C. D. Wright

Driving through this part of Louisiana you can pass four prisons in less than an hour. "The spirit of every age," writes Eric Schlosser, "is manifest in its public works." So this is who we are, the jailers, the jailed. This is the spirit of our age. "You won't be back will you," asked the inmate who told me he wanted to be a success. + + + Try to remember it the way it was. Try to remember what I wore when I visited the prisons. Trying to remember how tall was my boy then. What books I was teaching. Trying to remember how I hoped to add one true and lonely word to the host of texts that bear upon incarceration. Something about the extra-realism of that peculiar institution caused me to balk, also the resistance of poetry to the conventions of evidentiary writing, notwithstanding top-notch examples to the contrary: Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Wilde, Valéry, Celan, Desnos, et al. After all, I am not them. She asked me to come down, my friend the photographer and I went, and then I wanted to see whether my art could handle that hoe. Trying to remember how my skin felt when I opened an envelope of proofs of Deborah Luster's intimate aluminum portraits of the inmates at Transylvania (the site of East Carroll Parish Prison Farm, a minimum-security male prison, now closed); then Angola (the site of Louisiana State Penitentiary, maximum security, ever-growing); then St. Gabriel (the site of the Louisiana Correctional Institution for Women, the LCIW). I was electrified by the first face—a young, handsome man blowing smoke out of his nose. Behind every anonymous number, a very specific face. On the phone my friend had described to me the rich Delta grounds of Angola, 18,000 acres. Angola, where the topsoil is measured not in inches but feet. The former sugarcane plantation lies at the confluence of rivers and borderland of the vermin-and-vine-choked Tunica Hills. Grey pelicans nest on the two prison lakes; alongside the airstrip are the grading sheds, the endless fields of okra and corn. Then there's the prison museum, the prison radio station, the prison monthly magazine; the tracking horses and tracking dogs trained by inmates... and the tree-lined neighborhood of free-world residents, their children bused outside the fence to school. Then the immaculate cinderblock buildings that house the inmates, the administration building, and the death house; the greenhouse and extensive flower beds—take away the fencing and it resembles nothing so much as a college campus. The men in maximum number more than the men who lived in my hometown. Then there's the geriatric unit, the award-winning hospice program; the caisson the inmates built to bear the dead in the hand-built coffins to one of the two graveyards inside the prison. In the old burial ground most graves are not identified by name. The caisson is pulled by draft horses, French Quarter style. When the champion of the prison rodeo had a heart attack in the fields, a riderless horse led the final procession. The celebrated inmate's uniform was "retired" to the prison museum. Everything about Louisiana seems to constitute itself differently from everywhere else in the Union: the food, the idiom, the stuff in the trees, the critters in the water, and the laws, Napoleonic, not mother-country common law. The prisons inevitably mirror differences found in the free world. Where they came up with their mirrors is another mystery. (In maximum, they are made of metal.) The definition of the face is a memory. Vivid to me is Debbie saying that at the trial of her mother's murderer, she looked around and saw the people sitting on separate sides of the courtroom, the way they do at a wedding, the bride's people, the groom's people, and she tried to take in the damage radiating through the distinct lines—the perpetrator's side, the victim's side. Vivid to me is leaving Angola after the first visit and Debbie asking what I thought, and I said (too fast) I thought those were the nicest people I had ever met, and the ironic laughter it provoked in us both, the car yawing. The obvious truth, people are people. Equally, the damage is never limited to perpetrator and victim. Also, that the crimes are not the sum of the criminal any more than anyone is entirely separable from their acts. I remember an afternoon at the iron pile at Transylvania watching the men quietly plait each other's hair between sets at the weight bench. When I asked about a man whose face was severely scarred, a very specific face, with large, direct aquamarine eyes, a guard told me that the man's brother had thrown a tire over his head and set it on fire. This I did not know how to absorb. It was a steaming day; the men were lifting weights and plaiting their hair. I remember Easter weekend at the women's prison. The day before, a long line formed outside the prison-run beauty shop. Inside, the women having their hair fixed were talking back to a soap opera on the small snowy screen. By visiting day the inner courtyard had been transformed into a theme park for the children. A trampoline had been rented, a cotton-candy machine; someone dressed in a bunny suit was organizing an egg hunt. The girls wore starched, flouncy dresses, and the boys white jackets and black, clip-on bow ties. The women were dressed up, too, even the ones shackled at ankle and waist. Deborah photographed all day, nonstop. Identifiable pictures of children would have to be excluded from publication, but people wanted a keepsake. We left before visiting hours ended. It wasn't our place to be there. It wasn't really in us to be there. Remember sitting in the frigid Holiday Inn bar near St. Gabriel, at the end of one visit to the women's prison, staring at the aquarium, not talking. Talking to a man who says he has done a lot of time. Lot of time. He should write a book, he says. He wants to be a success. "Hollywood, huh, here I come." Talking to a woman who says the one time her dad visited her from the Midwest, she asked him to look at her eyes. There was a look she didn't want to get, a faraway look. Her father pretended to examine her eyes, then told her they looked like the same old peepers to him. She passed her time reading. Same way she passed her childhood. She thought she was going to be an astronomer when she grew up. Not a felon. Both parents are dead now. Of her three sons, one disappeared, one died of suicide, and the third severed contact. One of the inmates at St. Gabriel informed me she wouldn't be around for visiting hours tomorrow because she was on the drill team. Also, her ex-husband would not be bringing her baby boy to see her. Not tomorrow, not ever. The grease burns, I am told by another inmate, are courtesy of her sister. Don't Walk On The Grass, says the sign posted in the inner yard. Then there's the bus that leaves from Monroe taking visitors to one of four neighboring pens, Al Derry's Prison Transport and Popcorn Balls. Evidently, the popcorn balls make it the competitive ride. Only in Louisiana. After a time. A lot of time. They stop coming. The free-worlders. They are too poor or too busy working or are already looking after others on the outside or their car is broken or they are too worn down or they move too far off or they get old, sick, and die. So the inmates wait for their turn. They aren't going anywhere. They have all the time there is. "The only continuity of our lives," wrote Malcolm Braly, American writer, American lifer, "was that we had none." "Waiting," goes the motto at St. Gabriel, "it's the LCIW way." I wrote a woman and asked whether she ever had any pets. She wrote back: Bandit, Baby, Snobby, Elsie, Bear (those were the dogs). Tiger and Fuzzball (the cats), Jill, Ben, and Junior (the coons). And a lot of unnamed fish, hamsters, rabbits, chickens, ducks, geese, guinea pigs, "and a deer, not really a pet but I finally coaxed to the point she would eat out of my hand." Not to idealize, not to judge, not to exonerate, not to aestheticize immeasurable levels of pain. Not to demonize, not anathematize. What I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time. I wanted it given to understand that when you pass four prisons in less than an hour, the countryside's apparent emptiness is more legible. It is an open, running comment when the only spike in employment statistics is being created by the supply of people crossing the line. I wanted the banter, the idiom, the soft-spoken cadence of Louisiana speech to cut through the mass-media myopia. I wanted the heat, the humidity, the fecundity of Louisiana to travel right up the body. What I wanted was to convey the sense of normalcy for which humans strive under conditions that are anything but what we in the free world call normal, no matter what we may have done for which we were never charged. The world of the prison system springs up adjacent to the free world. As the towns decline, the prisons grow. As industries disappear, prisons proliferate, state-funded prison-building surges are complemented by private-investment promising "to be an integral component of your corrections strategy," according to an industry founder. The interrelation of poverty, illiteracy, substance and physical abuse, mental illness, race, and gender to the prison population is blaring to the naked eye and borne out by the statistics. Of the developed nations, only Russia aspires to our rate of incarceration. And the Big Bear is a distant second. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, the warp in the mirror is of our making. The popular perception is that art is apart. I insist it is a part of. Something not in dispute is that people in prison are apart from. If you can accept—whatever level of discipline and punishment you adhere to momentarily set aside—that the ultimate goal should be to reunite the separated with the larger human enterprise, it might behoove us to see prisoners, among others, as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves. If we go there, if not with our bodies then at least our minds, we are more likely to register the implications. + + + I am going to prison. I am going to visit three prisons in Louisiana. I am going on the heels of my longtime friend Deborah Luster, a photographer. It is a summons. All roads are turning into prison roads. I already feel guilty. I haven't done anything. But I allow the mental pull in both directions. I am going to prison in order to write about it. Like a nineteenth-century traveler. Kafka put it this way, "Guilt is never to be doubted." Also: behind every anonymous number, a very specific face. Also: there are more than two million individuals, in this country, whose sentences have rendered them more or less invisible. Many of them permanently. First to Transylvania. Then Angola. Then St. Gabriel. These are their place-names Over the next year and a half Deborah Luster will photograph upwards of 1,500 inmates. I will make three trips. It is an almost imperceptible gesture, a flick of the conscience, to go, to see, but I will be wakeful. It is a summons.

Where the old trees reign with their forward dark light stares through a hole in the body’s long house. The bed rolls away from the body, and the body is forced to find a chair. At some hour the body sequesters itself in a shuttered room with no clock. When a clean sheet of paper floats by, the head inclines on its axis. It is one of those common bodies that felt it could not exist without loving, but has in fact gone on and on without love. Like a cave that has stopped growing, we don’t call it dead, but dormant. Now the body is on all fours, one arm engaged in pulling hair from a trap, an activity the body loathes. When the time comes, the body feeds on marinated meats and fruits trained to be luscious. Once the body had ambitions—to be tall and remain soft. No more, but it enjoys rappelling to the water. Because the body’s dwelling is stone, perched over water, we say the body is privileged. Akin to characters in Lawrence books, its livelihood is obscured. It owns a horse named Campaign it mounts on foggy morns. That was the body’s first lie. It has no horse and wouldn’t climb on one. Because the body lives so far from others, it likes reading about checkered lives on the metrópoli. It likes moving around at night under its dress. When it travels, bottles of lotion open in its bags. Early in March the big rains came—washing all good thoughts from the body’s cracks and chinks. By now the body admits it is getting on, and yet, continues to be tormented by things being the way they are. Recently the body took one of the old trees for a wife, but the union has broken down. The light has bored out of the body’s long house. Fog envelops its stone flanks. Still the body enjoys rappelling to the water. And it likes the twenty four-hour stores, walking up and down the aisles, not putting a thing in its basket.

The animals are leaving the safety of the trees Light sensors respond to the footfall of every guest To retard the growth of algae The fishes must be moved from the window Stiller than water she lies As in a glass dress As if all life might come to its end within the radius of her bed Beyond the reef of trees a beach cannot be seen the bay itself barely breathing In the other wing of the house a small boat awaits elucidation

A question posed to Flannery O'Connor, as to whether writing programs stifled writers, drew the famous, tart rejoinder that in her opinion they didn't stifle nearly enough. Even if, as it is often said, there are too many of us—poets, that is—that the field is too crowded (as opposed to too many hedge-fund managers or too many pharmaceutical lobbyists or too many fundamentalists), time, rejection, discouragement, and the inevitable practicalities and detours (some of them fortuitous), as well as wasted energy, the slow seepage or sudden shift of interest, premature death, burdensome debt or better offers, usually cure the problem of overpopulation. In other words, there are plenty of natural predators

My Dear Conflicted Reader, If you will grant me that most of us have an equivocal nature, and that when we waken we have not made up our minds which direc- tion we're headed; so that—you might see a man driving to work in a perfume- and dye-free shirt, and a woman with an overdone tan hold up an orange flag in one hand, a Virginia Slim in the other—as if this were their predestination. Grant me that both of them were likely contemplat- ing a different scheme of things. WHERE DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY the church marquee demands on the way to my boy's school, SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING. I admit I had not thought of where or which direction in exactly those terms. The radio ministry says g-o-d has a wrong-answer button and we are all waiting for it to go off... Count your grey hairs Count your chigger bites Count your pills Count the times the phone rings Count your T cells Count your mosquito bites Count the days since your last menses Count the chickens you've eaten Count your cankers Count the storm candles Count your stitches Count your broken bones Count the flies you killed before noon

I want to go home, Patricia whispered. I won't say I like being in prison, but I have learned a lot, and I like experiences. The terriblest part is being away from your families.—Juanita I miss my screenporch. I know every word to every song on Purple Rain.—Willie I'm never leaving here.—Grasshopper, in front of the woodshop, posing beside a coffin he built This is a kicks' camp. Nothing positive come out of here except the praying. Never been around this many women in my life. Never picked up cursing before.—down for manslaughter, forty years I've got three. One's seven. One, four. One, one. I'm twenty-three. The way I found out is, I was in an accident with my brother. He was looking at some boys playing ball. We had a head-on. At the hospital, the doctor says, Miss, why didn't you tell us you were pregnant. I'm pregnant? I wasn't afraid of my mama. I was afraid of my daddy. I was supposed to be a virgin. He took it real good though. The last time you was here I had a headful of bees. See what I did was, I accidentally killed my brother. He spoke without inflection. Asked how many brothers and sisters did he have— On my mother's side, two brothers, well now, one brother, and two sisters. On my father's side, fifteen sisters. When I handed Franklin his prints, his face broke. Damn, he said to no one,I done got old. I kept a dog. When you walk through Capricorn, keep your arms down and close to your body. That's my sign. No, she can't have no mattress. No, she can't have no spoon. See if she throwed her food yet. No, she can't have no more. I am only about thirty-four minutes from home. That's hard. —George, field line seated on a bag of peas on a flatbed My auntie works here, and two of my cousins. If I get in trouble, get a write-up, my mama knows before supper.—George My name is Patricia, but my real name is Zabonia, she spoke softly. Some have their baby and are brought back on the bus the next day and act like it doesn't bother them a bit. Some cry all the way. And for days.—guard That's hard. I don't go there. My mama was fifteen when she had me. That's common. in the country. Some can learn, and will be okay. Some could stay in the class forever and not learn. S── when she was a little girl was struck in the head with a machete, and I don't think she'll learn much more... She is so sweet. You wouldn't believe she had did all the things they say she did. Don't ask. My mug shot totally turned me against being photographed. I miss the moon. I miss silverware, with a knife, and maybe even something to cut with it. I miss a bathtub. And a toilet. With a lid. And a handle. And a door. When Grasshopper came to Big Gola his wife was pregnant. He saw the baby once. Next when he was twenty. Now he's inside. In Texas. Second time. But he's short now. He'll get out soon. That's hard. I don't go there. I miss driving. We're both here because of love.—Zabonia of herself and her best friend I am highly hypnotizable. I would wash that man's feet and drink the water.

Count your fingers Count your toes Count your nose holes Count your blessings Count your stars (lucky or not) Count your loose change Count the cars at the crossing Count the miles to the state line Count the ticks you pulled off the dog Count your calluses Count your shells Count the points on the antlers Count the newjack's keys Count your cards; cut them again

Count heads. Count the men's. Count the women's. There are five main counts in the cell or work area. 4:45 first morning count. Inmate must stand for the count. The count takes as long as it takes. Control Center knows how many should be in what area. No one moves from area A to area B without Control knowing. If i/m is stuck out for the count i/m receives a write-up. Three write-ups, and i/m goes to lockdown. Once in lockdown, you will relinquish your things:                         plastic soapdish, jar of vaseline, comb or hairpick, paperback                                 Upon return to your unit the inventory officer will return your things:                                 soapdish, vaseline, comb, hairpick, paperback                                 Upon release you may have your possessions:                                 soapdish, vaseline, comb, pick, book                         Whereupon your True Happiness can begin In the Mansion of Happiness: Whoever possesses CRUELTY Must be sent back to JUSTICE Whoever gets into IDLENESS Must come to POVERTY Whoever becomes a SABBATHBREAKER Must be taken to the Pillory and there remain until he loses 2 turns

I back the car over a soft, large object; hair appears on my chest in dreams. The paperboy comes to collect with a pit bull. Call Grandmother and she says, Well you know death is death and none other. In the mornings we’re in the dark; even at the end of June the zucchini keep on the sill. Ring Grandmother for advice and she says, O you know I used to grow so many things. Then there’s the frequent bleeding, the tender nipples, and the rot under the floormat. If I’m not seeing a cold-eyed doctor it is another gouging mechanic. Grandmother says, Thanks to the blue rugs and Eileen Briscoe’s elms the house keeps cool. Well. Then. You say Grandmother let me just ask you this: How does a body rise up again and rinse her mouth from the tap. And how does a body put in a plum tree or lie again on top of another body or string a trellis. Or go on drying the flatware. Fix rainbow trout. Grout the tile. Buy a bag of onions. Beat an egg stiff. Yes, how does the cat continue to lick itself from toenail to tailhole. And how does a body break bread with the word when the word has broken. Again. And. Again. With the wine. And the loaf. And the excellent glass of the body. And she says, Even. If. The. Sky. Is. Falling. My. Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom.

If this is Wednesday, write Lazartigues, return library books, pick up passport form, cancel the paper. If this is Wednesday, mail B her flyers and K her shirts. Last thing I asked as I walked K to her car, “You sure you have everything?” “Oh yes,” she smiled, as she squalled off. Whole wardrobe in front closet. Go to Morrison’s for paint samples, that’s where housepainter has account (near Pier One), swing by Gano St. for another bunch of hydroponic lettuce. Stop at cleaners if there’s parking. Pap smear at 4. After last month with B’s ear infections, can’t bear sitting in damn doctor’s office. Never a magazine or picture on the wall worth looking at. Pack a book. Ever since B born, nothing comes clear. My mind like a mirror that’s been in a fire. Does this happen to the others. If this is Wednesday, meet Moss at the house at noon. Pick B up first, call sitter about Friday evening. If she prefers, can bring B to her (hope she keeps the apartment warmer this year). Need coat hooks and picture hangers for office. Should take car in for air filter, oil change. F said one of back tires low. Don’t forget car payment, late last two months in a row. If this is Wednesday, there’s a demo on the green at 11. Took B to his first down at Quonset Point in August. Blue skies. Boston collective provided good grub for all. Long column of denims and flannel shirts. Smell of patchouli made me so wistful, wanted to buy a woodstove, prop my feet up, share a J and a pot of Constant Comment with a friend. Maybe some zucchini bread. Meet with honors students from 1 to 4. At the community college I tried to incite them to poetry. Convince them this line of work, beat the bejesus out of a gig as gizzard splitter at the processing plant or cleaning up after a leak at the germ warfare center. Be all you can be, wrap rubber band around your trigger finger until it drops off. Swim at 10:00 before picking up B, before demo on the green, and before meeting moss, if it isn’t too crowded. Only three old women talking about their daughters-in-law last Wednesday at 10:00. Phone hardware to see if radon test arrived. Keep an eye out for a new yellow blanket. Left B’s on the plane, though he seems over it already. Left most recent issue of Z in the seat. That will make a few businessmen boil. I liked the man who sat next to me, he was sweet to B. Hated flying, said he never let all of his weight down. Need to get books in the mail today. Make time pass in line at the P.O. imagining man in front of me butt naked. Fellow in the good-preacher-blue-suit, probably has a cold, hard bottom. Call N for green tomato recipe. Have to get used to the Yankee growing season. If this is Wednesday, N goes in hospital today. Find out how long after marrow transplant before can visit. Mother said she read in paper that Pete was granted a divorce. His third. My highschool boyfriend. Meanest thing I could have done, I did to him, returning a long-saved-for engagement ring in a Band-Aid box, while he was stationed in Da Nang. Meant to tell F this morning about dream of eating grasshoppers, fried but happy. Our love a difficult instrument we are learning to play. Practice, practice. No matter where I call home anymore, feel like a boat under the trees. Living is strange. This week only; bargain on laid paper at East Side Copy Shop. Woman picking her nose at the stoplight. Shouldn’t look, only privacy we have anymore in the car. Isn’t that the woman from the colloquium last fall, who told me she was a stand-up environmentalist. What a wonderful trade, I said, because the evidence of planetary wrongdoing is overwhelming. Because because because of the horrible things we do. If this is Wednesday, meet F at Health Department at 10:45 for AIDS test. If this is Wednesday, it’s trash night.