Straight Back Chair, by Carol Lipszyc

Straighback Chair, the Home Place, photograph by Wright Morris (USA). 1947.

Straight Back Chair

wall in colourless grey
across the dented floor   tiles in a hexagon pattern
map of lost footprints

framing the shot   a straight back chair
seat chipped down the middle -  small tectonic
plate of earth broken

but for the looped carving on its wood panel
the chair is lean   its lines simple

its temperament - if that can be said about a chair -
obstinate

knob on the old farm door is smooth, round
decades earlier, his wife entered in her bib apron,
motioned in mild admonition
that dinner was set on the table

If he had stayed there, sitting on the straight back chair
in fading light and shadow
his backbone poking through the spindles
could he foresee the next crop of corn   wage a deal with God
for a full reaping of grain   smooth his palms against the flatland
in a benediction

for plain-clothed farmers
who bore down
on chairs like these?

Carol Lipszyc
​
Carol Lipszyc has produced works across genres. Her eighty-poem anthology on plural facets of the heart, The Heart is Improvisational, was published by Guernica in the fall of 2017. Her book of lyrical poetry, Singing Me Home, published in 2010, and her book of short stories on children and adolescents in the Holocaust, The Saviour Shoes and Other Stories, (2014) were published by Inanna. Earning her Doctorate in Education at OISE, University of Toronto, Carol has published scholarship in arts-based education journals in Australia, New Zealand, England, and Canada. Her Literacy/ESL Reader with chants, People Express, was published by Oxford University Press. Carol is currently an Associate Professor in the English Department at SUNY, Plattsburgh.