Dolefully, A Rampart Stands

“Pity is the rage of the lazy,” declares a mulberry bush, one of several observers of human behavior in the rural Northeastern town that Paige Ackerson-Kiely evokes in Dolefully, A Rampart Stands. Some of these resident witnesses are human—a police officer, a man working in a nondescript office, a churchgoer—and some, like the mulberry tree, other plants, a trestle—are not. Some of the speakers are unnamed and disembodied voices. All share a penchant for aphorism and sharp, elliptical diction that pulls you into a bleak landscape laced with the sense of menace. The collection’s opening poem, “Inventory of Ramparts,” establishes the recurrence of violence as a hallmark of the habitat:

The pier shed its long
splinters into the lake.

A dinghy rubbed the side of the dock
but the dock was still.

Some kids ditched a canoe in the reeds
—the boy’s voice was a reed—

they pulled it up the embankment by a rope
where no one could see it from water

or shore. His voice covered everything.
This isn’t an opportunity to talk about the body,

how many dogs you get to have over
the course of a life.

“This isn’t an occasion to talk / about the body,” the speaker reiterates a few lines later, although the body—as corpse, evidence, and ghost—continues to haunt this character and the others. This speaker goes on to ruminate about the boy’s death and dogs who appear often throughout the collection, and who, like their human counterparts, do not fare well but are everywhere, adding to the sense of imminent threat and barely tamed wildness.

The body takes many forms in the collection’s narrative, but the consciousness framing the story strikes me as female-informed and feminist, whether the character is a male worker having harassing thoughts about a female coworker in “Work as a Man” or the speaker in “Folding Chairs” who fears that she will continue to burn the supper and that she hasn’t made enough for everyone, right after noting that “the anger will surface once families get home, / kick off their boots in the mudroom.”

In “Work as a Man,” and the long noir poem, “Book About a Candle Burning in a Shed,” Ackerson-Kiely’s critique of patriarchal thinking reveals itself through the male characters’ thoughts, which focus on possession of women and veer into emotional and physical violence. The speaker in “Work as a Man” refers repeatedly to his coworker as “my girl,” while expressing jealousy over the coworker’s receiving attention from other men, while the police officer narrating “Book About Candle” obsesses over a dead murder victim whom he conflates (at least in his consciousness) with an ex-girlfriend.

Narrated by a police officer who is conducting a murder investigation on his own time, “Book About a Candle Burning in a Shed” comprises a series of prose poems delivered in a sinuous voice marked by slippery self-and-other characterization. The officer refers to his ex-girlfriend and his girlfriend interchangeably, as his investigation takes him to the eponymous shed with its ever-burning candle. As with Ackerson-Kiely’s other images, this title phrase delivers an apt and unsettling metaphor with the candle in the shed emblematizing the dead girl’s life: slight, ripe for going up in flames, unprotected from the elements and human trespass.

One reads this noir poem partly to find out who did what, and who is who (at times, the narrator appears to be the murderer due to his obsessive interest in the victim and his desire to erase some of the evidence of her life), but more in the end for the language, which encompasses lofty lyric, pithy insight, and regionally specific detail. During one of his visits to the shed, the officer invokes high, antiquated diction in describing the bed: “Flowers all over the bedspread in a ruined garden where nary a bee would feast.” In the same poem, he recalls brushing his victim/girlfriend’s hair when she didn’t want him to, saying, “But my hand was a meager skiff coursing the river of her hair—calm until I remembered the floods, the thousands of houses under water, the people that once lived in the houses, the people those people buried out back when they died from fever in the night.” Acts of tenderness morph into tragedy and more bodies of the dead.

Elsewhere, the language is more expectedly terse: “Chief has a suspect.” Or reflective of the locale and its labor: “Felt sorry for Chief, their pity for his age, simple straight talk—he still champs protocol and knows how to help foal a horse crying out and stuck in the push.”

This character also has a predilection for knowing/unknowing double-entendre: “The thing about being wanted for a crime is that they want you, even when they don’t know who you are.” And: “Thought to finger the old man reported to come out of the bushes on occasion to fill a canteen or maybe watch the children splashing on the banks like he was remembering something from back before.”

The noir genre enables Ackerson-Kiely to hang her linguistic versatility on a creepy character who embodies aloneness and is keenly aware of his apartness—both wanting it and lamenting it. The narrative seems less to me about story and more like a way to portray existential bewilderment, as the investigation ignores what is really wrong and what is actually happening in the town—severe class disenfranchisement and again, violence against the most vulnerable which makes one think (if you haven’t already) of Trump-era America—its engine and its victims.

Invoking noir and the personas of characters such as the officer who are presumably unlike the poet risks coming across as inauthentic, and thus patronizing; however, my guess is that Ackerson-Kiely’s aim was not to be realistic in this depiction of a place and its people, but to employ the genre and its stock characters to relate a portrait of psychological isolation, which may be heightened by the geographic remoteness of rural towns but which occurs everywhere in the minds of living persons.

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Here is the definition of rampart from Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary:

1: a protective barrier : BULWARK
2: a broad embankment raised as a fortification and usually surmounted by a parapet
3: a wall-like ridge (as of rock fragments, earth, or debris)

Not a commonly invoked word, and one with a specific association, although it took me until the end of the collection to recall that “ramparts” appear in our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Here are the opening lines, in case you forgot them, like I did:

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?

Which are followed by “the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air” reminding us that the U.S. is a nation born and maintained in bloody warfare that has never ceased. (Francis Scott Key composed the lyrics in 1814 to commemorate the War of 1812 and a protracted battle between British and American forces.)

The word “rampart(s)” frames Ackerson-Kiely’s collection, appearing in the opening poem “Inventory of Ramparts,” and the book’s title, which is taken from one of the last poems in the collection, “Made to Lie Down in Green Pastures,” a long poem in which the speaker is repeatedly asked by her President to lie down in a pasture like a cow or a servant, as a kind of test of patriotism and sustained act of dominance/submission. Like Ackerson-Kiely’s other characters, this speaker is no rebel and tries to comply with the requests, even as her digressions and observations belie an alertness that seems like it would balk or flee if it thought it could:

So I circled the defensive wall,
the outworks and the earthworks—
dolefully a rampart stands, but how does she lie?
I told him I could see, I told him I would stay awake
until dawn and when it came my President glared at me
proud, red, the Denver skyline winked in the distance,
a broken field tilled before frost.

Ramparts make me think of the current President’s repeated calls to build a wretched wall, but the word also reminds me that the remnants of those barriers litter rural landscapes like harbingers from America’s past. And as with other inanimate figures in Ackerson-Kiely’s world—sheds, trees, hay, windows—these walls have ears, eyes, and feelings. No longer triumphantly blocking fusillade and the view of destruction, but simply standing, presumably crumbling, and melancholic. In this late poem too, the plural “ramparts” of the opening poem and Francis Scott Key’s lyric have devolved to a single, lonely figure, “a rampart,” which is feminized as a “she,” aligning it with the majority of the book’s other victims.

The dogs, however, finally get their moment in my favorite short poem of the collection, “Exposure,” which opens with the 21st-century situation, “He looked better on the internet, broken up in outer space, reassembled next to their smiling dog on a flatscreen” and ends with: “And when the dog finally returned, it often licked the air around her hands where her fingers used to be.” In between, we get more intimations and precise images of brutality and threat such as, “The wind was a smear of cold cream after curtain call” and these lines:

The women survive; they can take it, the ugliness. Dogs come back, lie atop them. Dogs come back with hatchets and flashlights. Do not judge what must be done to survive.