100 Poems to Break Your Heart
Page 33
Our amputation teams were better.
We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
They sent us exploding ambassadors of peace.
They do this, we do that.
We canceled our sheep imports.
They no longer bought our blankets.
We mocked their greatest poet
and when that had no effect
we parodied the way they dance
which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
was leprous, hairless.
We do this, they do that.
Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
(10,000) brutal, beautiful years.
“The People of the Other Village” breaks the mold of the typical protest poem with its cutting wit and black humor. It is funny and upsetting at the same time. Lux strategically turns the poem of dissent and social criticism into a dark parable of tribalism: modern warfare fueled by ancient hatreds. Each example of escalating violence and revenge has a comic awfulness. There is a primal truth in the perfectly balanced refrain, which divides neatly in two: “We do this, || they do that.”
Lux’s poem is stichic, which means that it has an unbroken flow of lines. Like Sharon Olds’s “The Race” and Les Murray’s “It Allows a Portrait in Line-Scan at Fifteen,” it builds a case in one determined stanza. The twenty-five free-verse lines are carefully timed, the statements poised for maximum impact. The title flows, as if naturally, into the first line, but it also contains a dramatic surprise. When we read the title, “The People of the Other Village,” we expect an anthropologically oriented poem about a particular people—what they do, how they live. Maybe they have quaint ways; perhaps they’re just like us, after all. Instead, the title employs an enjambment that bites down with fury. Hence the realization that “The People of the Other Village”
hate the people of this village
The poem thus establishes its tragic premise.
Lux employs surreal images throughout this poem, but they operate on behalf of a crafted argument, not as ends in themselves. For example, the poet takes some minor but plausible offenses by people in occupied countries—refusing to take off a hat, failing to salute—and finds comic Dantesque punishments for them, such as nailing “our hats / to our heads” or stapling “our hands to our foreheads.” There is a weirdly primitive and exaggerated cruelty to the horrors: “They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats. / We devein one of their sisters.”
Lux knowingly put this poem in the first-person plural. It’s us and them. He doesn’t exempt us from responsibility. We do this, they do that. We strike the first blow, hurt them first with ugly schoolboy pranks. Notice how the poem forces us to press our lips together on the repetition of the letter m: “mail them packages of rats, / mix their flour at night with broken glass.” There’s a kind of grim glee in the way he keeps creatively generating attacks and counterattacks. Some of the actions and retaliations exaggerate the horror, but with a baseline of truth as to the basic primordial technology of war: “The quicksand pits they built were good. / Our amputation teams were better.” So too he takes a surreal image and applies it to suicide bombers: “They sent us exploding ambassadors of peace.” Other retaliations seem more realistic, even mundane, such as dumb trade wars: “We cancelled our sheep imports. / They no longer bought our blankets.” With a matter-of-fact tone, Lux’s poem swings wildly between realism and grotesquerie. The comical line about the unimportance of poetry (“We mocked their greatest poet / and when that had no effect”) proceeds to a mockery of how people dance (note the clever enjambment in “we parodied the way they dance / which did cause pain”), and this in turn leads to everyone insulting each other’s gods as “leprous, hairless.” The conflict keeps escalating until there is no turning back.
Everything builds to the last two lines, a final fragment, not even a whole sentence. “We do this, they do that” continues, and it all goes on and on for “Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand / (10,000) brutal, beautiful years.” Spelling out numbers and then reiterating them as figures in parentheses was originally done in legal writing. Lux uses this anachronistic practice to suggest that a kind of law is operating here—as if he is clarifying a policy. He repeats the numbers twice for emphasis. The alliteration in the last line has an archaic sound and inextricably ties together the words “brutal” and “beautiful.” The Gulf War may be the latest example, but this sort of conflict has been going on throughout human time. The history of every people is impure and contains violence and beauty.
Thomas Lux was a poet of the American vernacular, an existentialist with comic timing, a disabused romantic who believed in the redemptive powers of poetry. “I like to make the reader laugh—and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat,” he said. “Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humor.” “The People of the Other Village” is a political poem with an enduring truth, a lyric that combines sad zaniness and dark wisdom to steal the laughter right out of our throats.
Linda Gregerson
* * *
“For the Taking”
(1993)
Linda Gregerson’s poem “For the Taking,” which first appeared in The Atlantic (1993) and then in her second book, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (1996), begins without preamble, in medias res:
For the Taking
And always, the damp blond curls
on her temples
and bountifully down to her shoulder blades,
* * *
the rich loose curls all summer mixed with sand
and sweat,
and the rare, voluptuous double
* * *
curve of her nether lip—most children lose
that ripeness before
they can talk—and the solemn forehead,
* * *
which betokens thought and, alas
for her, o-
bedience, and the pure, unmuddied line
* * *
of the jaw, and the peeling brown shoulders—
she was always
a child of the sun . . . This
* * *
was his sweet piece of luck, his
find,
his renewable turn-on,
* * *
and my brown and golden sister at eight
and a half
took to hating her body and cried
* * *
in her bath, and this was years,
my bad uncle did it
for years, in the back of the car,
* * *
in the basement where he kept his guns,
and we
who could have saved her, who knew
* * *
what it was in the best of times
to cross
the bridge of shame, from the body un-
* * *
encumbered to the body on the
block,
we would be somewhere mowing the lawn
* * *
or basting the spareribs right
outside, and—how
many times have you heard this?—we
* * *
were deaf and blind
and have
ever since required of her that she
* * *
take care of us, and she has,
and here’s
the worst, she does it for love.
The full meaning of Gregerson’s title, “For the Taking,” only gradually reveals itself over the course of forty-two lines. The word “taking” has several connotations in this poem. The colloquial phrase “for the taking” means “ready or available for someone to take advantage of.” In the most simple and sinister way, that’s what happens to the poet’s sister, who, without knowing it, was there “for the taking.” Most devastating, the sister becomes the one who was “taken”—seized, held, exploited—by a relative, a sexual predator, “a bad uncle,” as a child might put it. He abused her, and the rest of the family was
too preoccupied to notice. Over the years, the poem reveals, this sister ends up taking care of them (that is, caring for and protecting them) and—it’s almost unimaginable for the poet to admit it—she does it from love.
Gregerson unequivocally implicates herself in this moral quandary. She is a key member of the “we.” The interjection, which is an unacceptable excuse—“how / many times have you heard this?”—suggests that she isn’t excusing herself for the family’s unawareness of the cruelty inflicted on her sister. On the contrary, she is trying to confront what happened and convicting the family for its obtuseness, which had such dire consequences. The poem takes up the guilt and helplessness of not knowing. Silence, the communal act of “not seeing,” is first cousin to denial, which is enablement. But instead of recognizing this, the family accepted and “took” so much from the speaker’s unnamed sister. The injustice of it all seems unending.
Gregerson has said that the subject of this poem ambushed her. When she began, she thought that she was writing a poem about the loveliness of her sister as a young girl. But by the second stanza she started to feel extremely uncomfortable, even implicated, since she had strayed unwittingly into that territory where affection for children—and appreciation for a type of loveliness that is unaware of itself—becomes predation. That’s when she realized that her true subject had been lying in wait behind what she had only mistaken for her subject. It was not something that she would have purposely set out to put into a poem.
There are just two sentences in this poem. The first enters with a conjunction, “And,” which is followed by the word “always”; the two words establish a sense of continuity and permanence. Indeed, the entire first sentence, which runs until the fifteenth line, pictures the eternal summer of a young girl, her purity and ripeness, “a child of the sun.” This part of the poem, or rather this part of the sister’s life, closes with an ellipsis. It trails off into the assertion, the brutal recognition, of the second sentence, which opens with this statement: “This // was his sweet piece of luck.” This sentence carries the weight of the sister’s sentence, her story, the years of abuse that took away her childhood.
Gregerson uses her signature three-line stanza for this meditative poem. William Carlos Williams coined the term “variable foot” for the three-ply line that he developed in his later work. Williams claimed that the traditional fixed foot of English prosody needed to be altered to represent idiomatic American speech rhythms. He was seeking metrical relativity, a more intuitive cadence based on speech. Gregerson formalizes Williams’s triadic stanza so that it emphasizes not just the character of speech but also the experience of telling a story while simultaneously thinking about it. The syntax dramatizes the unfolding of thought, a current that drives the poem forward, while the lineation creates hesitancies and interruptions, points of emphasis. The dropped three-line stanza thus enables the poet to control the pacing of the lines, which expand, contract, and then expand again.
This in turn creates a special emphasis on the foreshortened second lines, which typically consist of one metrical foot. Isolate those lines for a moment and you get a sense of the dramatic phrasing—
on her temples,
* * *
and sweat,
* * *
that ripeness before,
* * *
for her, o-.
The break in the word “obedience,” for example, creates an exclamation, “o-,” like “oh,” which falls, terribly, to complete the word “obedience,” the compliance that fated the eight-year-old girl.
The third line of each stanza leans back, though not all the way to the beginning, and then extends the meditation. Reread the third line of each stanza—
his renewable turn-on,
* * *
took to hating her body and cried,
* * *
for years, in the back of the car,
* * *
who could have saved her, who knew
and you can see how Gregerson wrings meaning out of each individual line, while keeping the flow of the poem and the subject in mind.
Gregerson tends to use this stanzaic structure for most of her poems—she once said that discovering it saved her life—but it has special purpose here. Each stanza enacts individually the overall story of the poem. It begins, it cuts off dramatically on both sides, and then it keeps going, though it cannot return to the beginning. The fullness of childhood can never be restored.
So too the stanzas unspool into each other. This gives a feeling of thought in action, time slowed and pushing forward. And it allows the poet time to emphasize certain phrases for effect. Pause for a moment over the movement that starts in the middle of the ninth stanza:
and we
who could have saved her, who knew
* * *
what it was in the best of times
to cross
the bridge of shame, from the body un-
* * *
encumbered to the body on the
block,
A triple break—of a word, a line, and a stanza—occurs with “un- // encumbered,” signaling a cataclysmic loss. The prefix un- has a negative force field and connects to the word “encumbered,” enacting how the sister could have been rescued but was instead sacrificed. So too the consonance of the letter c connects “could” to “cross” even as the pressure of the letter b connects the words “best,” “bridge,” “body” (which appears twice), and “block.” The bridge that the family crosses turns out not to be a real bridge but a brutal abstraction, a “bridge of shame.”
The weaving together of sounds, the poetic figuration, and the movement of the lines all work here in the service of the shocking revelation that a young girl lost her childhood, her innocence—she was served up—while everyone else was going on with their ordinary domestic lives (“mowing the lawn // or basting the spareribs right / outside”). It’s not just that the family was “deaf and blind”; it also “ever since required of her that she // take care of us, and she has . . .” The word “required” makes this all seem painfully compulsory. The phrase “take care of us” (to keep safe, to look after) seems especially ironic and painful, and brings us back to the title. There’s a ghastly family circuit of damage in operation. The poet recognizes—and the poem acknowledges—that this is shockingly unfair. The one who is most harmed is the one upon whom the others depend for absolution. And worst of all, the speaker suggests, is that she does it not from obligation but voluntarily, “for love,” which everyone in the family is willing to accept, to take.
Nicholas Christopher
* * *
“Terminus”
(1993)
Terminus
Here is a piece of required reading
at the end of our century
the end of a millennium that began with the crusades
* * *
The transcript of an interview
between a Red Cross doctor
and a Muslim girl in Bosnia
twelve years old
who described her rape by men
calling themselves soldiers
different men every night one after the other
six seven eight of them
for a week
while she was chained by the neck
to a bed in her former schoolhouse
where she saw her parents and her brothers
have their throats slit and tongues cut out
where her sister-in-law
nineteen years old and nursing her baby
was also raped night after night
until she dared to beg for water
because her milk had run dry
at which point one of the men
tore the child from her arms
and as if he were “cutting an ear of corn”
(the girl’s words)
lopped off the child’s head
with a hunting knife
tossed it into the mother’s lap
and ra
ped the girl again
slapping her face
smearing it with her nephew’s blood
and then shot the mother
who had begun to shriek
with the head wide-eyed in her lap
shoving the gun into her mouth
and firing twice
* * *
All of this recounted to the doctor
in a monotone
a near whisper in a tent