as her feet landed shoulder-width on the trail. She kept her knees bent, her hands in fisted readiness, but nothing was there. She felt it behind her again and repeated the maneuver, to discover only the familiar trail. But a presence hung so close that its breath hovered around her face like smoke in a bar. She continued to walk. The being moved all around her and gathered on her skin; as she relaxed, it followed the inward path of her letting go. She allowed it to enter and to fill her. Her body glowed in the dim, afternoon light of deep forest. She turned her attention to a tone that hummed in her bones like a plucked string, a sound that meant she would never sleep again.
She liked her sleep, she liked her dreams, but the presence told her they had to change. She unfolded the leaves of her holding-on like money from a thick roll of bills and paid them out to the presence, one at a time, until none were left and her hands and her mind were empty. The white flowers of a lone dogwood captured the light, razor sharp, of an early moon. A pair of woodpeckers called to each other and she caught a red glimpse of them flying from limb to limb. She sat down at the foot of the tree, took a deep breath, realized she no longer knew what to do. She had never really known. She sank down into the cocoon of not knowing for a long time, feeling her body merge with the tree and the spiraling-upward reach of its sap and leaves.
Much later, her house, no more than a mile away, called to her. The old cat, curled up on the red cushion of a chair, awaited her evening meal. The moon reached down through the canopy and revealed the faint rambling of the trail. The woman walked, knowing only the sensations of her living skin in the night air. Finally, she found an opening and stood at the edge of woods looking out on the street where she lived. Her neighbor’s children screamed and laughed on their lawn. She pushed against a pressure like a membrane of air, and broke out of the woods onto the grassy bank of her street. That night, she grew weary as always, and she slept, but a part of her remained awake. She entered her dream as if it were the body of a forest. Her radiance reached and reached until it touched someone out there in the distance: a woman on a horse flickering in and out of sight among the trees.
"Now, darlin'," I said. "Why in the world would she do that?"4
She did it because she’d carried me for all those months until her legs and feet were so swollen she could hardly cut herself loose from the moorings of the bed and drift to the kitchen, where she cooked another meal for everybody. My daddy sat at the table in his sport coat, tie loosened and a hunger raging in him that fried chicken and mashed potatoes and sweet tea and two daughters and a boy on the way and his wife floating into the dining room with serving bowls like a Macy’s parade balloon would never satisfy.
She did it because she didn’t know me and never would, the way things were going. She knew the one who wore a suit and tie and stood where he was supposed to stand at my daddy’s funeral, but that wasn’t me, the real me inside hanging on to the face of a cliff thousands of feet above the boulders of a river, trying to pull myself up to some ledge where I could catch my breath and sit down and look through my eyes for a few minutes without feeling like I was going to fall.
She did it because she’d sold the house and paid the bills and had enough left to carry on for a little while if she didn’t have to drag her big boy with her every step of the way. Meaning me. She told me once that I’d never know what it had cost her to get me outside her body. She had paid and paid. Because I was the last one, the one she’d fought for because she wanted a boy for my daddy, a handle on the life she was making that he could hold onto. He had a strong grip when he wanted to use it.
She did it because she had a full tank of gas in a beat-up old Cadillac that might or might not make it to Omaha. Her sister lived there with enough money in the bank that the two of them could make ends meet for a long time. That’s what she knew she had to do, had to make ends meet, had to disconnect a beginning from an old middle that didn’t know how to let go of anything. She knew that if I didn’t stop hanging on to the face of a cliff that didn’t exist, maybe I wouldn’t ever exist either.
She could visit my sisters and their kids, so she knew they existed. She said it right out: “I want to visit you.” She said it standing there in the jeans she’d only recently learned to wear, the sleeveless blouse that revealed her still-pretty arms, pushing her hair out of her face, squinting in the sunny Iowa wind as she filled that tank. That’s when I walked into the little store looking for something good for myself, nonchalantly unfolding the bills she’d given me as if I’d ever done something that had cost me anything.
She was gone when I came back out, left me standing with an ice cold Coke in my hands in a parking lot somewhere east of Oskaloosa, where the Des Moines runs cold and southeasterly toward its big sister. I stood there a long time turning that bottle warm. The wind scraped hot over my skin, the cash in my pocket enough maybe for a few skimpy meals, but not enough for a room. A car whipped by every minute or so, like the questions rising in my head with an urgency I had never known.
I drank the last of the warm Coke, realizing that I should’ve bought her one, too. That was the crux of it, the crux of everything. Either way, it wouldn’t have gone to waste. My thumb grew heavy in the air, brand new in its potential, knowing that it could take me anywhere but Omaha.
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1 Marianne Boruch, “Cadaver, Speak,” The Georgia Review (Summer 2010): 272.
2 Marianne Boruch, “Cadaver, Speak,” The Georgia Review (Summer 2010): 248.
3 Marianne Boruch, “Cadaver, Speak,” The Georgia Review (Summer 2010): 255.
4 Lee Martin, "Drunk Girl in Stilettos," The Georgia Review (Summer 2010): 192.
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Jim Peterson is a poet, novelist, and playwright. His recent books have been published by Red Hen Press: The Owning Stone (poetry, 1999, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award), Paper Crown (novel, 2005), and The Bob and Weave (poetry, 2006). Other poetry collections include The Man Who Grew Silent (The Bench Press, 1989); Carvings on a Prayer Tree (chapbook, 1994) and An Afternoon With K (1996), both from Holocene Press; and Jim Peterson’s Greatest Hits 1984–2000 (Pudding House, 2000, 2003). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Texas Review, Connecticut Review, and other journals. His plays have been produced in regional and college theaters. He and his wife, Harriet, have traveled extensively in Peru studying ancient Andean shamanic culture. He is on the faculty of the University of Nebraska’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing and is writer in residence and coordinator of creative writing at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lives with his wife and their beloved Welsh corgis, Dylan Thomas and Mama Kilya.
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Dorine Jennette is the author of Urchin to Follow (The National Poetry Review Press, 2010), and her poetry and prose have appeared in such journals as the Journal, Coconut, Court Green, Puerto del Sol, and New Orleans Review. She lives in Davis, California.
