Nikky Finney

Nikky Finney (born Lynn Carol Finney on August 26, 1957, in Conway, South Carolina) is an American poet. She was the Guy Davenport Endowed Professor of English at the University of Kentucky for twenty years. In 2013, she accepted a position at the University of South Carolina as the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature. An alumna of Talladega College, and author of four books of poetry and a short-story cycle, Finney is an advocate for social justice and cultural preservation. Her honors include the 2011 National Book Award for her collection Head Off & Split.

 

THE AUREOLE
Nikkey Finny

(for E)

               I stop my hand midair.
 
               If I touch her there everything about me will be true.
               The New World discovered without pick or ax.
 
               I will be what Brenda Jones was stoned for in 1969.
               I saw it as a girl but didn’t know I was taking in myself.
 
               My hand remembers, treading the watery room,
               just behind the rose-veiled eyes of memory.
 
Alone in the yard tucked beneath the hood of her car,
lucky clover all about her feet, green tea-sweet necklace
for her mud-pie crusty work boots.
 
She fends off their spit & words with silent two-handed
twists & turns of her socket wrench. A hurl of sticks &
stones and only me to whisper for her, from sidewalk far,
 
break my bones. A grown woman in grease-pocket overalls
inside her own sexy transmission despite the crowding of
hurled red hots. Beneath the hood of her candy-apple Camaro:
 
souped, shiny, low to the ground.
 
               The stars over the Atlantic are dangling
               salt crystals. The room at the Seashell Inn is
               $20 a night; special winter off-season rate.
               No one else here but us and the night clerk,
               five floors below, alone with his cherished
               stack of Spiderman. My lips are red snails
               in a primal search for every constellation
               hiding in the sky of your body. My hand
               waits for permission, for my life to agree
               to be changed, forever. Can Captain Night
               Clerk hear my fingers tambourining you
               there on the moon? Won’t he soon climb
               the stairs and bam! on the hood of this car?
               You are a woman with film reels for eyes.
               Years of long talking have brought us to the
               land of the body. Our skin is one endless
               prayer bead of brown. If my hand ever lands,
               I will fly past dreaming Australian Aborigines.
               The old claw hammer and monkey wrench
               that flew at Brenda Jones will fly across the
               yard of ocean at me. A grease rag will be
               thrust into my painter’s pants against my
               will. I will never be able to wash or peel
               any of this away. Before the night is over
               someone I do not know will want the keys
               to my ’55 silver Thunderbird. He will chase
               me down the street. A gaggle of spooked
               hens will fly up in my grandmother’s yard,
               never to lay another egg, just as I am jump-
               ed, kneed, pulled finally to the high ground
               of sweet clover.
 

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CATTAILS
Nikky Finney

One woman drives across five states just to see her. The woman being driven to has no idea anyone’s headed her way. The driving woman crosses three bridges & seven lakes just to get to her door. She stops along the highway, wades into the soggy ground, cuts down coral-eyed cattails, carries them to her car as if they might be sherbet orange, long-stemmed, Confederate roses, sheared for Sherman himself. For two days she drives toward the woman in Kentucky, sleeping in rest areas with her seat lowered all the way back, doors locked. When she reaches the state line it’s misting. The tired pedal-to-the-metal woman finally calls ahead. I’m here, she says. Who’s this? The woman being driven to, who has never checked her oil, asks. The driving woman reminds her of the recent writing workshop where they shared love for all things out-of-doors and lyrical. Come, have lunch with me, the driving woman invites. They eat spinach salads with different kinds of dressing. They talk about driving, the third thing they both love and how fast clouds can change from state line to state line. The didn’t-know-she-was-coming woman stares at she who has just arrived. She tries to read the mighty spinach leaves in her bowl, privately marveling at the driving woman’s muscled spontaneity. She can hardly believe this almost stranger has made it across five states just to have lunch with her. She wonders where this mad driving woman will sleep tonight. She is of two driving minds. One convertible. One hardtop. The driving woman shows her pictures of her children. Beautiful, the other does not say. Before long words run out of petrol. The woman who is home, but without pictures of her own, announces she must go. The driving woman frets & flames, May I walk you to your car? They walk. The driver changes two lanes in third gear, fast. The trunk opens. The Mario Andretti look-alike fills the other woman’s arms with sable-sheared cattails. Five feet high & badly in need of sunlight & proudly stolen from across five states. The woman with no children of her own pulls their twenty pounds in close, resting them over her Peter-Panning heart. Her lungs empty out, then fill, then fill again with the surge of birth & surprise. For two years, until their velvet bodies begin (and end) to fall to pieces, every time the driven-to woman passes the bouquet of them, there, in the vase by the front door, she is reminded of what falling in love, without permission, smells like. Each time she reaches for her keys, she recalls what you must be willing to turn into for love: spiny oyster mushroom, damson, salt marsh, cedar, creosote, new bud of pomegranate, Aegean sage blue sea, fig, blueberry, marigold, leaf fall, fogs eye, dusty miller, thief-of-the-night.