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.