Poem 32 Emily Dickinson, Again

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 by Emily Dickinson

Come slowly—Eden

Lips unused to Thee—

Bashful—sip thy Jessamines

As the fainting Bee—

Reaching late his flower,

Round her chamber hums—

Counts his nectars—

Enters—and is lost in Balms.

No matter what else might have been true about Emily Dickinson, she could write some hot poems. The virginal lady in white, maybe. But this poem is sexy, no doubt about it.  

The slow sounds of that first line "Come slowly--Eden" with those  "o" and "e" vowels, followed by the S's in the next lines, create a sensual delight in anticipation of lovemaking. We must move through the poem slowly, slipping from human desire ("lips") to the simile of the bee entering the jessamine blossom. The promise is Eden. The arrival will be slow. The result--to be "lost in balms." And there we are left at the beginning, really, of the lovemaking. 

I was looking for a poem about a cold spring, or about spring not coming, or any other sort of weather-related misery I could fall farther into. But then I found this poem and thought: what better cure for the weather than a sexy little poem from our greatest poet? This should keep us warm, then, for a few more weeks.

Here's what might be a new photo of Dickinson, by the way (on the left), with a friend. 

Poem 31 Matt Rasmussen

REVERSE SUICIDE

The guy Dad sold your car to

comes back to get his money,

leaves the car. With filthy rags

we rub it down until it doesn’t shine

and wipe your blood into

the seams of the seat.

Each snowflake stirs before

lifting into the sky as I

learn you won’t be dead.

The unsuffering ends

when the mess of your head

pulls together around

a bullet in your mouth.

You spit it into Dad’s gun

before arriving in the driveway

while the evening brightens

and we pour bag after bag

of leaves on the lawn,

waiting for them to leap

onto the bare branches.

                                           originally appeared in Passages North

I asked the incredibly talented Matt Rasmussen for a poem about sibling loss because it is an experience we share. What Matt does so brilliantly in this poem is capture all the parts of such loss—the bewilderment, the anger, the utterly mundane scenes that preceed an event that changes everything for a family.

The poem starts with a title that is explanatory—it describes exactly the fantasy that will follow, the reverse of the series of actions that took place when the speaker’s brother shot himself.

The poem begins casually, as if the brothers were talking: “The guy Dad sold your car to/comes back to get his money” and this doesn’t become jarring for a few stanzas. And yet the nagging straightforwardness of the financial transaction catches us, just a bit.  The father and son, with the returned car, wipe it down “with filthy rags” because the car is getting dirtier as time moves backwards, until we come to the first really brutal stanza:

and wipe your blood into

the seams of the seat.

Of course, if events could move in reverse, the blood would have to go back into the car before it could go back into the not-dead body of the brother, and yet. The initial discomfort we feel at the financial transaction of selling the car is heightened here by a sense that no brother—or father—should be doing this job. Not ever.  Rasmussen’s monosyllables work well here to heighten the brute force of the action he describes.

The poem then shifts, turns toward beauty in the snow that is not falling now but lifting:

Each snowflake stirs before

lifting into the sky as I

learn you won’t be dead.

Anyone who has suffered an unexpected tragedy recognizes this moment, the moment when we learn of the loved one’s death and everything changes and we have to “learn” the world anew. But in reverse, the moment is still fraught. The speaker can’t quite unknow the loss; instead, he has to learn a different truth, his brother “won’t be dead.” Which is not the same as saying “you are alive.” We see this struggle to believe the fantasy the speaker is creating in the next lines, which are angry and direct:

The unsuffering ends

when the mess of your head

pulls together around

a bullet in your mouth.

Here the speaker acknowledges both his own anger “mess of your head” and the hopelessness of the fantasy. To wish his brother back means to wish him into suffering again.  So whose suffering will be relieved? Whose will carry on? 

The poem ends brilliantly, in the familiar, mundane world of family tasks: two brothers working in the yard together.  Those leaves could no more return to the trees than a brother return to life. And while the speaker realizes this, the image of the brothers in the yard increases the sense of loneliness and loss. What we lose when we lose a sibling is the person who helps us remember the moments, not only important ones, that construct our lives.  We lose the person who we assumed would be there through all the hard journeys. And in dying, the sibling has left the hard things—parental suffering, aging, grief, loneliness—to us. And of course, we lose the joys we would have shared, moving through this gorgeous world together. 

19 years ago today my sister Kate died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Thank you, Matt, for this beautiful poem. It helps make a sad day a little bit less so.

 Matt’s first book, Black Aperture, winner of the prestigious 2012 Walt Whitman Award from the American Academy of Poets, will be published in May by Louisiana State University Press. For more about Matt or his book, go to

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/2360

http://lsupress.org/books/detail/black-aperture/

Poem 30 Patricia Kirkpatrick

WHITE TREES    by Patricia Kirkpatrick

“Hope is an ‘intuition of emptiness’ with which we make agreement…”

-Fanny Howe

She went out to see

white trees

that night as black

branches turned

and filled with snow

shrouds where

lamplight

didn’t reach

where figures

she went out to stay

away from

how the night went on

without her

burrow into drifts

to stalk

the blizzard to its face

and deep crevasse

to fall

and falling

to touch

silence

with her hands

to channel

vision against the coming

storm the sheen

of sodden places

as if to pick up

afterbirth

and steady lambs

to grass to

track

and shepherd

grief she walked

that night

to vacancies

white trees were filling with

Wow, this is a stunning poem.  In its very short lines and abrupt fragments, it represents the inner state of a woman walking bravely, if haltingly, into a “coming/storm.”

The first eight lines immediately introduce the poem’s beautiful, startling images and the fragmented nature of the woman’s experience:

She went out to see

white trees

that night as black

branches turned

and filled with snow

shrouds where

lamplight

didn’t reach…

In the line breaks we get discombobulated: is the night black, or the branches? is it snow or a snow shroud? Without punctuation to guide us and with those line breaks that work both forward and backward, we are uncertain.

It continues:

she went out to stay

away from

how the night went on

without her

And again we have the surprise in realizing she did not “go out to stay” but rather to “stay away.”  To stay away from what? “How the night went on/without her.”  We begin to get, with the shrouds in the first few lines and the fear of being left behind (“without her”), a sense that this is a poem about fear of death or the unknown, of the ‘desert places’ Frost describes in his brutal poem about walking at night in the snow.

What happens next, though, surprises. The verbs change and in changing suggest that though this woman is upset and alone, she is also active, not passive, in face of whatever she fears. Look at these verbs. She goes out to “stalk,” “fall,” “touch,” “channel,” “track,” and, finally  “shepherd.” If something awaits her, she will find and come to understand it. Moreover, in the end what she shepherds is “grief,” suggesting that even if what lies before her is indeed hard, she can take a gentle sort of care for it.

The poem ends, 

“she walked/that night/to vacancies/white trees were filling with” 

no closing mark of punctuation, ending with a preposition: all indications are that the walk is not over, that the “empty spaces between the stars” that Frost writes of must be lived. The paradox of vacancy filling a space extends this notion. Life requires us to face absences and our fear of loss, and if we accept loss, we can actively examine it. If we examine loss, we have something—a space is filled by seeing and accepting.  If we try to stay inside, where it’s warm and safe, the loss is still out there and we have nothing but our fear.

 

I’ll end where I began. Wow.

Kirkpatrick won the first Linquist-Vennum Prize for Poetry and her book, Odessa, will be published this December by Milkweed.  For more information, see the link below.

http://milkweed.org/blog/awards/patricia-kirkpatrick-wins-lindquist-vennum-prize-for-poetry/

Poem 29 Carol Willette Bachofner

Allow the Year

Allow the year to end, clouds

gusting in an ocean overhead

and the sun on its passage

to solstice, sinking near earth.

Allow the thickets of winter

shadows to cross the yard

and ivy to ascend chain link

crimson as a neighbor’s light

brazenly on and off. Allow loss.

Allow the grinding traffic

whatever its various ends

to stop unseen and the mice

under the bird feeder to eat

among sparrows. Allow them.

Allow the trash pickers. Allow

their bottles, plastics and cans.

And the old cat her last patch

of warmth on the back steps.

And the housefly on the wall

its frail hold. Allow the year

to end, whatever the way, allow

the kitchen curtain to blow

in and out, and in and out.

Allow the year to end, the soul

to rise and fall, then rise again.

— Carol Willette Bachofner

from I Write in the Greenhouse, Front Porch Editions 2011

first published in Bangor Metro.

I chose this week’s poem because I struggle with letting things be. So much of my nature is devoted to resistance, to grasping, and especially in the fall when I so want to keep winter from coming, want to keep the world green.

Carol Willet Bachofner is a Maine poet, and we can see Maine a bit in the landscape of this poem.  It is a sort of prayer to change, a gentle reminder to appreciate the beauties of the world, with the incantation of “allow.” I am reminded of Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come” and its repetitions and gratitudes, its God who “does not leave us comfortless.”

In this poem, the speaker isn’t addressing the season’s shift between summer and fall but rather the solstice’s turn from fall to winter. And the speaker doesn’t seem to be struggling with the change, as I do, so much as celebrating all the various aspects of daily life—the beautiful, “the thickets of winter/ shadows” that “cross the yard” and the mundane, “mice/ under the birdfeeder.”  Through her repetition of “allow”—a lovely word, full of those open vowels—the reader is mesmerized, drawn in and allowed (if I may say that) to really see the world, ordinary and beautiful at once. This detailed depiction of a day, with its sparrows and trash pickers and houseflies, is evoked finely and becomes, through careful description, beautiful.

But in case we are not convinced by the quotidian, the poem’s last lines leave us no doubt : “Allow the year to end, the soul/to rise and fall, and rise again.” Note how subtle the move from the physical to the metaphysical here, and the gorgeous internal rhyme of “end” and “again” to make the argument. Change is part of the human condition. We must allow it, and in allowing for it, perhaps we will be able to see its beauty. If we fall short, if we “fall”, we can rise up again—the next day to the clouds and sparrows—or eventually, if we so believe, into a heaven that might be better than this world. Or maybe not. Maybe this world is heaven. Certainly we need to be here and paying attention to know.

Oh, how I love poems. Willette Bachofner’s poem, reminding me to see, is a gift right now in my busy life. Thanks, Carol.

If you’d like to know more about Carol Willette Bachofner, go to these links:

http://carolbachofner.com/

 http://rockcitypoet.blogspot.com/

Poem 28 Tim Nolan

Old Astronauts by Tim Nolan

When they get together now—

they nod to one another—

don’t talk about the pitch

black of airless space—

don’t want to remember

the dust of the moon

in the treads of their boots—

they fall in bathrooms—

just like everyone else—

but from a greater height—

and before their heads

hit the tiled floor—

they float for awhile—

weightless seeming to dance

at the end of a cord—

one of them found

Noah’s Ark—or is just

about to—mostly they

remain dead silent—

whatever they saw and felt—

lost for generations—it’s that

they were led to believe

they really could escape—

the pull of the molten core

With Neil Armstrong’s death last week, this poem by Tim Nolan seems appropriate, doesn’t it?  I am especially enamored of the line breaks in this one, along with the use of the dash which is so often used (think of Dickinson) as a mark of punctuation that refuses closure. 

In the second stanza, the line break “the pitch/black of airless space” nicely disorients the reader. Pitch is a great word, full of possible meanings, and it looks like a noun there at the end of the line. But when we move to the next line, we see it was meant as an adjective for “black” and somehow Nolan has created in us a sense a bit like zero gravity. 

This is a sad poem, about—as many of the poems in this book are—how we understand the lives of those we love who are dying, have died. What did their lives mean?  The astronauts in the poem cannot articulate the exceptional experiences of their lives.  But they are not just like the rest of us, for even as they “fall in bathrooms” they fall “from a greater height.” And in that falling is the floating their bodies once knew in space. In this way, Nolan suggests that the experiences of these old astronauts are articulated by their bodies if not their words, even as their lives end. In such a notion is consolation.

The last lines mourn the fact of gravity, of our boundedness to this planet and a span of time. The astronauts “were led to believe/they really could escape--/the pull of the molten core.”  And notice again that dash. There is no escape, the poem tells us, but the speaker resists that knowledge, pushes forward again and again to keep the line/life going.  Punctuation can’t stop death. But it can put up a great fight. In this poem, and in many others in this wonderful collection, Nolan takes on hard subjects and wrestles with them, searching for solace and meaning as time continues to pass.

Good stuff.  Look for the book, And Then, coming soon from New Issues Press. 

 http://www.amazon.com/Then-American-Poetry-Timothy-Nolan/dp/0898232651/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346117872&sr=1-2&keywords=Tim+Nolan

Poem 27 Connie Wanek

Monopoly

                      by Connie Wanek

We used to play, long before we bought real houses.

A roll of the dice could send a girl to jail.

The money was pink, blue, gold as well as green,

and we could own a whole railroad

or speculate in hotels where others dreaded staying:

the cost was extortionary.

At last one person would own everything,

every teaspoon in the dining car, every spike

driven into the planks by immigrants,

every crooked mayor.

But then, with only the clothes on our backs,

we ran outside, laughing.

"Monopoly" by Connie Wanek, from On Speaking Terms. © Copper Canyon Press, 2010. Reprinted with permission.

Connie Wanek is a deceptive poet. Beware. Her poems seem easy. They are not. They are supple, subtle, smart, musical, and hard. They demand several readings, but the straightforward-seeming speaker in each never lets on. No, she just makes her observations and leaves off, leaving to the reader the task of paying attention.

But what a reward one gets for looking closely. 

Wanek has written a series of poems based on children's games, and this is another. The situation seems fairly clear: a speaker remembers playing the board game Monopoly as a child.  Looking closely, though, we come to see this poem is an exquisite commentary on the current economic situation: many people lose their homes while a very few get rich, owning more and more. The case she makes is powerful for its lack of bombast, its illumination of the political through the sphere of childhood, and its trust in the reader to make the connections for herself.

The poem begins with two interesting choices--the use of the first person plural “we” –indicating we are all in this together—and the “used to,” clearly setting the poem as memory.  The next words about playing the game “long before we bought real houses” begins to pull the reader into complexity.  What about these real houses? how do they connect to the childhood game? But Wanek’s touch is light; she just moves back to the game with the line “A roll of the dice could send a girl to jail.”

We know this is literally true about the game, but as the poem goes on, we see that this arbitrary bad luck doesn’t seem to be only part of the childhood game.  The implication becomes clear: these days, it can just be bad luck that sends a person into bankruptcy or foreclosure.  The speaker continues, remembering the color of the Monopoly money, the thrill of ownership, the way placing those hotels on your properties spelled doom for your competitors. 

The move between stanza is so understated: “at last one person would own everything” and then “everything” is illustrated—teaspoons from the “dining car”, railroad spikes “driven….by immigrants”, crooked mayors—all elements of the railroads that made our country’s first barons.  And yet we know these items are not part of the game but were in fact part of the first economic collapse.

The poem’s last two lines manage to make the case all the clearer while steadfastly turning away from the move most poets would make. Instead of clarifying for the reader, “hey, I’m making a point here about our current economic situation,” Wanek turns deftly back to the game, “But then, with only the clothes on our backs/we ran outside, laughing.” Notice the brilliance of that “but then.” It, like the rest of the poem, means two things at once. On the one hand, “but then” the game is over, and the children go out to play. And also, “but then,” and the comma really matters here, means, but back in those days, we “with only the clothes on our backs” were playing a game. The children, of course, are laughing.  But now, the implication is clear, this isn’t a game.

See what I mean? This looks like a fairly accessible poem about a favored childhood memory. Instead, it indicts our current economy, where bad luck dooms people to homelessness and the loss of everything they possess, except maybe those clothes on their backs. 

As I write tonight, feeling inarticulate in comparison to the poem’s grace and confidence, I am remembering Pope’s line:  “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance.”  Connie Wanek makes poetry look easy.  What a gift.

For information about Wanek's latest book:

https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/pages/browse/book.asp?bg={4245C754-8E29-4CC4-A483-B41B504B6403}

More information available at:

conniewanek.com

Poem 26 Emily Dickinson

#935  

            by Emily Dickinson

As imperceptibly as Grief

The Summer lapsed away—

Too imperceptible at last

To see like Perfidy—

A Quietness distilled

As Twilight long begun,

Or Nature spending with herself

Sequestered Afternoon—

The Dusk drew earlier in—

The Morning foreign shone—

A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,

As Guest, that would be gone—

And thus, without a Wing

Or service of a Keel

Our Summer made her light escape

Into the Beautiful—

I have chosen this poem because I am a nostalgic, and especially this year, as summer’s close brings with it the end of my glorious sabbatical.  For me, this poem captures the way the endings--of summer, of many things--feel.

I am not a Dickinson scholar. I am much more an ardent admirer.  She is, for me, like an idolized but peculiar relative in whose company I long to be, but whom I never understand much better for having spent time with.  Sometimes I am utterly unable to make sense of her poems and other times, as in this poem, my whole body understands immediately and intuitively the feeling the poem addresses.

To start, what about that first simile? Summer does creep imperceptibly away. As does grief. But the lessening of grief is a relief—days later we realize we haven’t cried for our lost one.  But the creeping away of summer causes a form of grief for the speaker, so the simile is a bit odd.  The leaving is the same, yes, but one absence is comfort and the other is not.

Then look at the next choices.  “The Summer” is this past particular one, in the past tense where the poem is located (not “a summer”), but not yet, as it later becomes, “our summer.” The verb “lapsed” also works in surprising ways.  I misremember this line always as “The Summer slipped away.”  But lapsed is so much the better choice, meaning as it does “to fall away by degree” and also a fall from grace.  Grace, like “our summer”, will appear much later in the poem. (Not to mention that “lapsed” is sonically more surprising and interesting than the alliterative “slipped” would be; lapsed keeps the “s” sound but pushes it to the middle.)

This slipping, the speaker tells us, was so imperceptible that it couldn’t be a form of betrayal, of “perfidy.” And then she faces the difficult task of describing something she has claimed is imperceptible. If it can’t be sensed or understood, how can it be described? The poem really could be broken into four four-line stanzas.  The middle two stanzas are where Dickinson takes on the task of describing the passing of time. “Twilight” begins earlier, “dusk” draws “earlier in”.  Such changes are by degree and are subtle; the natural world often moves in time too slow for the human mind to catch it. Only later do we realize the season has shifted. And by that point, it feels a bit like betrayal.

The summer has been a guest, and guests must eventually leave. Her leaving couldn’t really be a surprise.  But even so, somehow there is something “harrowing” about the “Grace” that, like a guest,  “would be gone.”  What might a harrowing grace be? A distressing beauty? A troubled divine love? And summer has become female and ours (“our summer”), personifying and personalizing the loss even more.

The last stanza doesn’t resolve these questions but turns away from them. Summer is perceptible, if her leaving is not, and even without a clear means of transport, she still makes her escape—though it is “light”—into the “beautiful.”

I would never claim to know what Dickinson might have meant by anything, and I am bold in claiming her as a favored, strange auntie. But I understand these last lines somewhere near my solar plexus.  We can’t help feeling grief for summer’s passing—for time’s passing—but we also must recognize that such passage provides light and beauty.  Even when our hearts protest.