Iron Woman

IRON WOMAN"

I knew I came from a different place,
a story cut apart with scissors.
I would find a piece of rust in the morning
or a shape in a field through a fog.
I would hear a broken language
as if spoken by a woman
with a bird's nest on her head,
long pieces of iron welded for her buckskin.
She wears a mosquito mask,
a crooked twig for a nose.
Her teeth sewn together with close white threads.
I hear her small voice
from the bird's nest on her head.
It once lived in a pile of fallen limbs & brush
hauled to the field to burn after an ice storm.
Her voice rises in the trail of smoke
& mixes with mine in air.
It takes a while to speak with these two voices
as it takes a while to walk on two feet
each one going the other way.


Diane Glancy

From Iron Woman (1990). Used with permission of the author.

This collection of sixty-two poems won the 1988 Capricorn Poetry Prize. The Iron Woman of the title refers to a Noguchi sculpture on the Macalester College campus. When walking past this sculpture, Glancy hears "old footsteps of the ancestors in the leaves of autumn" and is struck with "a sense of loss." She dedicates this collection to the Iron Woman statue or, more exactly, to "the 'remains' of a heritage" evoked by its presence. This second printing of the first edition was limited to 1000 copies.