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)

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)

       

 

     

  





  

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)