100 Poems to Break Your Heart

by Edward Hirsch

  In this elegy, subjective questions about a mother keep bumping up against the objective reality of her death. There is a moment where Chang adapts and darkens Richard Siken’s line “I live in someone else’s future” (from “The Worm King’s Lullaby”) into “Imagination is having to live in a dead person’s future.” She imagines, objectifies, and generalizes grief into the experience of “wearing a dead person’s dress forever.” Grief is personified and characterized here. The mother is gone and so is her blue dress. And yet somehow this poet—this elegy and obituary—will inhabit it forever.

  Toi Derricotte

  * * *

  “Pantoum for the Broken”

  (2017)

  Toi Derricotte had already written “Beds” (2011), a series of difficult, harrowing, essayistic prose poems about her father’s violence during her childhood (“He’d explain how he had studied hard so he knew where to hit me and not leave a single mark”) when she turned to the traditional form of the pantoum to confront another unspeakable subject: what it’s like for young girls to be violated, molested, and harmed, sometimes by an unknown perpetrator, sometimes by a person who is all too well known. In this shocking poem Derricotte deploys the pantoum form to dramatize sexual abuse, capturing an experience that is extremely difficult to write or talk about. In just five stanzas, twenty lines, she unmasks a horrific brutality and somehow connects to a community of survivors.

  Pantoum for the Broken

  How many of us were fingered?

  A soft thing with a hole in it,

  a thing that won’t tell, that can’t.

  I forget how many times I was broken,

  * * *

  a soft thing with a hole in it.

  Some remember, grateful it wasn’t worse;

  I forget how many times I was broken.

  Someone faceless rolled on me like a horse.

  * * *

  Some remember, grateful it wasn’t worse.

  Some forget but their bodies do inexplicable things.

  Someone faceless rolled on me like a horse.

  Sleepwalking, I go back to where it happens.

  * * *

  Some forget but their bodies do inexplicable things.

  We don’t know when or why or who broke in.

  Sleepwalking, we go back to where it happens.

  Not wanting to go back, we make it happen.

  * * *

  If we escaped, will we escape again?

  I leapt from my body like a burning thing.

  Not wanting to go back, I make it happen

  until I hold the broken one, hold her and sing.

  The pantoum originated as an oral Malayan form—it first entered written literature in the fifteenth century—and Derricotte retains something of its original spoken quality. The form is highly, perhaps even obsessively repetitive. It consists of interweaving quatrains of indeterminate length. The second and fourth lines of each stanza repeat as the first and third lines of the following stanza. Every stanza takes four steps forward and two steps back—and thus, as a form, it keeps looking back over its shoulder. The fact that it turns back while moving forward makes it well suited to poems of loss, such as Donald Justice’s “Pantoum of the Great Depression,” and poems of departure, such as Louis MacNeice’s “Leaving Barra.” But these poems are gentle compared to “Pantoum for the Broken.” Also, the pantoum started out as a disjunctive form (the first two lines had no apparent connection to the second set of lines), and here Derricotte employs disjunctive memory in her poem of severe brokenness.

  “How many of us were fingered?”—is there a more appalled or appalling opening line in the history of the pantoum? The word “fingered” does double service here: its primary meaning points to a horrifying sexual violation. But the word also means “targeted,” and the sense of being fingered by sexual predators also comes into play.

  Each end-stopped line in a pantoum tends to present a statement, and Derricotte shocks the reader by showing how young girls have been reduced to objects: “A soft thing with a hole in it, / a thing that won’t tell, that can’t.” The partial rhyme that connects the small but crucial words “it” and “can’t” reinforces the feeling of helplessness. The pronouns related to these girls switch from the third-person plural—“How many of us were fingered”—to the first-person singular: “I forget how many times I was broken.” The words “fingered” and “broken” emphatically do not rhyme, another disjunction. The first stanza ends not with a period, but a comma, and the double pause of line break and punctuation emphasizes the connection to the beginning of the second stanza: “I forget how many times I was broken, // a soft thing with a hole in it.”

  In a strong pantoum, every time a line repeats, it accrues a different or additional meaning. The first time Derricotte evokes “a soft thing with a hole in it,” she is referring to the vagina of a young girl. But the second time, because the line comes after the horrifying confession “I forget how many times I was broken,” the image comes also to stand for the speaker’s whole self. The wound has grown. She has been broken so many times that she has been hollowed out.

  For the rest of the poem, Derricotte moves fluently between the plural and the singular to reflect on memories of sexual abuse: “Some remember, grateful it wasn’t worse; / I forget how many times I was broken.” Some may be grateful that the violence wasn’t even worse, a documented perspective among some survivors of trauma, but the speaker evidently isn’t one of them. Derricotte has said that the next image came to her from a recurring childhood dream: “Someone faceless rolled on me like a horse. / Sleepwalking, I go back to where it happens.” Each successive statement comes at us like a blow, reenacting the horror as the speaker keeps going back to it, in memory. Thus, the pantoum enacts a series of compulsive returns.

  It is purposeful to reduce the abuser, in this case an unnamed man, to “someone faceless.” The face is the center of human recognition. If the human face “orders and ordains” us, as the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas declares, the abuser has been reduced here to something less than human, the animal body and nothing more; hence the simile “Someone faceless rolled on me like a horse.” The comparison seems to add on to the action, doubling it, repeating it, worsening it. The mention of the horse also harkens back to the speaker’s sense of being broken. To break a horse is to stamp out its spirit and conquer it. That’s precisely what the sexual predator is doing to the young girl. The horror is reinforced by the dissonant near rhyme of the words “worse” and “horse,” which emphatically reoccurs in the next stanza.

  Derricotte’s speaker summarizes how the experience of abuse shapes different people, sometimes through remembering, sometimes through forgetting:

  Some remember, grateful it wasn’t worse.

  Some forget but their bodies do inexplicable things.

  Someone faceless rolled on me like a horse.

  Sleepwalking, I go back to where it happens.

  The word “faceless” also evokes the idea of facing or not facing up to something. Nonetheless, whether one remembers or forgets, confronting or avoiding the past, the return is inescapable. It turns some women into “sleepwalkers,” others into people who go through life doing things that they can’t understand.

  It’s worth pausing a moment to focus on the rhyming of this pantoum. In every stanza, Derricotte reinforces connections with a single close or near rhyme. Two lines rhyme, but two others do not. Recall the words “it” and “can’t” (stanza 1), “worse” and “horse” (stanzas 2 and 3), “in” and “happen” (stanza 4). Throughout the poem, the lines that rhyme reinforce a sense of connectedness; the lines that don’t rhyme reinforce a feeling of brokenness. This pattern also fortifies the poem’s dialogue between remembering and forgetting.

  There is a turn, or change in sound, in the penultimate stanza. Here the lines that don’t rhyme are brought into closer relation with the words “things” and “happen.” You hear the jangling repetition of the letter n in all f
our words: “things,” “in,” “happen,” “happens.” Something is happening—and the thing that is happening is enacted in the sound.

  This sound carries forward into the final stanza, where all four end-words are also connected. But now, for the first time, the entire stanza rhymes in a simple alternation, abab:

  If we escaped, will we escape again?

  I leapt from my body like a burning thing.

  Not wanting to go back, I make it happen

  until I hold the broken one, hold her and sing.

  The rhyming doesn’t just strengthen the meaning; it enacts a movement from one form of speech to another. The speaker is transforming herself—and other victims of sexual abuse—from objects into subjects. She is reclaiming their personhood. They are becoming singers, and the language is lifting off.

  The last stanza opens with a question—“If we escaped, will we escape again?” It is followed by a recollection of how the speaker herself once responded: “I leapt from my body like a burning thing.” The consonant b presses the word “body” toward the word “burning,” and the analogy captures the urgency. The “thing that won’t tell” had become a “burning thing” that needed to vault away from the speaker’s own body—as if she were jumping out of a burning building. In the last two lines, Derricotte dramatizes a fear that is faced and conquered: “Not wanting to go back, I make it happen / until I hold the broken one, hold her and sing.” Note the change from “we” in the penultimate stanza to “I” in the last stanza—this is the single crucial transformation of the pantoum form. Derricotte has carefully saved it for the final two lines. The speaker does not want to return to the past, and thus she must return in order to transfigure it. She is the only one who can make that happen.

  The last line transports this poem from speech into song, and into determined action. The speaker has created a split and a coming together: the part of the self that survives is holding and consoling the part of the self that was victimized. She is holding and consoling her younger self, the broken part of her. The speaker is being transformed. Something has been completed; something is being sung. “Pantoum for the Broken” has become a poem not just of brokenness but also of healing.

  Meena Alexander

  * * *

  “Krishna, 3:29 A.M.”

  (2018)

  Meena Alexander was a poet of dislocation and exile, of what she termed “fault lines.” She wrote “Krishna, 3:29 A.M.” when she was deep in the midst of a doomed fight against cancer. It is a dark-night-of-the-soul poem, a summing up. In the end, it turns into an ars poetica. In this way, it is like Wisława Szymborska’s “Under One Small Star” and Heather McHugh’s “What He Thought,” though it has a much more pressing personal reality, since Alexander was facing her own death when she wrote it. She is the “you” in the poem, the memories are hers, and this may suggest that she wasn’t quite ready to let go.

  Krishna, 3:29 A.M.

  In a crumpled shirt (so casual for a god)

  * * *

  Bow tucked loosely under an arm still jittery from battle

  * * *

  He balanced himself on a flat boat painted black.

  * * *

  Each wave as I kneel closer a migrant flag

  * * *

  A tongue with syllables no script can catch.

  * * *

  The many births you have passed through, try to remember them as I do mine

  * * *

  Memory is all you have.

  * * *

  Still, how much can you bear on your back?

  * * *

  You’ve lost one language, gained another, lost a third.

  * * *

  There’s nothing you’ll inherit, neither per stirpes nor per capita

  * * *

  No plot by the riverbank in your father’s village of Kozencheri

  * * *

  Or by the burning ghat in Varanasi.

  * * *

  All you have is a writing hand smeared with ink and little bits of paper

  * * *

  Swirling in a violent wind.

  * * *

  I am a blue-black child cheeks swollen with a butter ball

  * * *

  I stole from mama’s kitchen

  * * *

  Stones and sky and stars melt in my mouth

  * * *

  Wooden spoon in hand she chased me

  * * *

  Round and round the tamarind tree.

  * * *

  I am musk in the wings of the koel which nests in that tree —

  * * *

  You heard its cry in the jolting bus from Santa Monica to Malibu

  * * *

  After the Ferris wheel, the lovers with their wind slashed hair

  * * *

  Toxic foam on the drifts of the ocean

  * * *

  Come the dry cactus lands

  * * *

  The child who crosses the border water bottle in hand

  * * *

  Fallen asleep in the aisle where backpacks and sodden baskets are stashed.

  * * *

  Out of her soiled pink skirt whirl these blood-scratched skies

  * * *

  And all the singing rifts of story.

  The speaker is reading the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God, in the middle of the night. The title yokes the boundless vision of Krishna, the eighth incarnation of Lord Vishnu, to the specificity of the hour (3:29 A.M.), which is calculated down to the minute. We are very precisely located at a moment in time. Alexander’s last poem follows the format that Michael Collier employed in “An Individual History” and Lucie Brock-Broido used in her summary poem “Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room”; it consists of a series of single lines, each isolated on the page. It takes an extra leap to get from one line to the next, as if to suggest that thinking comes in fragments at this hour of the night, this late moment in life.

  Things get disjointed, and the thinking is not linear, but associative. The first line shows us Krishna in human form, though the speaker is wryly aware that the text (or the translator) is going a little far in picturing him wearing a crumpled shirt. Hence the parenthetical joke (“so casual for a god”). The first three lines present Krishna, who has taken human form, returning from battle with his celestial bow, or Sharanga, and balancing on a boat. The reference here is not only to Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita but also, perhaps even more so, to Krishna in the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana (The Beautiful Legend of God), which Alexander especially loved. This text presents the stories of Krishna first as a mischievous child, then as an adolescent who lollygagged with young cow-herding girls, and always as a miracle worker. Alexander often returned to one of her favorite stories, the sly tale of Krishna stealing butter to feed to the monkeys.

  The next verses of the poem (“Each wave as I kneel closer a migrant flag / A tongue with syllables no script can catch”) show the speaker leaning into the text, looking down into the water that surrounds Krishna’s boat, reading between the lines. The image of the waves provides a portal to her own past. That’s why each wave becomes “a migrant flag,” a symbolic banner of displacement, of moving into exile. It is a “tongue with syllables” that could never be captured by a “script.” It will always evade the written word.

  The sea evoked strong feelings in Alexander. She was born in Allahabad, India, though when she was five years old her father, a meteorologist for the Indian government, took a post in Sudan, a newly independent country in northeast Africa. She celebrated her birthday on an ocean liner headed for Khartoum. “The sea cast me loose,” she recalled in Poetics of Dislocation. “The sea tore away from me all that I had.” It encouraged a subterranean inner life, she thought, but at great cost.

  That interior life operates in “Krishna, 3:29 A.M.,” and so does the sense of its cost. The poem is triggered by what the poet is reading, what she is listening for in and even imposing on the text. That’s why it turns to a shloka, or metered passage
, in the Gita: “The many births you have passed through, try to remember them as I do mine / Memory is all you have.” This reference modifies chapter 4, verse 5, where Krishna says, “You and I have passed through many births, Arjuna. You have forgotten, but I remember them all.”

  Alexander takes Krishna’s words and wrenches them into “Memory is all you have,” which is the true trigger of the poem, the place where it turns to the speaker’s own past with a vast nostalgia and longing: we survive many lives. An argument implicitly develops here. Memory may be an imperative, “all you have”: “Still, how much can you bear . . . ?” The next lines express a powerful sense of loss, of dislocation and disinheritance. This is not the universal “you”; the speaker is talking to herself in the second person: