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Interview with poet David Armand, by Dixon Hearne
DELTA POETRY REVIEW: Thank you for
sitting down with us today. I know you’re a very busy
person: full-time teaching responsibilities, a family,
everyday life. All that and you’ve still somehow managed
to publish six books in under ten years. Not to mention
multiple journal publications in almost every genre
there is. How do you do it?
DAVID ARMAND: Well, people ask me that all the time.
They either assume I’m neglecting one of my
responsibilities or that I’m just some superhuman
machine. The fact is that neither one of those
assumptions is correct. I mean, look: there are
twenty-four hours every day and we have seven of those
days each week. If you know what things to make a
priority, it’s really not that hard to do the math. I
simply make writing one of my priorities by
incorporating it into my everyday routine.
Read more...
Blume with Chicken, January 1986, Lowndes County,
Mississippi
—after a photograph by
Birney Imes
It’s been a long night. The morning
comes up slow and gray.
And cold. You can almost hear all
the rust settle and crack
on the old appliances lined up
against the cinderblock walls,
the grease-darkened windows settling
in their frames.
And Old Man Blume Triplett standing
out there in the gravel lot
of what was once his daddy’s
store—Whispering Pines, he called it,
though I can’t say for sure I’ve
ever heard a pine tree whisper.
Maybe creak and growl in a hurricane
but not whisper. Trees
around here are too tall and proud
for that. Anyway, back to the point:
He’s got a cigar in his mouth, the
stub left over from after breakfast.
Same thing he has every day: two
eggs (runny), two pieces of toast (burnt),
and four strips of bacon (shimmering
in their own hot grease). His doctor
said all of this will kill him one
day, but Blume just said, “What won’t?”
The flannel jacket he’s wearing does
just enough to keep off the cold,
but does well too to cover those
faded blue tattoos on his forearms—
the ones he got in Hawaii when he
was in the navy, the only time he ever left
Mississippi. The only time he ever
plans to. You fight for your country
when it calls on you, his daddy had
told him. And so he did.
And now he takes care of the old
store, even though it’s closed down
and dead, waiting for the ground to
take it back to dirt and loam and rock.
But he still keeps it up while he
can. He just spraypainted one of the letters
in the sign yesterday, as a matter
of fact—the white outline of the “G” still
stenciled over the gravel like one
of his old tattoos.
Blume stands there holding
a hen in his arms, stroking the soft
golden-brown feathers of her neck as she takes
in the warmth of him. Just like a
child would. But Blume never had any children.
It’s just him and the bird and this
run-down store his daddy left him when he died.
And it’s a cold, cold day for
Mississippi, and they’ll both take all the heat they can
get.
Man with Mouthless Fish, Phillip, Mississippi, 1982
—after a photograph by
Birney Imes
That old clock on the wall in her
daddy’s store has been stuck
on the same time for ten years.
3:04, it says.
And people can’t remember anymore if
it stopped
in the morning or in the afternoon.
Carl likes to tell the
little girl
that they stopped it on the day she
was born. To mark the occasion.
She’s always liked that little
story. She’s always liked Carl, too.
In fact, she calls him Uncle Carl,
and she lets him help her bait her lines
when they all go fishing on the
mornings when she doesn’t have school.
After they get back, her daddy lets
her pick whatever she wants
off the shelf: Snickers, Now &
Later, Butterfingers, a bottle of Coke.
But first, as dawn fingers the black
line of pine trees hugging the shoals,
they’ll fish, casting their lines and nets into the
Little Tallahatchie,
the river stretching wide and dark
in places, logs easing over its surface:
a thick brown milk teeming with
catfish and other things unseen, floating
all the way down from
who-knows-where,
the little girl likes to
imagine.
She thinks on those things as she
stands behind the cooler in her daddy’s store,
watching him and Uncle Carl as they
show off the fish they caught today.
Her daddy had scooped it up with a
net, and they had all marveled
at its deformities: no mouth, a
cataracted eye, no fins to speak of.
How did it survive this long, the
little girl wonders:
all that dark, dark water above it,
pushing down on it as it inched its way
through riversilt and the myriad
ribs of sand as that thick brown string of water
turned and curved and fanned itself
out into its own wild version of an open gaping mouth?
Stoop
Hermanville, Mississippi, 1981
—after a photograph by Birney
Imes
The concrete stoop is cracked, a
fissure like a broken bone
running right across its lower half:
a toothless, crooked smile.
Its surface is spackled with damp
cigarette butts, a can of Bud
resting between a set of workboots,
greasy and dust-skeined.
A group of men sits there—behind
them a spine of stairs,
some of the wooden slats missing,
others warped and aged
but all of them leading up into
darkness, to some hovel maybe,
where most of these men go to sleep
off their day’s labors,
only to wake up tomorrow and do it
all over again.
One man is tossing a boiled peanut
into his mouth. Another one
screws the cap onto a plastic bottle
of Coke. They’re talking.
Trying to push the worries of the
day beneath the surface,
like the alluvium that shifts and
flows under all of that concrete
and how it could all just disappear
with one really good spell of rain.
Yet there’s one man whose eyes you
can’t quite see. He’s wearing
a denim shirt, jeans spattered with
grease and paint. A nub
of cigarette juts out from his
fingers. And he’s completely still—
so still that you can make out the
words on his hat. It’s an old trucker’s hat,
askew on his head, and it says, in
white letters, “Here I Am.”
The Pink Pony Cafe, Darling, Mississippi, 1985
—after a photograph by
Birney Imes
A young girl. Framed inside of a
wooden doorway.
But there’s no door. And nothing but
black behind her.
She’s wearing a pink shirt, a red jacket, a red belt.
Jeans.
Looking out from the threshold of a
building that’s made
of broken red bricks, rusted sheet
metal, a stained screen
covering this place’s one filthy
window. Which looks
down and onto a muddy yard littered
with cans,
brown bottles, and crumpled batons
of aluminum foil:
leftovers from last night’s dinner.
There’s an upended chair on the
roof. Did the same wind
that bent all the tin eaves upward
like that—
covering the sign that says “Pink
Pony Cafe”
so that you can hardly make out the
gray letters anymore—
toss that chair up there? You could ask the girl
who’s standing in the doorway, but
she’s distracted.
Her family’s already started dinner,
their long shadows
cast across the brick and wood like
the last remnants
of an atomic blast, that bright
flash leaving
nothing behind but an image on a wall:
a bench, a mother, a father. Their
children.
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