Trying to understand why he wants sex when all she wants is five minutes for something, she can’t just now think what.
(mockingly) “Name things, my dear.”
Trying to understand why John needs sex at all when all Margaret wants to do is think up one worthy line. “It’s his stress reliever.” “Sex is a gift that you give each other.” “If you can get through the first five minutes, your body will respond, and then your mind will follow.”
My mind is trying to hang onto one sweet line.
MARGARET begins to walk.
WALLACE: What lines are you finding today on your walk?
Let’s start with what you see.
Birds. Animals. Blades of dune grass.
MARGARET begins the countdown of surrendering to sex.
MARGARET: FIVE! An ancient rabbit with his winter face.
WALLACE: An ancient rabbit with his winter face. The word “ancient,” was that your first thought because it doesn’t have the energy of winter face?
MARGARET: (whispering) I need to think.
WALLACE: Never mind, there’s another, there is another line coming!
MARGARET: The ancient tree. FOUR! The ancient tree, supine in death.
John, please… No, I don’t say anything because I can’t say… I am thinking of the word for a poem that I will write. I will.
WALLACE: You’ve used ancient. Imply age. Think.
MARGARET: The…… grey tree. THREE!
Starting to respond sexually.
WALLACE: Grey, really? No leave it. Go back to it later. Spruce? Pine?
MARGARET: I don’t know. TWO! The tall thin ones with sparse needles.
WALLACE: Jack pine?
MARGARET: Hackmatack.
WALLACE: The grey hackmatack, supine…
MARGARET rushes through the door and flings herself into the bed. Lights low over the bed.
MARGARET: ONE!
WALLACE: That isn’t sounding bad, “supine” might work.
MARGARET is in sex.
MARGARET: Yes.
WALLACE: Let’s consider this word “supine.” Lying face up, having the front or the ven-tr-al part upwards.
MARGARET rolls over onto her back.
MARGARET: Yeees.
WALLACE: Palms up? Christ like? It’s a good word but is it sublime?
MARGARET: Nice, so nice.
WALLACE: The best word isn’t a nice word, it has to contain within it exactly the right sound combinations. Supine, sublime in death. Could work?
MARGARET: Yes. Yes. YES…… John!
WALLACE: Oh. Dear. God.
MARGARET: (in a Groucho Marx voice) Was it sublime for you too?
WALLACE: Choo choo. There goes that train of thought. Are you satisfied, Margaret?
MARGARET: Do you feel…?
MARGARET stands at the foot of the bed.
WALLACE: What?
MARGARET: Anything. John!?
WALLACE: I will not have this.
MARGARET pulls out of the memory.
Do you even know where you are?
MARGARET: I am in Wallace Stevens’s nightmare of a graduate scholar gone terribly gone.
WALLACE: I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
Define “inflections,” define “innuendoes,” define “beauty,” in the context of the poem, in the context of your thesis. Yes, twice deferred, never completed, never defended. What is the sensation here?
MARGARET remains quiet.
Accept it, accept this. You are not the poet you were going to be, nor the scholar, nor the wife nor a mother. This grand pain over his death is only because you wish to be the widowed wife, no pressure, no defence, certainly no completion.
MARGARET: The servant chooses the brutality of the master by her level of non-compliance.
WALLACE: State the sensation.
MARGARET: The beauty of lovemaking or just after.
WALLACE: Ahh, for the first time you’ve use that word.
MARGARET: Because now sometimes we must make up love.
The terrible beauty is…… we do.
stanza vi
shadows
MARGARET wearily stands at the door but she cannot go in. Not yet.
MARGARET: I have been walking for hours. My pelvis aches with thinking.
MARGARET turns and walks to the far point.
WALLACE: Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
MARGARET leans into the air above the ocean, so easy to drop.
MARGARET: He hasn’t bargained on marrying a failure. I haven’t been able to look higher than the knot in his tie for months.
WALLACE: Years.
MARGARET acknowledges that.
(simply) You are pregnant.
MARGARET moves closer to the danger of dropping over the edge of the rocks. She pulls back.
MARGARET: This is what I think. The body is a child and the mind is the adult. Sometimes the body gets pregnant but decides that it doesn’t want the baby. The mind wants the baby. The mind is already whispering to the baby. But the body decides NO! and signals its intention with a bit of blood. The mind is horrified… it pleads… but the body is a child and won’t listen and that is a miscarriage.
MARGARET walks on.
This is what I think. Sometimes the mind thinks, “I can’t be pregnant. Not now. I can’t!” But the body is a child and it holds the embryo like a marble in its fist. The mind asks, cajoles, but the body won’t agree. And the body uses weapons like tender breasts already and subterranean orgasms.
But the mind has to deal with her unfinished Ph.D.
And his silence, always his silence.
The body says, “Make me,” and the mind does and that is an abortion.
WALLACE: What you think is an essay, what do you feel?
MARGARET: My mind didn’t know that my body would be so wounded.
But the wounding of my body is nothing compared to the wounding of my mind.
MARGARET enters the house.
We didn’t go the last six and a half years not having sex. At some point he must have got the courage to reach across the divide and my body, my mind, so wounded, said…… yes or maybe said nothing.
And so began the winter of our marriage, of unrelenting icicles in the wasteland of our emotional lives.
Everything in shadow. I was a shadow.
MARGARET’s shadow lies across the bed.
Finally I gather my wounded self in. I walk.
WALLACE: You walk away…
MARGARET: …from blackbirds. Yes. I walk…… I walk.
WALLACE: You walk a route. Every day you walk out the front door of your house but hours later you return, walk up the front steps, re-enter that life.
MARGARET: True. I walk in place until the distance between us, when we lay beside each other at night, is the distance between the two poles. Slowly our bed becomes a place of perpetual dark. The edges of our bodies, when they touch, are hardfrozen to feelings, behind our eyes… glaciers… that no words will ever penetrate.
WALLACE: Margaret, grief is not an indecipherable cause.
MARGARET: What is indecipherable is that I had not one poem to my name yet I say, “No.”
No to everything.
I say, poem poems, poem poems, poem poems, poem poems, poem poems, poem poems, poem poems.
stanza vii
golden birds
MARGARET: There once was a middle-aged man from Haddam
who said, “Golden birds are delightful,”
shouting “blackbirds no more!”
as he walked out the door,
> this most banal man of Haddam.
WALLACE: I adjust you, Margaret; to a middle-age man in a deadening life an erection is not banal.
MARGARET: “Adjust”?
WALLACE: I meant to say assure but by some trick or magic in the mind I said “adjust,” which is more playful. It makes the word “banal” chirp.
MARGARET: Tell me about golden birds and men.
WALLACE: Perhaps it is a shortcut. Back in history a man like John would have joined the crusades, or jumped a Spanish Galleon leaving port, or signed up for some war, any goddamn war.
MARGARET: An accurate portrayal of what a man would endure to leave my bed?
WALLACE: (whispers) Feel that, portrayal teasing out betrayal.
(answering) Risking death is at least living, my dear.
MARGARET: The poet Wallace Stevens said…
WALLACE: I said…
MARGARET: (correcting) He said he just liked the name of Haddam. It could have been anywhere.
Everywhere.
Oh thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
WALLACE: Once he laid a red silk shawl beaded in gold on your skin.
MARGARET begins walking, struggling to get to the top of the spiral staircase, the place to write, but failing.
MARGARET: We are in the dark of our early forties.
There is a physical weight to these four words.
I am not writing.
He is Dean of Graduate Studies…… yet he’s in the dark.
WALLACE: Committee work. Don’t think, Margaret, that you sessionals know the half of it.
MARGARET: I can’t think, I only do and do and do.
One day a golden beam appears… a light there, yes, there dead ahead, signalling an end to his darkness. He doesn’t act on it. He is a married, married man married. But he has been infected with (so difficult) joy. He looks for this light everywhere. He no longer sees anything else. I can’t think what is to be done. I am so fucking banal baking muffins with apples and walnuts.
He talks about other people’s affairs obsessively as one does to make oneself invisible. Invincible.
He tells me… a cautionary tale.
WALLACE: Get this, a guy notices that the Christmas lights on his neighbour’s house are blinking in sync with the Christmas lights that his wife has strung on their house. He becomes obsessed with those blinking lights because, in his head, they are absolute proof that his wife is having an affair with their neighbour. Yeah, really. So the husband is diagnosed as having obsessive morbid pathological jealousy.
MARGARET enters the bedroom.
The weird thing about this case was that, as it turned out, the wife was having an affair with their neighbour.
MARGARET: (to John) So John, as it turned out, the husband was misdiagnosed.
The husband had, of course, seen the normal signs of an affair. A walnut in the bed, when I know I changed the bedding before going to work. But now, at bedtime, when I turn down the sheet I see that someone, sometime after I left the house for the day, has been eating a muffin in the matrimonial bed. My eye catches… something golden glints… but I won’t see that, I can’t.
The only thing I can think to do is turn off the light.
The light grows more intense.
There, it has disappeared, hasn’t it?
Anyway, the normal signs that he has been brushing off with a sweep of his hand manifests in the Christmas lights and the only explanation is infidelity.
I walk into the house, the cinnamon of the apple muffins still lingering in the air but the air feels different. Like all the molecules have realigned in some way I can’t absorb the meaning of, but vaguely there’s a feeling that someone unknown to me has been walking through my house.
MARGARET looks fully at WALLACE.
It destroys me still, John.
MARGARET stands at the bed.
I stand in our dark bedroom and watch you pull her hips in the air, watch you lay all your aching longing along the spine of her body, every part of your being communicating her goldenness to you.
What destroys me are the sobs that reverberate in my ears,
not mine, yours.
Your sobs enter my chest as surely as those tiny points of light entered the pupils of the man watching his Christmas lights blink in sync with the lights of his wife’s lover. They go on and on those sobs. I think…… you are crying out all the sadness that is trapped inside this bed.
Then light floods it all away.
WALLACE touches the light switch, returning the lights to normal.
I stare across the bed at you. You are not looking at the turned down sheet, the bed raw, exposed and I ask.
My hand is already dropping to sweep away the walnut, “Were you home during the day today?”
WALLACE: What are you doing in the dark, Margaret?
MARGARET looks at WALLACE.
MARGARET: I don’t repeat the question because right now sweep, sweep I am deciding to live in the dark.
We have please-just-let-this-lie sex, in which I try to communicate what…? That time, long ago, when I was your golden bird.
You try to communicate whatever-it-was-that-I-saw-is-all-in-my-head.
Months later I shout at you, “She is just a golden bird, oh thin man of Haddam.”
WALLACE: Fuck Wallace Stevens.
stanza viii
the blackbird is involved
MARGARET is working on a poem.
WALLACE watches her from his desk.
WALLACE: I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
MARGARET: The yardstick.
WALLACE: You make it so.
MARGARET: I read once that the great poets stand on the shoulders of lesser poets. If there were no lesser poets, you geniuses would not be the great poets.
WALLACE: A defence for mediocrity, dear Margaret?
MARGARET loves this verse, she says it with reverence.
MARGARET: I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
MARGARET crumples the poem. Then carefully smoothes it out.
WALLACE: Begin.
MARGARET tries to give the poem the benefit of the doubt.
MARGARET: Sometimes it would happen
hours into our sleep
we both would wake
a spontaneous waking that I loved.
Her exposure is unbearable.
WALLACE indicates he is waiting.
On that night I now remember into our bedroom
came the sound of skateboards racing by our window
a gang of boy-men taking advantage of the empty street
to do it, the long hill beside our city house.
We lay, not touching, listening as they swerved and swept by
the skateboards’ wheels’ pulses or breaths
the riders’ voices’ grunts, low whistles, whoops
making me think of caribou pressing past
tiny houses in the north following too
some ancient mystifying radar.
These man-boys thrilling to the empty dark street
comrades in freedom and instincts.
Or so it must have seemed to you although you only said
skateboarders.
That night as I lay beside you thinking,
We are both awake!
I did not know something was claiming you
that as the skateboards swept past
an aching thing rose out of you out of our bed out of the windo
w
and spirited our life away with it
even as I curled into your back cupping my hand over yours.
Even if I had noticed that light or shadow leaving our bed
I have learned in these raw years
that I did not then nor do I now possess the words
to call you back.
MARGARET begins to rip the poem down the middle.
WALLACE: You know my praise gives you no satisfaction.
She finishes ripping it in two.
MARGARET: It is messy in the middle, overwritten everywhere but most especially at the end and it doesn’t…
WALLACE: …“the riders’ voices’ grunts, low whistles, whoops
making me think of caribou pressing past
tiny houses in the north following too
some ancient mystifying radar.”
Those lines have it.
MARGARET: Light? (quoting Wallace Stevens) “The poet fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others.”
WALLACE: Is there something you need me to say?
MARGARET: For your first poem in sixteen years—
WALLACE: —but this is the poem you wrote the day the divorce papers arrived.
MARGARET: I’ve reworked it.
It Is Solved By Walking Page 3