The terra cotta girl
With the big flat farm feet
The opening lines establish identity in both a specific and general way. The girl can assumed to be waiting to see the counselor from the title, but nothing much else about her can be known for certain. The only genuinely specific description of her at all is that that she’s got skin the color of the burnished golden-brown of terra cotta tile, large feet with low arches and, presumably, comes from rural stock. These lines serve to create an immediate idea of what the girl looks—that comes mostly from stereotype. If you think you know what a farm girl looks like, you are likely basing that image on media presentations. The specific image the overwhelming majority of people will develop is thus actually just as generalized as the description. This is a wonderful example of a poet exploiting information people think they have to facilitate efficiency. Rather than using twenty or thirty words that would probably have resulted in the same effect, the poet uses half or even a third as many words, losing nothing in the process.
reads an existentialist paperback
from psychology class,
finds no ease there
The same device used again. The big-footed “farm girl” is waiting to see some sort of counselor and reading a book assigned by a teacher. Without being told specifically that this is true, the connection of “existentialist” to “psychology class” allows this image of the girl to become slightly sharper. Almost certainly, this means the girl is in college since the assumption is going to be that many high schools probably don’t even have a psychology class and even if they did…why would she be reading an existentialist paperback? After all, Existentialism is a school of philosophy, not psychology, right? Only when moving into a more sophisticated level of application would existentialist ideas veer into the discipline of psychology. Then again, maybe the girl is just confused. Maybe the reason she is finding no ease in the paperback is that she is facing a philosophical crisis rather than a psychological one. Economy of words, yet a world of potential ambiguity.
from the guilt of loving
the quiet girl down the hall.
The most simple, direct and straightforward lines of the poem. The one aspect going on here with no ambiguity is what is causing the problem that the girl looks to ease by reading books about psychology or philosophy. She’s wracked by guilt of one kind or another at falling in love with a woman rather than a man.
Their home soil has seen to this visit,
their Baptist mothers,
who weep for the waste of sturdy hips
ripe for grandchildren.
The final lines complete the poem as a tour de force of using implied and assumed knowledge to fill in the missing information. The reference to Baptist mothers should automatically allow most American readers at any rate to situate this poem as taking place in the South; specifically a rural (farm girl) part of the South. That connection should in turn allow for readers with even just the slightest familiarity with history to make the connection between childbearing hips being wasted the love between two women to the more fundamentally conservative population of the rural South. With surprisingly precious little actual discriminating evidence provided, a typical reader should easily be able to make the leap toward understanding exactly what kind of “counseling” the girl is going to receive once she moves from waiting room to office. Even though it might well be argued as completely specious and unfounded reasoning, the internal logic of received stereotypes make it is “obvious” to those connecting the dots that this is a fundamental Baptist counselor well-versed in the therapy of deprogramming those who have made wrong choices concerning their sexual orientation. This conclusion makes perfect sense, of course, but the truth is that in a court of law, it wouldn’t have a leg to stand on based on the evidence provided in the actual verse.
