100 Poems to Break Your Heart

by Edward Hirsch

  The second part of the poem breaks off and introduces an anecdotal element. Bidart recalls expressing admiration for Brainard’s short collage-like book The Friendly Way (1972), which has a surreal zaniness. Blurring the boundary between the artist and his work, the speaker is left wondering about the code—not just for the collage but for its maker. There is something secret about Brainard he can’t quite decipher.

  The rest of the poem consists of a single run-on sentence. It moves forward by continually qualifying and arguing with itself. The speaker is all the while trying to think through his grief. The sentence begins with two stanzas in dialogue with each other. The first line refers to the “plague” of AIDS: “In the end, the plague that full swift runs by / took you, broke you . . .”

  This stanza references Thomas Nashe’s poem “A Litany in Time of Plague” (1600):

  All things to end are made,

  The plague full swift goes by;

  I am sick, I must die.

  Lord, have mercy on us!

  Bidart’s speaker immediately responds, in italic, with a second voice refuting the first. He can’t bear the thought that the plague not only took his beloved but also broke him. Hence:

  in the end, could not

  take you, did not break you—

  This thought breaks off to observe something hard to fathom about Brainard: how he had somehow erased in himself not just meanness but also rage and vengefulness, what the speaker calls “the desire to punish / the universe for everything . . .” The timing here is exactly calibrated. Notice the hesitation at the end of the line and stanza—“the desire to punish”—that spills over into the next phrase—“the universe for everything”—though the syntax then jumps forward to “everything // not achieved, not tasted, seen again, touched—; . . .” The phrases cannot really express the weight, the full import, of all Brainard would never manage to experience.

  The poem pauses here but doesn’t stop; it drives forward to its conclusion. Brainard carries his secret with him to the end.

  . . . the undecipherable

  code unbroken even as the soul

  * * *

  learns once again the body it loves and hates is

  made of earth, and will betray it.

  Bidart’s own fury is palpable. The weight of negation is heavy. He repeats the prefix un-, meaning “not,” in the words “undecipherable” and “unbroken” to refer to Brainard’s mysterious code, which the poet will now never crack. In his view, the immortal soul is painfully schooled by the mortal body, which it both loves and hates. That’s because the body is made of earth and thus will “betray” it by dying. How many times must the soul keep learning this lesson?

  “In Memory of Joe Brainard” is a stunned remembrance, a poem that marvels at Joe Brainard’s elusive purity of spirit even as it rails against the death that unfairly took him.

  Lucille Clifton

  * * *

  “jasper texas 1998”

  (1998)

  Lucille Clifton was an unswerving and courageous African American poet. Her audacious poem “jasper texas 1998” appeared in a section of new work in her selected poems, Blessing the Boats (2000). It comes directly after one of her most enraged poems, “the photograph: a lynching.” The first poem takes up a violently traumatic past that we still carry with us; the second responds to the brutal killing of a Black man in Texas near the end of the twentieth century. They are both part of what Clifton elsewhere calls “the terrible stories.” “jasper texas 1998” is also followed in Blessing the Boats by the poem “alabama 9/15/63,” which is about the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four Black girls were killed in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963. All three of these short poems ask large unanswerable questions. They are well-timed indictments of American society.

  “jasper texas 1998” takes its rightful place in a long line of African American poems about lynching. We have already seen how Langston Hughes helped redefine that subgenre of outraged elegies in the 1920s. At the end of the twentieth century Clifton was called upon to respond to yet another American barbarism.

  jasper texas 1998

  for j. byrd

  i am a man’s head hunched in the road.

  i was chosen to speak by the members

  of my body. the arm as it pulled away

  pointed toward me, the hand opened once

  and was gone.

  * * *

  why and why and why

  should i call a white man brother?

  who is the human in this place,

  the thing that is dragged or the dragger?

  what does my daughter say?

  * * *

  the sun is a blister overhead.

  if I were alive i could not bear it.

  the townsfolk sing we shall overcome

  while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth

  into the dirt that covers us all.

  i am done with this dust. i am done.

  Clifton isolates each of the three words in the title of her poem—“jasper texas 1998.” It first appeared in Ploughshares (1999) with the title rendered conventionally: “Jasper, Texas, 1998.” But when Clifton reprinted the poem in a book, she gave this extra weight to each word. We register the small town—“jasper”—and then the state where it is located—“texas”—and finally the date—“1998.” The dedication to “j. byrd” turns this into a memorial poem. The title may initially seem bland or neutral, but when read retrospectively, every word strikes like a blow to the body. It says: this horrific thing happened, here, in this place, at this time. And it happened to this man.

  The poem is based on the dragging death of forty-nine-year-old James Byrd Jr., who was dismembered as he was pulled behind a pickup truck. Three white supremacists were responsible. Clifton’s poem is a radical response and a historical intervention. It’s rare to find a poem that so successfully takes a contemporary event, especially one so horrific, and immediately transforms it into art. Here Clifton takes her gift for the demotic and applies it with a furious force. She is outraged and wants justice.

  Clifton decided early on not to capitalize the pronoun i, or any proper nouns for that matter, or the first word of each sentence in her poems. The absence of capital letters is an egalitarian gesture that puts all nouns and pronouns on the same level. It was a move of radical informality right from the playbook of E. E. Cummings. She also at times has added extra space between sentences for emphasis. In other ways her punctuation tends to be somewhat regular. Here she employs her characteristic mode in sixteen lines—two stanzas with five lines and one with six.

  Clifton made the radical decision to speak from the point of view of the murdered man’s head. He is like Orpheus, whose severed head continued to sing as it floated down the river. But Orpheus was a mythical personage, and James Byrd Jr. was a real person who suffered unimaginable harm. The poem opens on a country road. The first line is a sentence, a blunt declaration: “i am a man’s head hunched in the road.” We experience the power of his voice. The second line has one of the most extraordinary enjambments in contemporary poetry: “i was chosen to speak by the members / of my body.” The word “members” takes on a double meaning—it refers to parts of a body as well as the individuals composing a group. We speak, for example, of the members of a congregation. The shock comes with the realization that those individuals are body parts, which have asked the head to speak on their behalf. They have been dismembered. Even after death, the arm and the hand are still trying to point.

  The second stanza consists of three questions. The first line is a metaphysical outcry: “why and why and why,” which then coils into a more direct and specific question: “why and why and why / should i call a white man brother?” This question is rhetorical. James Byrd Jr. has been reduced to a thing dragged along a road, but he somehow retains his humanity. The racist perpetrators (the poet doesn’t grant them names) have degraded themselves as something less than human. Each of them has becom
e a “dragger.” The last question, “what does my daughter say?,” reminds us that the horrible sequence of events was never an abstraction. It happened to a very specific man with an actual daughter.

  A feeling of hopelessness pervades the last stanza. Hope has been destroyed for the victim, who speaks from the other side of death. The sun has become a blister, which Byrd couldn’t bear if he were still alive. That’s because he knows what he has seen. He can’t undo what he has suffered. The well-meaning townspeople may sing “we shall overcome,” a gesture of hopefulness from an anthem of the civil rights movement, but hope “bleeds” from Byrd’s mouth into the dust “that covers us all.”

  The first two stanzas of this poem create a pattern and lead us to expect a final five-line stanza. But it has an additional line, an overflow line, which provides an extra punch. The sixteenth line pairs two short declarative sentences as a single unit with a space between them. The repetition in the lines emphasizes the brutal finality for James Byrd Jr.:

  i am done with this dust.  i am done.

  The colloquial phrase “I am done with” suggests that he is finished with something. He’s literally done with the dust. The brutal last sentence—“i am done”—also means that he is dead. It’s all over for him.

  Lucille Clifton’s poem speaks imaginatively for a man who will never come back, whose life is over now. It is a tribute and an elegy. It is also an indictment. And it refuses to console us.

  Cynthia Huntington

  * * *

  “The Rapture”

  (2000)

  Cynthia Huntington describes and dramatizes a stupefying threshold moment in her radiant poem “The Rapture”:

  The Rapture

  I remember standing in the kitchen, stirring bones for soup,

  and in that moment, I became another person.

  * * *

  It was an early spring evening, the air California mild.

  Outside, the eucalyptus was bowing compulsively

  * * *

  over the neighbor’s motor home parked in the driveway.

  The street was quiet for once, and all the windows were open.

  * * *

  Then my right arm tingled, a flutter started under the skin.

  Fire charged down the nerve of my leg; my scalp exploded

  * * *

  in pricks of light. I shuddered and felt like laughing;

  it was exhilarating as an earthquake. A city on fire

  * * *

  after an earthquake. Then I trembled and my legs shook,

  and every muscle gripped so I fell and lay on my side,

  * * *

  a bolt driven down my skull into my spine. My legs were

  swimming against the linoleum, and I looked up at the underside

  * * *

  of the stove, the dirty places where the sponge didn’t reach.

  Everything collapsed there in one place, one flash of time.

  * * *

  There in my body. In the kitchen at six in the evening, April.

  A wooden spoon clutched in my hand, the smell of chicken broth.

  * * *

  And in that moment I knew everything that would come after:

  the vision was complete as it seized me. Without diagnosis,

  * * *

  without history. I knew that my life was changed.

  I seemed to have become entirely myself in that instant.

  * * *

  Not the tests, examinations in specialists’ offices, not

  the laboratory procedures: MRI, lumbar puncture, electrodes

  * * *

  pasted to my scalp, the needle scraped along the sole of my foot,

  following one finger with the eyes, EEG, CAT scan, myelogram.

  * * *

  Not the falling down or the blindness and tremors, the stumble

  and hiss in the blood, not the lying in bed in the afternoons.

  * * *

  Not phenobarbital, amitriptyline, prednisone, amantadine, ACTH,

  cortisone, cytoxan, copolymer, baclofen, tegretol, but this:

  * * *

  Six o’clock in the evening in April, stirring bones for soup.

  An event whose knowledge arrived whole, its meaning taking years

  * * *

  to open, to seem a destiny. It lasted thirty seconds, no more.

  Then my muscles unlocked, the surge and shaking left my body

  * * *

  and I lay still beneath the white high ceiling. Then I got up

  and stood there, quiet, alone, just beginning to be afraid.

  The voice of the speaker is utterly trustworthy in this poem. Huntington borrows an eschatological term from evangelical Christianity—the rapture—to remember and capture the first moment when she was suddenly and violently stricken by multiple sclerosis (“For ten years I could not say the name,” she confesses in another poem), though instead of being lifted up she is dropped to the floor of her own house. This epiphany moves downward.

  Rapture is a form of euphoria. The sense of it as spiritual ecstasy, a state of mental transport, was first recorded around 1600. But the etymology of the noun rapture (meaning “the state of being transported, carried away”) derives from an older usage, which comes from the medieval Latin raptura, meaning “seizure, rape, kidnapping,” which in turn derives from the Latin raptus, “a carrying off, an abduction; rape.” Huntington has said that she deliberately used the word rapture in its oldest sense, as akin to rape and abduction. She was thinking specifically of the rape of Persephone, who was grabbed into the underworld by something she didn’t see coming, something that forever changed her perspective. Huntington’s abduction was savage and irreversible too. At the very moment of her fall, she felt some kinship with Persephone, who was snatched up and whisked downward into Hades. Both women were rapt.

  Huntington’s poem unspools in eighteen long-lined, carefully shaped two-line stanzas. Formally, it resembles Marie Howe’s letter to her dead brother, “What the Living Do.” We have seen from a range of other poems in this book how long lines tend to create an oracular feeling and extend the voice beyond speech into something more like a prophecy. Like most epiphanic or visionary poems, this one is grounded in the quotidian world. Think of Anthony Hecht’s poem “A Hill,” which begins, “In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur, / I had a vision once,” or James Wright’s “A Blessing,” which commences, “Just off the highway in Rochester, Minnesota, / Twilight bounds softly forth in the grass.” Here, a woman in midlife, a poet, is standing in the kitchen on a spring night, making soup (there is something so elemental in the phrase “stirring bones”) and looking out the window.

  In the first two-line stanza, an intact or closed unit, this narrator immediately tells us that she is going to dramatize and recall the exact moment when she became someone else, “another person.” Notice how in the second stanza the eucalyptus tree seems to be losing control of itself and “bowing compulsively // over the neighbor’s motor home parked in the driveway,” a presaging of the narrator’s quasi-religious experience. The mobile home isn’t moving. So too the street becomes unnaturally quiet. This isn’t accidental—there is almost always a cessation of sound in such poetic crossings, which Wordsworth called “spots of time.” The fact that “the windows were open” suggests a porousness between interior and exterior worlds. We are moving from one state of being to another. It seems to be an ordinary domestic night in the neighborhood when something extraordinary begins to happen to the narrator’s body: “Then my right arm tingled . . .”

  Huntington describes with great clarity the terror and exhilaration of losing control of her body. She feels a fire racing through, an explosion of light. She compares the shuddering to an earthquake and then modifies that to “A city on fire // after an earthquake.” As readers, we register the double emphasis caused by a line break as well as a stanza break. We note the precision of her memory, what she sees when she falls—the underside of a stove that
hasn’t been cleaned, an observation that lends credibility to the leap out of time. It’s as if the poet-narrator were amusing herself by imagining the quotidian view of the bottom of the stove as a figure for looking up into the world from Hades. She experiences the vision, the so-called rapture, that comes to her all at once “Without diagnosis, // without history.” Once more, we register a sentence fragment, two phrases separated both by a line break and a stanza break. The moment seems to have no before or after, no chronology; it is severed from history.

  “The Rapture” funnels to this flash of an instant, a prolonged moment out of time. The narrator gives us a long, detailed look into her medical future (all those tests and examinations, all those drugs). This is her self-diagnosis. It’s as if she can see into the future everything that is going to happen to her. She lists these events through a series of negatives, all of them fragments: “Not the tests . . . , not / the laboratory procedures . . .”; “Not the falling down or the blindness and tremors . . .”; “Not phenobarbital . . .” A logical proposition is driving this catalog: it’s not these things that seemed truly important, she argues, “but this . . .”