Poem-A-Day: Wedding Album 1977 by Tess Taylor

Wedding Album 1977   by Tess Taylor     My parents kissing in a kitchen. In her loop-eyed dress my mother-- enormous in her belly, I loom. In a commune in Fort Greene she typed and typed her dissertation. Upstairs a woman practiced primal screams, a wild-haired painter mourned his dying wife. My parents had already made my life  near the mass grave of hundreds of Revolutionary soldiers, a cockeyed brownstone full of junkies, somebody who stripped my parents' jalopy down to wires and bones.  Soon they sold all they had  and drove to Madison to have me.  Had five people over for pie.  It was done then: They were married.  Weeks later in their bedroom I was born. In piles my mother's writing watched us from unquiet bricks and boards.        Copyright © 2013 by Tess Taylor. Used with permission of the author.     About This Poem "In my book The Forage House, I blend seemingly official histories with the blurry but persistent images that become family lore, that shape personal legends. This poem is one of my founding stories: in 1977, before I was born, my parents lived in a the former kitchen of an un-renovated commune in Fort Greene, in a house that was crumbling then and is now worth 2 million dollars, or something equally enormous. I was on the way, New York was rather grim, Brooklyn was grimmer, and neither of my parents could find steady work. In my mind there are all these wild-haired characters moving around making barley casserole and howling. The painter, by the way, was Jonathan Lethem's dad, and the commune held Jonathan Lethem and his sister and brothers in a wild seventies heyday. My parents left. I actually went on, much later, to have a more traditional childhood, married parents, sun-glazed suburb, church on Sundays, a dog. But there's this persistent image of this alternate genealogy of our wildness, of our possible other lives. I love the photos of my parents in the moments just before they knew me, and the alternate image of myself as a young Brooklynite. Years later, when I graduated college, I moved back to Brooklyn; I actually lived about six blocks from this house. Jonathan Lethem and I joke that I was his in utero roommate. That's kind of cool."    --Tess Taylor August 21, 2013 Tess Taylor's first collection of poetry is The Forage House (Red Hen Press, 2013). Taylor teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in El Cerrito, California. Most Recent Book by Taylor The Forage House (Red Hen Press, 2013) Related Poems Lost in thought, the baby by Rebecca Wolff The Difference Between a Child and a Poem by Michael Blumenthal Goodnight Moon by James Arthur Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on  weekdays and classic poems  on weekends. Browse the  Poem-A-Day Archive.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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