Below these bluffs
            After Elizabeth Treadwell
            For Jackson, born 02/05/07
​

​​i.
 
a small boy / a mirror
I have made him / so
 
his need for me / though
I am broken/ unmended
 
through multiple reflections
a generation / a tick
 

ii.

Here below these bluffs the fatal river flows
cotton people unknown barges resilient tugs
brown on brown on white on brown
the alien landscape sticks in the yellow oak
water urging swallowing delivering taking
in tides mud marking unmapping
 
I’m goin’ down to the river
Take along my rocking chair,
And if the blues don’t leave me,
I’ll rock on away from there.
 

iii.
 
                    :For he would not be Stagolee
                    Though he was born by the Mississippi, Lord, Lord
                                   They shot that poor man to death.
 
                    :For he would not be Po’ Lazarus
                    For the high sheriff shot Lazarus with a mighty big number, Lord, Lord
                                   He shot him with a forty five.
 
                    :For he would not be John Henry
                    For John Henry hammered his poor heart to death, Lord, Lord,
                                   He hammered his poor heart to death.
 

iv.
 
the railroad goes through our town, oh
the railroad goes through our town
the cars are carrying coal, oh
the cars are carrying coal
we think of the men below, oh
we think of the men below
 
here in our 21st century
 
v.
 
bright year
constellates a scorched cry
mother/rage and mother/love
nesting his magic
 
we dwell in our unseen sameness

​

Statement: This piece began as a meditation upon Elizabeth’s use of female and male archetypes. Writing this poem for my son, I looked to ballads and folklore for archetypes of black masculinity. Elizabeth’s inhabitation of an eternal feminine in which the maternal and domestic expand, rather than constrict, opens a channel for writing about experience that I often find unutterable.
 
Bio: Poet-Scholar Kathy Lou Schultz has published four collections of poems, most recently Biting Midge: Works in Prose (New York: Belladona) and Some Vague Wife (Berkeley: Atelos). She also performs her work on the CD, The Colored Waiting Room by Dr. Guy's MusiQology. Her scholarly monograph is The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka (Palgrave). Schultz is Assoc. Professor of English at the Univ. of Memphis where she is Director of Women’s and Gender Studies.