Samuel Washington Allen Prize, selected by Danielle Legros Georges
Carolyne Wright’s most recent books are Masquerade, a memoir in poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021) and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009. She has nine earlier books and chapbooks of poetry; a ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), which received ten Pushcart Prize nominations; and five award-winning volumes of poetry in translation from Spanish and Bengali—the latest of which is Map Traces, Blood Traces / Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre (Mayapple Press, 2017), a bilingual sequence of poems by Seattle-based Chilean poet, Eugenia Toledo (Finalist for the 2018 Washington State Book Award in Poetry, and for the 2018 PEN Los Angeles Award in Translation). Carolyne has served as Visiting Poet and professor of Creative Writing at colleges and universities throughout the U.S., including Harvard, Radcliffe, Emory University and the University of Miami. She returned in 2005 to her native Seattle, where she teaches for Richard Hugo House, the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program (from 2005 until the program’s closure in 2016), and for national and international literary conferences and festivals. A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, Carolyne lived in Chile and traveled in Brazil on a Fulbright Study Grant; she returned to Brazil in 2018 for an Instituto Sacatar artist’s residency in Bahia. She has also received grants from the NEA, 4Culture, and Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, among others. A Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award took her back to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, for two months in mid-2022, and for another two months later in 2023 or 2024.
Bahia
“Of course I may be remembering it all wrong . . .”
—Elizabeth Bishop, “Santarém”
Of course I remember everything all wrong
—you Orixás who protected me—after all these years.
That season of Carnaval I wanted to stay on,
more than anything I longed to keep on
extending those weeks of blessed madness,
renting a modest room in the Pensão
São João: how did I find such a place,
what a mouthful of sounds I yearned
to master in that name! I intoned them
silently as I gazed up at the curlicue-d Baroque
of the hand-tinted signboard: a shabby-genteel B & B
—at what address? Mestre Pitta asks me: a Avenida
Sete de Setembro? A Antiga Baixa dos Sapateiros?
A Baixa dos Sapateiros—street that gave its name
to composer Ary Barroso’s famous lament: “. . . Ah, Bahia,
Bahia que não me sai do pensamento não. . .”
Bahia that never leaves my thoughts.
Somehow I never kept that address.
Wasn’t it on one of those means-business
mean streets somewhere beyond the Pelourinho?
A cobbled lane lined with tall, dingy edifices
too new for charm, too old for mint condition
—cheap steel and vitrines of jaundice-yawing
rainbow—canyons of perpetual shadow
upside colonial, sun-flooded Barroquinha?
A lane lined with shingles of freight inspectors,
oculists, and shops with fabric by the yard?
I open the old map that separates along its folds
and falls apart in hands still capable
of grasping, of seeking a reason
for this history:
. . . um amor que perdi na Bahia
vou contar. . . Who was that love, never mine,
I had followed here? Never mind.
Mestre, you understand—you followed
your own love to her distant country
where you knew no one and spoke
not one word of the language.
In your distant country, I rose every morning
with the January sun and drumming
of street percussionists, bolted
coffee and toast, and dashed out into Salvador’s
resplendent day, hoping to run into him
in those random passings on the footpath—
that elaborate pretense of coincidence
I convinced myself I’d perfected.
Flower-pattern lenço on my head,
white muslin blouse through which the sea
breeze filtered, swirled skirt the color
of undulations on All Saints’ Bay
—in my own untutored way, I wanted
to honor Iemanjá, the only Orixá
I knew of then, and I had nothing
but myself that anyone could have wanted.
I trace a finger along the streets splayed open
on the old map, streets still as steeply canted
as I recall them, where I swayed down colonial
cobblestones—deeply fissured in places and spattered
with sudden rain. I kept on catching myself
mid-stumble, like a novice dancer not yet practiced
in a new routine. How I tried to mimic moves
of Bahian girls! Those golden-skinned moças
and meninas, my own skin burning under sun-screen
and impossibly pale. Could I have camouflaged in plain sight
surrounded by so much sun-inflected laughter?
Rapt in their own magic and arrayed in the rhythms
of festival-tempered speech, everyone in the streets
ignored me. Late mornings, I lingered between stalls
of the Mercado Modelo. Outside: open-air displays
of vegetables and fruit, baskets of fresh-caught fish
and chickens hanging by their feet, still in their brilliant
fantasias of feathers. Lunch was pão de queijo
and batidas of mango, guava, pineapple and passion fruit—
I savored the taste of native syllables
in such blends: manga, goiaba, abacaxí, maracujá.
In the Upper City, Terreiro de Jesus, I watched capoeira players
touch hands, turn and feint, swivel-kick and hover
in their spell-slow cartwheels, fast whirls and loops,
others waiting their turns to play, clapping
and chanting in the roda, the berimbau moaning
ancient orations on its single string.
You might have been one of them,
Mestre, in lean days of reaping dust from trouble
when you had to choose between trolley fare
to your classes or that one solid meal a day, rice
and beans from a food-stall in the square.
In that same square, I admired how the men
played—capoeiristas all male in those days
—restless and at rest together, barefoot
and bare-legged, lanky and hunger-haunted,
ebony torsos gleaming with sweat
and tensile flourish: capoeira the apex
and nadir of my stranger’s struggle to justify
my presence here—not then for anyone
who had dawned like me.
But the women!
—statuesque in head-wraps, strands of cowrie
and mother-of-pearl—calling out the responses,
their skirts of aquamarine and white lace widened
under bustles, hems sweeping the circle’s
circumference in the full sun of the square.
But, you ask, that love of mine?
Who was almost never present but whose presence
in my vague desires gave shape and form
to all the hours I wandered through the city?
One morning—Sunday of Carnaval?—he showed up
at breakfast, grabbed my hand and led me out
to dance the whole day, following street by steeply
cobbled street in the trio elétrico’s clangorous
wake. Was it that evening—after the swelter
of samba blessed with sweat and cachaça’s
cane-sharp daze—we stumbled on to the bonde,
the old trolley that ran from where?
—Bonfim?—to Porto da Barra and the beach.
Praia da Barra, ah! That sole wild night
in the dunes we struggled each other moonless
almost out of our clothes, till the fisherman
with cerveja on his breath stumbled over us
and shouted, shaking his net knife in our faces
till we clambered to our feet, trembling
and begging his pardon, wrapping our salt-damp
clothes around us. All the way back
on the bonde in the percussive languor
of samba schools—his gaze upon my shadowed,
pearlescent face and salt-bidden limbs
—then to my room where he took me again
and again between the fraying sheets
and syncopated whistles of the street blocos,
then turned away, weary of his own reluctant
willingness to please me. He rose, dressed,
and stepped out the battered blue door
into the rest of his life.
I lay in the dark for hours
in a nowhere swoon. I understood then
the man didn’t matter. No one in the world
who loved me knew where I was in that glistening
thrill, cradling myself naked and unafraid,
abandoned to the patron saints of nakedness
between thin walls and the perilous exhalations
of Carnaval calling me to the lost flesh of myself.
Bahia, page 5
Mestre Pitta, this story has captured your imagination!
You tease me every time, you keep the images alive
inside me, but you don’t break the bounds
of my saudade or my life-long desire
to understand what I was doing then, or how
the Orixás were watching over me.
Mestre, Iemanjá protected me that night—I think
you know this, so you keep your teasing light.
I caught the long-haul bus next day,
I was going back to myself,
back to the country I came from.