Saturday, March 24, 2012

Animals

In this session of Poem-Pairs we look at animals, not with the typical "aww" response elicited by certain species in a zoo or on National Geographic specials. Instead, we consider our more instinctual responses. 

In "The Oldest Living Thing in L.A. ," Larry Levis gives us an opossum (one of those "aww" animals) trying to cross a busy thoroughfare in Los Angeles. As soon as people try to help it,

    . . . It would lift its black lips & show them
    The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors,
    Teeth that went all the way back beyond
    The flames of Troy & Carthage . . . 

Yet the opossum

    . . . would back away
    Delicately & smoothly, stepping carefully
    As it always had. It could mangle someone’s hand
    In twenty seconds. Mangle it for good. It could
    Sever it completely from the wrist in forty.

Some onlooker would probably call

    . . . Animal Control, who woke a driver, who
    Then dressed in mailed gloves . . . someone who hoped
    The thing would have vanished by the time he got there. 

Note how Levis' choice of details underscores the more menacing aspects of what we might take to be a benign animal.

Similar to the appearance of the Animal Control person in the Levis poem, Stephen Dunn's "The Sudden Light and the Trees" tells us how the speaker once called the Humane Society about a neighbor's dog. The menacing element here is not the dog, but rather that neighbor:

    My neighbor was a biker, a pusher, a dog
        and a wife beater.
    In bad dreams I killed him

    and once, in the consequential light of day,
        I called the Humane Society
    about Blue, his dog. They took her away

    and I readied myself, a baseball bat
        inside my door.
    That night I heard his wife scream . . .

What about those cantilevered three-line stanzas? How do they heighten suspense by breaking the narrative into phrases that underscore the emotional tension within the poem?

Once again, there is an animal -- this time, a sparrow caught in a basement -- which generates the central conflict in the poem. Unlike Levis's armored Animal Control person, the speaker manages to trap the bird and release it:

    . . . I remember how it felt

     when I got it in my hand, and how it burst
         that hand open
    when I took it outside . . . 

But also recalled is the neighbor's reaction to the speaker's action:

    . . . And I remember

    the way he slapped the gun against
        his open palm,
    kept slapping it, and wouldn’t speak.

One might ask: who is the real animal here -- the sparrow or the neighbor?



        The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.  (Larry Levis) 


At Wilshire and Santa Monica I saw an opossum
Trying to cross the street. It was late, the street
Was brightly lit, the opossum would take
A few steps forward, then back away from the breath
Of moving traffic. People coming out of the bars
Would approach, as if to help it somehow.
It would lift its black lips & show them
The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors,
Teeth that went all the way back beyond
The flames of Troy & Carthage, beyond sheep
Grazing rock-strewn hills, fragments of ruins
In the grass at San Vitale. It would back away
Delicately & smoothly, stepping carefully
As it always had. It could mangle someone’s hand
In twenty seconds. Mangle it for good. It could
Sever it completely from the wrist in forty.
There was nothing to be done for it. Someone
Or other probably called the LAPD, who then
Called Animal Control, who woke a driver, who
Then dressed in mailed gloves, the kind of thing
Small knights once wore into battle, who gathered
Together his pole with a noose at the end,
A light steel net to snare it with, someone who hoped
The thing would have vanished by the time he got there.


    (from Elegy, page 7: University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA©1997)


     The Sudden Light and the Trees (Stephen Dunn)


                                   Syracuse, 1969

 My neighbor was a biker, a pusher, a dog
    and a wife beater.
In bad dreams I killed him

and once, in the consequential light of day,
    I called the Humane Society
about Blue, his dog. They took her away

and I readied myself, a baseball bat
    inside my door.
That night I heard his wife scream

and I couldn’t help it, that pathetic
    relief; her again, not me.
It would be years before I’d understand

why victims cling and forgive. I plugged in
    the Sleep-Sound and it crashed
like the ocean all the way to sleep.

One afternoon I found him
    on the stoop,
a pistol in his hand, waiting,

he said, for me. A sparrow had gotten in
    to our common basement.
Could he have permission

to shoot it? The bullets, he explained,
    might go through the floor.
I said I’d catch it, wait, give me

a few minutes and, clear-eyed, brilliantly
    afraid, I trapped it
with a pillow. I remember how it felt
 
when I got it in my hand, and how it burst
    that hand open
when I took it outside, a strength

that must have come out of hopelessness
    and the sudden light
and the trees. And I remember

the way he slapped the gun against
    his open palm,
kept slapping it, and wouldn’t speak.


        (from  Landscape at the End of the Century: Poems, pages 42-43: W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY ©1991)

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Fields/Meadows

In our previous blog, we considered a poem-pair where the action takes place on the inside: in an airport, in an airplane, in a room. It's time to move out-of-doors.

Rodney Jones' poem Ground Sense opens with a sly line break: instead of divulging his intimacies with women, the speaker subverts our expectations and moves to a deeper level of understanding:

      Because I have known many women
      Who are dead, I try to think of fields
      As holy places. Whether we plow them

     Or let them to weeds and sunlight,
     Those are the best places for grief,
     If only that they perform the peace

     We come to . . .

Fields, meadows, woods: they provide a venue of understanding--but not for everyone:

      . . . except as my
     Friend’s wife begins to disappear,
     He feels no solvent in all the earth

Yet in comparison, the speaker feels like an "amateur at grief":
     
     Walking the creek behind the house,
      I cross to the old homeplace, find

     A scattering of chimney rocks, the
     Seeds my grandfather watered, the
     Human lifetime of middle-aged trees.

Though published in 1973, Robert Duncan's poem Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow has an older feel to it: we find words like therein and wherefrom, and phrases like

      whose secret we see in a children's game
      of ring a round of roses told.

Some of the references feel archaic, as though from a tale of King Arthur:

     Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
      I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
     whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

     She it is Queen Under The Hill
     whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
     that is a field folded.

What feels like a certain verbal clunkiness perhaps belies a geniuneness of feeling.

Even the title of the poem invites comment: Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow. Not "Often I Return to a Meadow": instead, the speaker seems to say that he sometimes has the ability to attain the transcendence of experience which the meadow encapsulates:

     Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
     as if it were a given property of the mind
     that certain bounds hold against chaos,

     that is a place of first permission,
     everlasting omen of what is.
 

       Ground Sense (Rodney Jones)  


Because I have known many women
Who are dead, I try to think of fields
As holy places. Whether we plow them

Or let them to weeds and sunlight,
Those are the best places for grief,
If only that they perform the peace

We come to, the feeling without fingers,
The hearing without ears, the seeing
Without eyes. Isn’t heaven just this

Unbearable presence under leaves?
I had thought so. I had believed
At times in a meadow and at other

Times in a wood where we’d emerge
No longer ourselves, but reduced
To many small things that we could

Not presume to know, except as my
Friend’s wife begins to disappear,
He feels no solvent in all the earth,

And me, far off, still amateur at grief.
Walking the creek behind the house,
I cross to the old homeplace, find

A scattering of chimney rocks, the
Seeds my grandfather watered, the
Human lifetime of middle-aged trees.

  (from Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems 1985-2005, page 123: Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, NY © 2006)



      Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow (Robert Duncan)

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

        (from The Opening of the Field, page 7:  New Directions Paperback, New York, NY © 1973)





       

 




 

     




  





  

Monday, March 5, 2012

Bedside

Elementary school art teachers are fond of saying "It's not the product but the process" -- it's not so much what the finished art object looks like, but rather that the child enjoys the creative experience itself. The poem-pair below shows how a poet can focus either on a process or on an end-result.

In Sharon Olds' poem "The Race," the speaker relates a (literally) breath-taking journey through an airport and then onto an airplane in order to reach the bedside of an ailing father. Olds conveys the travail through her choice of particular details: the rush, the panic, the running, the suitcase banging against her, and the last dash into the airplane just as the gate is closing. Note how she uses an almost religious tone:

                I blessed my
    long legs he gave me, my strong 
    heart I abandoned to its own purpose . . .

               Like one who is not
    too rich, I turned sideways and
    slipped through the needle's eye . . . The jet
    was full, and people's hair was shining, they were
    smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a
    mist of gold endorphin light,
    I wept as people weep as they enter heaven,
    in massive relief.

In contrast, Jane Hirschfield's "Talc" spends very little time getting to the bedside

                 Twenty minutes
    and I was gone, there was a plane,
    and another, there was a friend who took
    me to you, you were asleep.

and instead focuses on the experience of being at the bedside. And that experience, while visceral, is also intuitive:

                 They had washed you,
    I barely noticed the yellow stains and the blood
    that remained on your skin. They had cut you,
    I did not see the bandages holding the length
    of the chest, they lay where I should have been
    lying, I did not understand . . .
    The slash stapling the crease of your thigh was
    nothing. When the nurse turned the white valve
    near the collarbones' nest before opening one
    on the wrist, there was not one cell of my body
    that needed to understand . . .
    I waited. I knew that the sweetness I smelled
    on your body was powder, was baby powder, I did
    not understand, but I knew that they had given you back
    to this world for a second time and I waited
    for you to agree. I waited for you to open your eyes,
    a first time, then another, another. I waited until
    you were sure, until every part of you stayed.


The Race  (Sharon Olds) 


When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,
bought a ticket, ten minutes later
they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
had said my father would not live through the night
and the flight was cancelled. A young man
with a dark blond moustache told me
another airline had a non-stop
leaving in seven minutes. See that
elevator over there, well go
down to the first floor, make a right, you’ll
see a yellow bus, get off at the
second Pan Am terminal, I
ran, I who have no sense of direction
raced exactly where he’d told me, a fish
slipping upstream deftly against
the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those
bags I had thrown everything into
in five minutes, and ran, the bags
wagged me from side to side as if
to prove I was under the claims of the material,
I ran up to the man with the white flower on his breast,
I who always go to the end of the line, I said
Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said
Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then
run. I lumbered up the moving stairs,
at the top I saw the corridor,
and then I took a deep breath, I said
Goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the
bags banged me, wheeled and coursed
in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
women running, their belongings tied
in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my
long legs he gave me, my strong
heart I abandoned to its own purpose,
I ran to Gate 17 and they were
just lifting the thick white
lozenge of the door to fit into
the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not
too rich, I turned sideways and
slipped through the needle’s eye, and then
I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet
was full, and people’s hair was shining, they were
smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a
mist of gold endorphin light,
I wept as people weep when they enter heaven,
in massive relief. We lifted up
gently from one tip of the continent
and did not stop until we set down lightly on the
other edge, I walked into his room
and watched his chest rise slowly
and sink again, all night
I watched him breathe. 

    (from  The Father, page 26:  Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY ©1992)


Talc  (Jane Hirshfield) 

 

 When you phoned I was far, and sleeping,
but they brought me the message and I ran,
I ran to the phone where you were,
you were speaking, we two were speaking,
when I ran back to the room I no longer
knew we would speak again. Twenty minutes
and I was gone, there was a plane,
and another, there was a friend who took
me to you, you were sleep. I didn’t know
there was still any question, I only learned
later, everything later, weeks later I was
still frightened of all that I learned.
I swear though I knew it was there I scarcely
saw the hose taped to your mouth, its ridges
that breathed in case you did not; scarcely saw
the twin tubes coming out of your chest or
the blood running through them and into the pump
that returned to your wrist, quietly, steadily,
what belonged there. The slenderer tubes
that entered the side of your neck I scarcely
noticed; not the empty ones waiting for something
not needed, not the ones drawing fluids
from three labeled bags. They had washed you,
I barely noticed the yellow stains and the blood
that remained on your skin. They had cut you,
I did not see the bandages holding the length
of the chest, they lay where I should have been
lying, I did not understand. I did not see
the wounds on your side where some scalpel or saw
had been dropped or some heated or iced tool
had burned. The monitor’s chiming was nothing,
someone would come, they would turn it off.
The slash stapling the crease of your thigh was
nothing. When the nurse turned the white valve
near the collarbones’ nest before opening one
on the wrist, there was not one cell of my body
that needed to understand. I barely felt the bars
where my hand fitted into your hand, the rail
that days afterward still tracked my cheek.
The urine that drained to the sack below us must
have been warm, I must have touched it, I should
have known it was warm with your warmth but I did not.
I waited. I knew that the sweetness I smelled
on your body was powder, was baby powder, I did
not understand, but I knew they had given you back
to this world for a second time and I waited
for you to agree. I waited for you to open your eyes,
a first time, another, another. I waited until
you were sure, until every part of you stayed. 

    (from  The Lives of the Heart, pages 105-106:  Harper Perennial, New York, NY ©1997)