by Carol Barrett
On reading Vivian Gornick’s Women In Science
years after her Woman In Sexist Society
That first book named the dark, Vivian, the light
on my own thighs at daybreak, how I poured first lines
into the cup on Miss Slemmer’s desk, wrapped my throat
in my skirt when an unnamed man left me to the woods.
You called flesh what it is, poor semblance of life,
spelled our dove names in feathers, in blood, wrote
our flight from the scarlet stump. Now, tracking
these women to their beakers, their notebooks,
pungent cells, you dare leave their names untold?
The one trained to the question: will it bring you
nearer to God? It matters, Vivian, her name.
Matters whether the woman paired to the man
who divided the animal kingdom between them,
claiming fish, toads and possum for his own,
assigning her the cockroaches in the basement,
it matters whether she is Naomi or Ruth.
The woman who did not wear tweeds, wear oxfords,
who climbed stone stairs in sandaled feet: it matters
the house where she stirred her coffee, molecules
dancing, pirouettes in equations the next day in lab.
It matters the town where she goes for groceries,
stopping the evening light to lift a butterfly
from coarse pavement onto the grass, matters
the name of the roses her grandmother pruned
off the back stoop, the ones she gathered
and chopped with a curved blade in a wooden bowl,
testing the color of juice in a handful of summer rain.
Matters the name of the tower, the pitted clock
where a secretary checks on another’s rightful tenure:
the men kept her too long, they’ve lost, she’s won.
Give us their names! The slips of their stories
press our cut lips like shame. You ask what constitutes
a lived life: not a body chemistry, Vivian, a name.
***
Carol Barrett has published three volumes of poetry, including Calling in the Bones, which won the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry press. She supervises doctoral research in gender studies and several other interdisciplinary fields. Her poetry has appeared in magazines in Britain, Germany, Israel, the Virgin Islands, as well as Canada and the U.S. An NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol has also placed poems in over fifty anthologies.