Spotlight series #102 : Gale Marie Thompson
Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.
STATEMENT
Mountain Amnesia is actually about 10 years in the making. I have written and published a whole other book (Helen or My Hunger) before this one was published! It’s a longer story, but the short version is this: after moving to North Georgia in 2019 and then experiencing a worldwide pandemic and various griefs while isolated in the Appalachian Mountains, my vision for what the book could be completely changed. I had spent so much time tromping alone in the woods and trails with my dog, Hubble, that I viewed everything through the lens of the vigorous and messy natural world. I wrote poems in that grimy growth of moss and soil, confronting the death that created it. Then I began to reassemble the manuscript with these new poems, and I saw that I had been building these themes for years. The manuscript simply fell into place. I like to tell this story to writer friends and students because I’m so grateful for those 10 years, for giving me time to build the manuscript into what I needed it to be.
In this poem specifically, the title poem, I think about the dance between presence and absence, especially regarding my own personal wrestling with the “lyric I.” The “I” in a poem offers a vessel for personal experiences, creating moments of intense reflection beyond narrative constraints. And yet this power — to shape and manipulate language in a poem — poses ethical questions about the poet’s responsibility to convey reality. This poem grapples with the paradox of seeking solace through creation and interacting with the outside world, while confronting the limitations and boundaries of the self.
Mountain Amnesia
Of all the camps to camp
I am made to stop here: log fern,
mountain maple, double-knob —
Bell Mountain’s peak mined gaping
and useless. No longer new
to this valley, I am still stupid
and faithful. I blister the tomatoes
and over the phone declare
this is good news when they move
my uncle to a new hospital.
The lowing cattle make hideous sounds
that I confuse with chainsaws
and processing machines.
Elevation is the only direction here.
My cup runneth over, but who can I tell.
*
If writing this poem means that I must
present myself a formed dark cheek of the whole,
how safe all this production of meaning
could be. This hunger filled by quiet
rituals of finding cause and finding cause.
But I am tired of beating just to beat.
Winter bulbs are forgettable
but sticky with secret energy,
cell walls of potential stretched out
just below the forest floor.
*
Thunder boils dark spots down the valley,
in this pulsing yard, kicks up
in every room.
I started something like this back at the dunes.
I wanted to write about what it was like to lift so easily
From the world.
What it was like to untether that I could untether
A kind of colony collapse of one
*
I am never light, really I am never good. One long
phrase of routine against a line of dark.
I am a side sleeper a sieve
like a lamb a soft-brained little dove
guilty of all the greed and ego
Without the lyrical subject,
this I lifts away from my eyes,
the world. I find it impossible, and yet
that is what makes the world
this world.
It happens, nevertheless.
*
On Star Trek, Data dreams of birds
and doesn’t know why
So he paints them
Bird bird bird bird bird
He feels “inspired” He doesn’t have anything
to say about them
but Bird bird bird bird bird
*
There are a few ways of knowing I haven’t mastered.
There are a few ways of dying I haven’t imagined.
In August the creek rose twice.
When I backed my car into the bridge,
I blamed it on the storm.
The rooster next door is alone
and cries a sloughing crow
deep into the afternoon.
The dog who seeded my thigh with her jaws
follows the scent of her own urine
to a grotto underneath my porch.
Tadpoles clot puddles
left by tire tracks and grow,
scooting along on their new feet
until the puddles dry up
and the grass burns. I settle into it,
the letting go.
*
If I am an animal, I should be
a strong one. I should forgo horns
and single flippers for the hardened skin
around my mouth, red burrow of fingers
resembling steeples.
I used to be something else, a child in the churn
sleeping boldly inward, folded,
un-honed. I have tried to be strong and lonely,
to find the muck-throated god
inside the stone. To feign death was easy.
To be out and away from the world
is not a virtue. Even my face has become something
glass-green and lawless.
A kind of loosening of the cheeks.
*
The rain pulls each leaf away
without pomp, rearranges the air.
My cup runneth over, but who can I tell.
from Mountain Amnesia, by Gale Marie Thompson, published by Center for Literary Publishing, used by permission of CLP.
Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Helen or My Hunger (YesYes Books 2020), Soldier On (Tupelo Press 2015), and most recently Mountain Amnesia, winner of the 2023 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, and Mississippi Review, among others. Gale lives in the mountains of North Georgia, where she works as an editor for YesYes Books and directs the creative writing program at Young Harris College.
