At the Altar

By Eleanor Ross Taylor 1920–2011

That bag you packed me

when you sent me

to the universe—

camp after camp I’ve opened it

debating whether to unpack—

Not yet, not yet—

Why did I feel so much in it

was dangerous on the playground,

too good for everyday,

feel those splendid fireworks

hazardous to institutions,

unmannerly to etiquette,

so that, time after time,

I found myself saying

Not yet?

At each new place I faced it,

it suggested,

Here spread out your things,

put on this coat,

open this bottle—

No, not yet . . .

sometimes throwing something out,

giving things away,

lightening my load. . . .

The more I pull out,

the more it seems, some days,

is left inside,

the heavier it is.

Sometimes I think this package

is almost a door

the opening of which

careening across heaven

could be fatal.

Some days now I wonder if I’ll ever

dare face my given garments—

permanently wrinkled,

surely out of date—

your travel-thought

wasting in its tissue, flesh-corrupt—

till I’ve absorbed it,

like those stitches that dissolve

in an incision

where something’s been removed.

Source: Captive Voices (Louisiana State University Press, 2009)

Biography

Eleanor Ross Taylor was born in 1920 in Norwood, North Carolina, and graduated from Women’s College, now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in 1942. While studying at Vanderbilt University, Caroline and Allen Tate introduced her to novelist Peter Taylor, whom she would marry in 1943. Her poetry has been described as elegiac, lyric and feminine; writer Erica Howsare explains, “The southernness of her background . . .

Continue reading this biography