WALLACE: Ahhhhh. For your only poem in sixteen years, it is grounded.
MARGARET: When you say “grounded” you mean to say it does not make the leap.
WALLACE: A poem cannot be a frog in a jar.
MARGARET: How does a poem not be a frog in a jar?
WALLACE: In order to leap into the light, a poem, like the frog, must have space to—
MARGARET: —move forward into—
WALLACE: —exactly. (thinks death)
MARGARET absorbs his thought.
MARGARET: No. In this poem he’s not…
WALLACE: What?
MARGARET: In this poem, John is kept alive.
WALLACE: Well, there it is. All this time you have been revising a dead frog.
MARGARET: Must you be so cruel?
WALLACE: Margaret, apply electricity to a dissected frog’s heart, watch its sickly beats and crow that you have a live frog—
MARGARET: —but don’t expect it to leap into any goddamn space?
So every poem now proclaims, he is dead.
WALLACE: Every poem knows that he is. That knowing is the light.
She leaves the house, strides to the far point and throws the crumpled poem into the sea.
stanza ix
many circles with planets
MARGARET pulls back the chair and table to create a space in the room. She is building a universe in concentric circles.
She retrieves her high-school poetry anthology and places it in the centre of the floor. She walks round the book in a tight circle.
WALLACE moves out of the shadows.
MARGARET gets WALLACE’s The Palm at the End of the Mind and places it a little distance from the anthology. She walks, using the book as the beginning and end as she makes her way about the high-school anthology circle.
MARGARET gets the white box, places the sari at an equal distance from WALLACE’s poems. Again she walks around the universe so far, using the sari as the beginning and end.
WALLACE: What now?
MARGARET picks up the anthology and leafs through it.
MARGARET: My high-school poetry anthology. All my first loves. Larkin, cummings, Eliot, Bishop, Atwood, (teasingly) Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Walter de la Mare.
WALLACE: Please, if only one got to choose one’s bedfellows.
MARGARET: Teasdale, Sexton, Plath.
WALLACE: Oh yes, the famously dead get read.
She opens the high-school anthology to WALLACE’s poems.
MARGARET: Do you want to know what seventeen-year-old Margaret wrote beside your poem?
“What are the blackbirds in Stevens’s poem?”
MARGARET holds the page up to him.
WALLACE: Oh yes, those years, when you wrote the “o” in poem in the shape of a heart.
MARGARET: I did.
MARGARET returns the anthology to the centre of the universe.
MARGARET hauls out a large, clear plastic bag with shredded paper. She scoops some out and makes a ball with it, then carefully as before traces a circle from the ball around the sari circle.
She moves to make a new outer circle. She stops, spreading her arms out slowly. She slowly walks around all the objects.
She gets a blank sheet of paper. She holds it up to him. She places it on the floor and completes the circle walk.
MARGARET retrieves the orange bowl, with one orange remaining, and places it a little distance from the paper.
WALLACE starts to speak but she silences him.
I was never a scholar.
Using the bowl as the beginning and end she walks around the universe.
MARGARET goes to the bed and strips back the bedclothes. She looks for and finds a single Rapunzel-length golden hair. She carefully lays it out. The hair is long enough to go completely around the universe so far.
She returns to the bed, taking the sheets off. She stands at the outer edge of the universe and holds a corner of each sheet in her hands to illustrate opposite poles.
Why is the familiar… how does the familiar become repellent? When I was a kid I loved holding two negative poles of magnets together. Feeling how determined they were not to connect. I brought the two negatives together again and again, to feel that sensation, that power of repelling. My heart would lurch when I forced the points to meet… the centre of deadness.
She lays the corners down so they do not touch.
WALLACE: And this is…?
MARGARET: The Universe o’ Margaret.
WALLACE: Oh good, a science project, also decades late.
MARGARET walks over to him and takes his hands, leading him to the anthology.
MARGARET: When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
MARGARET hugs the anthology to her breast.
Poetry.
They move to The Palm at the End of the Mind.
The poet Wallace Stevens and all his beautiful poems.
MARGARET moves to the sari.
John and Margaret in love.
WALLACE resists this so that she steps first and then faces him to pull him across the sari circle.
John’s Ph.D.
They laugh and step over the ball of shredded paper.
WALLACE will in some way intrude on the next circle. MARGARET stops him.
Stains.
WALLACE: Blood—?
MARGARET: (nods) —and of aborted first thoughts.
They step over the unmarked grave of that.
All the poems I didn’t write.
They step over the blank page.
A married woman safe who keeps oranges in a bowl in her bedroom.
They step over the bowl.
One Golden Hair.
They step over the golden hair.
The last time we had sex.
MARGARET takes his arm, propelling him to step over the sheets. She walks the labyrinth holding the book of poetry.
The last time we had sex, I, of course, did not know that it was the last time. Eighteen years of bad sex, good sex, great sex, indifferent sex… all the sex. Who really knows when, this sex, is the last time. People who are leaving for war think it could maybe be the very last time. Who else? So I didn’t say to him, “This is the last time we will have sex.” I didn’t try to remember every second of it. No, the act of sex is an act of faith. We come home from the marriage counsellor where John has insisted that he does love me and I have insisted that I do love him. We have sex. Is there something else we could have done? Maybe. Sex is what we do.
Angry, mechanical, hurtful sex. He sucks too hard on my right breast because he is concentrating on getting hard enough to get inside of my resisting vagina.
Finally I say, “That hurts,” and John says, “Sorry.” He slips away inside his head. He feels her welcoming him and like that he is fully gone behind his eyes. But that’s fine, because I’ve left too.
I am in the house we had when we were first married. I’m remembering the afternoon I arrived home before he did. I slowly walk through the downstairs, then climb the stairs, stripping off my clothes as I go, blouse, skirt, bra and on the top of the stairs my red-and-white lace panties. Naked I lay under the sheet on the bed that is showered in late spring sunlight that electrifies my sexiness. I am that girl again. I have fallen asleep and when I awake… right now… he is in the room, naked too, and he strips off the sheet and climbs above me. I open to him and he enters me so gently and we look into each other, me watching him, as he watches me. We soften, flush and climax.
Where did those two lovers go?
I didn’t know the last time was the last time. But I remember finding his body next to mine repellent, his breathing repellent, having him undress in front of me repellent. I remember I said, “You can’t sleep in this bed anymore.” And he left our bedroom and a week later our house.
WALLACE: What is that, Margaret?
MARGARET: A story that might be a poem.
WALLACE: I’ll g
ive you this. It isn’t maudlin. But. Is this really what you want to write for your start?
MARGARET: I want to be in the middle already with selected, collected works.
WALLACE: Not to quote that damnable Frost but, the road not taken.
MARGARET: I took that road every morning when I rose from our bed, but by the time I had walked across the campus to the shared office for non-tenure-stream English professors—
MARGARET walks backwards like a child retracing her steps in snow.
WALLACE: —two thousand four hundred and sixty-four steps.
WALLACE steps behind her so that she bumps against his force field. There is no retracing those steps. She drops to her knees. In the fading light she gathers up her life and shoves it under the bed.
stanza x
the point of turning
MARGARET is walking the path.
MARGARET: In the beginning we walked together. We walked miles of beach, not another person in sight, no evidence that we were not the only two people on earth.
WALLACE: Adam and Na-ive. (stressing the “ive” to sound like “Eve”)
MARGARET: We were Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve before their story was distorted by the telling of it. There is poetry in that.
MARGARET stares out into the deep past.
WALLACE: What are you reaching for, Margaret?
MARGARET: A golden day.
WALLACE: How far back?
MARGARET: Three years before the year that marked the end.
We are on the beach for the afternoon… There is a storm, somewhere far out in the Atlantic, but we don’t have it. We have a brilliantly sunny day and magnificent green, high-rolling waves.
WALLACE: A good metaphor.
MARGARET: I am not writing.
The weight of those four words on MARGARET.
We are walking. On that July day, a storm far out in the Atlantic, we watch a grey seal, caught in a great high-rolling green wave, the roller transparent, backlit by the sun, the seal stopped in green amber, a fossil of some joy once. The sea roils, spray leaps along the crest of the wave, the very centre of the roller solid, holding the seal a stilled heart. We go off into the dunes, the sun-drenched sand warm beneath us, the sounds of us coming mingled with the sound of the pounding of the waves along the shore. A golden day.
WALLACE: Tsk tsk—
MARGARET: Golden memories carry no more truth than the blackest memories.
At what point does a liquid become solid? How long does it hold there just at the point of turning?
The next morning in the car on the way home he wants to have sex. Suddenly he wants sex all the time, morning, noon and night. His erections are like a teenager’s, ripe to burst.
“What is it?” I do ask. He is so angry. “Can’t we just have sex, does it all have to relate to words?” I answer with my body. I keep the pace. Still he wants more.
WALLACE: What do you feel?
MARGARET: There is no feeling, only the acts. Each act only multiplies the need. Even before the immediate act is done, even before he reluctantly releases himself into that place I give to him, he is already building towards the next act.
WALLACE: What is the sensation?
MARGARET: Say it to me.
WALLACE: At the sight of the blackbirds
MARGARET: More slowly.
MARGARET walks as she listens.
WALLACE: At the sight of the blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
MARGARET: I know that cry.
WALLACE: In the context of the poem…
MARGARET: In the context of the act of sex without love or anything like love.
His sharp cry, “God damn it god damn it god damn it arghhh.”
Days of it, weeks.
WALLACE: Please-leave-me-or-I-will-die sex.
MARGARET: I give over my body. I do. Still it is not enough.
Finally he bursts. “You are so removed when I have sex with you. You are not even in your body, not even in the room.”
“You give me nothing.”
MARGARET stares out at the sea.
MARGARET turns and stares into the deep past.
I think of the seal hung in that green high roller backlit by the golden light of memory, the point of turning.
“You give me nothing.” This is what I thought.
How do I get to be that seal? I am numb from the ache to be inside the beauty of a poem.
WALLACE: If you had written it down, made a poem that day…
MARGARET: …Yes?
There it was. (acknowledging) I gave him nothing.
MARGARET holds out her emptiness.
But I answered him, “No, I am here. I promise. I am here.”
Three years more I pulled us through liquid glass,
shards in our wake.
stanza xi
a blood flecked urge to go even a step further
MARGARET: What were his last moments like?
WALLACE: I am not omnipresent, Margaret.
MARGARET: I feel John inside the smashed car smashed and the first person on the scene a young man repeatedly running up to look inside but sprinting away frightened by John’s… dying moans.
WALLACE: Employ the five senses.
MARGARET: Metallic odour of the monstrous wreck, bile of a lacerated liver, his spine interrupted his fingers’ tips dead, (testing) his spine interrupted his fingers’ tips stilled—
WALLACE: —yes.
MARGARET: —slapping of sneakers on wet pavement, a young man’s face a puzzle in cracked glass appearing, disappearing, reappearing, disappearing.
John is at once the changed man trapped inside the twisted metal and the young man trying to have the courage to look inside and see the horror of that change.
The John I fell in love with loved metaphors.
MARGARET is walking a figure eight, always pausing where the two ovals meet. Her discoveries should coincide with the crossover.
Stanza eleven.
WALLACE: Your nemesis.
MARGARET: Yes, I never got through it.
WALLACE: He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
MARGARET: There is a trick to reading Wallace Stevens. Substitute “I,” whenever Stevens says “he” or “she.”
WALLACE: I rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced me,
In that I mistook
The shadow of my equipage
For blackbirds.
MARGARET walks the figure eight for a long time.
MARGARET: I am in Connecticut in a glass coach.
The faculty meet-and-greet for new Ph.D. students. I stand at the edge of the room watching. The sensations in me of beautiful poems! A brilliant thesis! Publications in scholarly journals! Tenure! I am shining with every future.
I see him, of course, in the centre of the room, the golden boy.
I think it will make a good poem… sex with this slightly drunken golden boy.
Mmmmm I like it, waking up with this glowing boy in my bed.
I tell him, “You are in bed with a woman who will one day be a famous poet for using the word scrotum beautifully in a sonnet.”
She stops walking.
He rolls his body away from mine. He laughs, “A poet?”
fear pierces me
I laugh back, “After we have tenure.”
We is a bold word. He takes it. “When we are Dean of Graduate Studies,” he says.
In that moment, I mistook,
John laying his body along the whole of the length of me
for blackbirds.
There is the sound of blackbirds in flight. MARGARET slowly tur
ns in place, counting them.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten and see, there, the eleventh lifting off.
I love this poem.
This poem holds the meaning of me. I will get to the end.
WALLACE moves towards the stairs. She stops him.
You almost killed it in me.
No.
You kept it alive in me.
Oh the pain of that.
She pauses then kisses him on the mouth tenderly, forgivingly.
I chose well.
I will get to the end of everything.
MARGARET steps back as the light on WALLACE leaks away until he is a shadow.
stanza xii
flying
WALLACE is in the shadows.
MARGARET is in a beautiful Mediterranean blue dressing gown.
MARGARET: A month walking in an olive grove in Crete changes me. I bury the yellowed copy of the last email from him, “I fell out of love with you,” in the sandy soil under an olive tree.
At the airport in Athens, waiting to board the plane as a passenger is a pilot. His jacket lapel has tiny metal wings to show he is a pilot. He is fifty-five, maybe, and his face looks as weary of pain as I feel. He isn’t doing anything to hide it—he is simply stillness, sadness but above all he is weary. He is as aware of me as I am of him. We stand ten paces apart looking at the other when it is safe to do so. We are weary warriors from the same tribe; we don’t know the face but we know the soul.
It Is Solved By Walking Page 4