Morning

 

Length: 1:17

 

This video is headed by a short paragraph, which introduces the poem voiced in the video: “And then I imagined them leaving together, wanting a different life, an alternate path. Curiously, I imagine this leave-taking in my mother’s voice, as though acknowledging that my uncle cannot tell this story for himself.”

 

The video shows a bluish-tinted photograph of the Louisiana swampland, mostly water with trees and wetlands growing in the bayou. The poem read is in Jonathan’s voice, but technologically altered so that it sounds more like a woman’s voice. The effect is odd, even unsettling—clearly not a voice previously present in Techne. The word morning, the title of the poem, appears on the screen as the voice starts reading the poem:

 

This morning I left my father’s house.

I never knew how easy it would be

 

but I opened the door and stepped onto

the porch as his spit hit me between the

 

shoulder blades. I couldn’t help but smile.

The sun struggled with a cloud as I turned

 

down the dirt road that would soon separate

the life given me from the life taken. Glen,

 

my brother, waited by his truck at the local

store, not wanting to soil his hands with

 

the dust of Dad’s land. I couldn’t blame him

though I resented the freedom he thought he

 

had. I somehow knew better. I knew that

the memory of this humid and sticky place

 

would not fade into fall as we worked our

way to the Big Easy. There would be much

 

to think through: the money neither of us

had, the accents that coarsened our words,

 

mother, sitting at the wooden table over

breakfast, fingering her beads, praying,

 

praying that God would be a better

father to the children she feared it had been

 

a sin to conceive. Try as I can, I cannot

resent her that. But I could not stay. And

 

Glen and I turn our way to the Big Easy, to

the life taken, to be other than what we are.