Monday's Poem Susannah Martin — Hanged as a Witch In the forest she gave me this poem © Bill Gough An empty pumpkin drained and folded upon a rock is, by winter draped, where I am emptied by the early morning fallen empty to the ground this ground my father plowed this ground that plowed me under under the maps and wills and boundary lines. I, a mere woman, was to have the land, the land was to be mine and men would not let the moonlight give the lands to hands the world would say weren't mine; these curling hands that stooked the hay and milked the cows and held the bucket that dipped the moon from the well that carried stars on water until my eyes were dizzy with the look of stars on water and instead of bringing water deep into the farmhouse I spun around and my skirt was at the circles edge and I was the center of the spin and I stopped and all the moons and stars and skies spun around me until I twirled the bucket in lazy loops over my head and down and round and no drops were spilled and my arm was a spinning whirly-gig and no drops spilled — no stars fell out. The land, it was said, should not be mine, a woman at the center of the moon a woman who in the night could lift her eyes and move into the moon a woman who could feel the mantle of the trees rest light upon my shoulders and spill along my back my hair released from braids swimming down my back back to the house that was so empty , empty of the moon, empty of the stars empty of the trees and night a tree is in the fireplace moved to order by the sharp edge of the world cut by straight lines by straight hanging lines. How I got my reputation for being dangerous was simple enough. One morning I looked and saw the world and at the same time saw how men had taken straight lines where no straight line existed in the world and cut the face and bosom of the earth with their straight lines. My mother soft and curved and skirt wrinkled spread in a circle around her made no straight lines when she gazed out at the land and I was at her rounded breast and her nipple made a long circle for my lips and her milk spilled, and washed a flood into my mouth and a gush down my throat. Men looked at the land and they held guns and the guns were straight and aimed at the sun, dark lines against the sky while other men joined lines across the land, and anywhere the land was crooked they set it straight and began measuring for meadows and began cutting down trees and straightened them out with the straight line of two-handed cross-cut saws and ripped the circles from the edges and burned the branches, and didn't notice the smoke would not rise straight the smoke would curl and clasp the sun and tickle trees. I was older and one morning saw all the edges that men had placed to cut the heart of the world. My father, belt buckle angled metal and, sharp knife at his belt, fence-lines drawn across the land with hammer in his hand hit long straight nails to hammer the world together to hammer the world straight. When I learned the land could be mine, I knew that I could set it free. I told them I would tear down the house and make it as rounded as an owl's wing I would tear down the barn and make it curled and curved like a squirrels tail, spiraled as the head of a ram and there would be no fences, and even the well would go because it was a straight tube drilled into the eyes of the world to make her cry. The land, they said, the men who keep the world straight — like a road that does not wander, is not to be yours and told the court that only a witch would want such roundness only a witch knew how to climb inside the moon. What is a witch they asked? A witch is she who does not want the world to be ordered and controlled, who thinks each tree a living thing and will not see a tree as plank and will not see a tree as table and chair and sharp-edged buckboard. It is she who may worship what is seen. This witch, they said, must have one straight line, one that takes her where she is to go in a straight line to death. This is the law of man and straight-edged bible. Why, said I, this bible is a crooked book a curved book — see, here, the Jesus you talk of stopped hands that were to throw sharp rocks ... She blasphemes they said ... and Jesus loved, to his heart, women. He loved a whore I say loved her and threw the bankers from his father's house the straight line clank of money gone as gold clattered your gold is not true gold I told them it is gold of hearts like a small hard house all corners. The devil cannot catch a person unless there is a corner... She speaks of devils she says she lives inside the moon she blows the dust from water before she drinks. Oh see the curves — Let us tear down houses and see the swell of the earth beneath them. And they close their ears — they hard-hand straight edge press to block the sound and stop my voice. They lead me to the scaffold they hold me by the arms and buckle my arms so my arms are an angle they lead me from a room. This room now holds an ocean where the clouds roll towards your eyes. You stand before my house, this slate-tipped house of rope and gargoyle of steps that lead through circles of rope. A railing of rope burns. A straight line of rope pulls taut. This house holds my hands so much my hands that they stretch towards you on arms of stacked sweet stones tombstone arms. Bones brittle moss bones soup bones bones laid on your shoulder. I am here holding you by the shoulders because.... ....because there is no straight line to your heart is there? Your heart is round I know it must be with blood curve if you hear me this far away your ears swirling inwards to the curves and earth-tone of your middle ear and you have heard me my voice round and warm between the years. That night the night of the hanging this night the night you hear me blood shadows are spilled by the moon to smoke and burn in icy fire. Ice candles drip near houses. A distant dog is eating time. What empties now goes in the moon. Midnight the world adjusts her tuning and snow flings blood-lace like maple sugar across the snow. Snow drifts my hair my lips my eyebrows. This is where I go when they hang me. This is where I land when the rope swings me like a pale pumpkin above the world. Where you walk I place my feet. My words are on your tongue as gentle as a host of cloud hot as iron as tipped as the sudden dropping of a hatch. My eye holds reflections of fallen pumpkins the sun rises inside my open eyes and warms the lids and they close. The field once empty has at its center forgotten spring clouds slumped pumpkins long wet hay bundled by the snow I am emptied by the morning snowed over a drift beside the pumpkins. I fell through clouds into an ocean — I splashed into your rope-bursting heart — your eyes filled with me and I now live inside the salt upon your cheeks. I am small drops of water steaming salt into the snow. I am the spaces in snow soft as a doily held between the eyes and the eye sight of the first spring light.

Bill Gough Is from Newfoundland, now living with wife & partner Caren Moon on Vancouver Island. He teaches at Malaspina University-College in the Creative Writing Department. Photo by G.R. Snyder. Bill Gough: This poem began at Goddard College in Vermont while I was working on my MFA — and a voice spoke to me in the upper garden of the college. I learned later that the land was once owned by the woman of the voice — she who is in my poem. She was tried in Salem as a witch — and hanged there in 1692. The poem formed in that upper garden; shifted through my time at Goddard, and arrived in its current form on Salt Spring Island.