Sympathetic Magic

by Amy Fleury

Overview

Amy Fleury’s bewitching new collection of poems, Sympathetic Magic, unveils the everyday manifestations of sympathy as well as the connections wrought by “sympathetic magic”—that indelible tether that binds people, places, and objects across time and distance. Fleury’s lyrics journey across the landscapes of childhood and old age, body and spirit, past and future, exploring the boundless permutations of sympathy as it appears in the most surprising locations. Connections reveal themselves in the aggressive silence of the small town or the round penmanship of a loved one, and echo throughout the solitude and regeneration of the forest as well as the antiseptic air of the hospital. At the center of these travels lies the narrator, stretching her limbs from the heart of the heartland, her body a compass summoning us from all directions, emphasizing with tender simplicity that “we all live under the self-same moon, no matter the phase.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809332250
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/26/2013
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	559 KB

About the Author

Amy Fleury is the author of a collection of poems, Beautiful Trouble, published by SIU Press, and the director of the M.F.A. program at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, River Styx, and Crazyhorse. She was the 2009–10 Amy Clampitt Resident Poetry Fellow.

Read an Excerpt

SYMPATHETIC MAGIC

The stray dog limped through traffic,
tugged by the invisible leash over miles
and years and griefs to rest her head
in your lap, trusting you with her sleep.

Sometimes what is needed comes to hand-
a book fallen open to a page of benediction,
the balm of song from the car radio's dial,
a pocket-laundered dollar to pay the toll.

In distress, you wish for an apocryphal Veronica
and she arrives at your side, offering
her only tissue, dabbing at your actual eyes.
But darkness still comes before day is yet done.

Like a dowsing rod, you lean toward
whatever is coming to you, the waters
of loving, the sump of loss. Lean in.


PENMANSHIP

Opening the shoebox of my grandmother's letters
is to receive again the pillowy words she wrote
to the girl I once was. Those portly loops curlicue
across her pastel stationery-silly, yet I still love
how the sturdy girth of her Rs and her bosomy Bs
carry their prodigious pocketbooks to town
with the chubby vowels somersaulting after.
I practiced my cursive when I wrote her back,
using gray sheets from the Big Chief tablet.
At school, my teacher, whom I otherwise adored,
lassoed my letters with red ink, tried to stanchion
my hand in the lines of Palmer Method exercises.

Since then I've made a study of it, the slant
and weight of a pen stroke, this dying art-
the means by which we might come to know
one another, how we wish to be understood.
My mother's writing, pin-neat, is a steady stitch
sewn into grocery lists and valentines, ending
each line with the snipped thread of a sentence,
while my dad, who rightly prefers to type,
has a style that looks like somebody dumped out
a drawer full of forks and rubber bands,
his signature jouncing down a mile of bad road.
And the seismograph of my brother's notes
scrape the page with a series of halts and peaks.

Years of grading student essays have taught me
to decipher crimped print that embosses thought
on paper; slashes, both erratic and brash;
girlish, licorice twists; and briary marginalia.
My friend sends an inscrutable postcard from Greece,
and in the library, I squint over the great poet's words,
so trembly and faint that graphite seems to evaporate
into pure essence. My own script, fluid and elliptical,
is a visceral pleasure, given the momentum of the pen.
The last upstroke, a scarf unfurled in a gust of wind.


A BRIEF HISTORY OF BARBED WIRE

The horizon was traipsing away west
and that vast land did not know it was owned.

Acres were platted and plotted and plowed.
The fly-vexed cattle of the dominion

were herded, made to graze given pastures.
Now a deputation of starlings alights the fence,

which does not hold snowmelt, pollen or smoke,
not the hawk, not the shadow of the hawk.

Evenings the strung wire thrums a hymn of wind.


SISTER ANONYMOUS

They discover the dead girl
in a culvert, blood corsaging
her white fluttering blouse,
an embarrassment of bloated
limbs, broken teeth, a face
gemmed over with scabs.
Nearby ants scribble their hill,
beginning a campaign
for her last moist places.

Some say it began in a truck stop's
glass-spangled parking lot,
the hum and fog of the rigs' exhaust
muffling the shouts that followed her
this far down the state highway,
where a V of geese drags its shadow
across winter's brittle pastures.
Of course, who can know for certain?

Dear sister anonymous, dead
on the side of the road, where
is your coat? The one your mother
buttoned up to your chin,
sending you off on that errand
from which you never came home.


GRAND MAL

The aura comes on, and your face,
almost becalmed, dims and strays.
It begins with a twitch, your head
quirking to the side, and then
an electric arc spasms the body
into gnashings and flailings
and thrashings, and she tries
to keep you from falling,
but you do fall, an ugly thud
on the floor, where she kneels
to blunt, as best she can,
your self-punishing fists
and fitful kicks, saying your name.
And from your mouth comes
a primal, torn-open sound,
and like a thunderous day
with little rain, your contortions
begin to quieten and quell,
and at last you lay slack
and insensible with your shoulders
bruised and a bloody tongue.
But mercifully you won't remember
these halting minutes when you go
so deep into yourself it seems to her
you might not, might never, return.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

I.
Sympathetic Magic
Elk Skeleton
First Morel
The Fort
Penmanship
Bicentennial Year
Assumptions
Farm Auction

II.
At the Geographic Center
A Brief History of Barbed Wire
Here in Topeka
Verdure
Home Altar
Vocabulary of Ashes
At Thirty-Five
Two Solitudes

III.
Sister Anonymous
Niches
Specimens
Galileo's Finger
The Head of St. Catherine
Ex Voto
See You in the Funny Papers
In a Foreign City

IV.
Magnetic Resonance
Hospital Time
Vigil
Arising
Ablution
Grand Mal

V.
Green Temple
Sky Judge
In Acadiana
Hurricane Ike
Pacheco Burn
When at Last I Join
Spiritus Mundi

Editorial Reviews

There is no shelter from the blows of fate in Amy Fleury’s American heartland. Yet the inhabitants of her poems respond to suffering with quiet dignity and an abiding faith in the interconnectedness of all living things. It has been a long time since a book moved me as deeply as this one. These are not just beautifully wrought poems; this is one of those rare works that can renew the weary human soul.”—Julie Kane, Louisiana Poet Laureate and author of Jazz Funeral and Rhythm Booze

“At a time in American poetry when enigma sometimes seems to substitute for emotion and ‘difficulty’ for content, there are still poets who can seize you by the senses and not only show you new wonders but make you feel you’re remembering them. Sympathetic Magic is further evidence that Amy Fleury belongs in that select circle.”—William Trowbridge, Missouri Poet Laureate and author of Ship of Fool

Praise for earlier work

“The minute I finished Beautiful Trouble, I wished I had copies to give to all my friends: to the poets, of course, who will admire it for its art, but also to those who don’t read poetry. Fleury proves that a book of poems need not be baffling or condescending or self-absorbed. With ordinary words placed with perfect precision, this book throws open dozens of windows onto fresh new ways of seeing, and loving, the world.”—Ted Kooser, former U.S. Poet Laureate

From the Publisher