Melitodes

Abstract

Melitodes Emma Aylor (bio) 1 Sundays like this, alone in October light,I hold a mirror to the face of memoryto see what vapor it can leave there,hardly roused from another image of the graveyard—unmarked fieldstones, burial in a high placewith feet facing east for resurrection, burial in the wildflowers bruisingwith bees, what's left of the figureswrapped in their palls, chamberedclose together. It comes back to me all the time.There seems to be a strong inclination, a folklorist says,to believe that the natural world acknowledges the death of a person. The moon broke out. It shone, he said, "pretty."I could not find any dampness on the ground from the rain.The dead crow hung over the fence—did it holdsome deeper purpose involving the color black?A mark on the wheat, mark on alfalfa,as any person would make with a soot-dipped hand. 2 My mother reminded me on her last visit to Seattleof the bee tree down in the gully—the snagthought empty, seen colorless, but the tree buzzed, she remembered, perhaps with blue orchard mason beesthere for the tense wood, forest edge, their home:the hollow tree moved in shakes [End Page 26] up the hill; it rattled flats of ivy;down at the bottom in trickle after floodit ruffled small water, sweet in its cross. I wish I could remember the kind of tree it was.And my father fed me whole honeycombsfrom the orchard at the foot of the mountain, forked from the ball jar and drippingthe seep down my throat, a brim.My baby teeth crushed the waferlike frames. They led me under; I ate to believein the tone of the land I was born unto.I almost never saw a graveyard down in a valley and could not find a person to ask. Here I live,a clean continent away, and spend the coinsfrom dead men's held-down eyes. [End Page 27] Emma Aylor Emma Aylor's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, and the Cincinnati Review, among other journals, and she received Shenandoah's 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She lives in Lubbock, Texas. Note This poem uses information and some found text from James K. Crissman's Death and Dying in Central Appalachia: Changing Attitudes and Practices (University of Illinois Press, 1994) and Gerald Milnes's Signs, Cures, and Witchery: German Appalachian Folklore (University of Tennessee Press, 2007). Copyright © 2021 Berea College