When to Stop — Blackbird Archive

← v7n1, Spring 2008

Never knew when to stop, my Aunt, Estelle.

A girl, called to recite

(a thing she did quite well)

she waxed so eloquent,

went on so long,

her Papa growled, “Oh, let up, Stell!”

Kept up, past forty,

singing lessons with Miss Gottschalk;

at seventy-five still clings

to artless, low-cut blouse,

lipsticks the retrograding mouth.

I’ve seen her (in-laws

envying her prelude seafood stems,

half-scornful of her postlude fingerbowls)

presiding at her table,

erect and smiling, answering

her husband’s snarl

with a quick nimble joke

that gave us all escape.

Now he has nothing more

to say to her, to tired-out us,

or to the world,

when he just leans his forehead

hard upon his hand, and

nully forks and chews.

A living silence, she, erect and smiling,

giving his sleeve a quick caress,

eyes like a cherubim’s,

chats on voraciously for two.

aging family humor

Eleanor Ross Taylor

Eleanor Ross Taylor (1920–2011) was the author of six volumes of poems: Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems 1960–2008 (Louisiana State University Press, 2009), which won the 2010 William Carlos Williams Award; Late Leisure (Louisiana State University Press, 1999), which won the 2000 Library of Virginia Literary Award in poetry; Days Going/Days Coming Back (University of Utah Press, 1992); New and Selected Poems (Stuart Wright, 1983); Welcome Eumenides (George Braziller, 1972); and Wilderness of Ladies (McDowell, 1960). Her awards included a 1968 fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 1998 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the 2001 Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the 2009 Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry, and the 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 2009 she was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Photo by David A. Peterson