The Woman I Kept to Myself
Page 6
to think you’re lost without it, por favor!
You left in exile—that was not your fault.
This passion is a second desertion.
Before leaving, I touch the shelves of books,
then close my study door reluctantly
like a child casting a longing glance
at bedtime at her bears and dressed-up dolls,
posed to enact some simple ritual,
a tea party, a classroom scene. Stay!
Don’t you dare move! But English won’t obey,
no living language will. When I come back
it will take días to collect myself,
pieces of me not fitting anywhere.
MEDITATION
Sometimes I’ll walk out in a field at night
and sit under the stars, breathing in stars,
moon, sky-reflecting pond; breathing out stars,
moon, sky-reflecting—Whoa! What was that?
A beaver in the pond? And now, a flood
of other thoughts rush in—my aching back;
so and so’s email; oh god, I forgot
to pick up garlic! Soon, I cannot hear
the owls hooting, the leaves rustling back,
carried away by today’s trivia.
Sometimes a busy, brassy place seems best:
a shopping mall Saturday afternoon,
crowded with warring teenage girls and moms,
and little boys out of some matinee
practicing their Karate kicks and cries—
all of that roiling, noisy humanity
I carry deep within me which is why
I need to meditate. But sales beckon,
shoppers hurry by, the food court fills, and down
the spiritual tubes goes my meditation.
My final stop is always on these lines,
a breathless shipwreck crawling up a beach
that seems deserted, not a sign of life.
But in this emptiness, I find myself
and lose myself as lines move in and out
like breathing, like discovering a space
which by turns is a shopping mall, a field,
a pond, and all and none of the above.
It’s hard to call what happens here a name—
my poem, my practice, my meditation?
AFICIONADOS
I have a friend who tangos and attends
meetings in Helsinki, amazingly
the largest convention of tango lovers
in the world: day after chilly day
the couples one-two, swoon, one-two, and turn,
across the mirrored ballroom as snows fall
beyond the steamed-up windows. Just last year,
he met a dental hygienist from Maine
and fell madly in love. I see him dancing
in shiny black shoes and red cummerbund,
she in a long (I think, required) skirt,
a slit revealing vistas never seen
in Maine, vistas she surely never sees
peering down throats, her hand on countless cheeks.
Another man I know adores Star Trek
and meets with other Trekkies once a year.
Get him started and the dinner party
is ruined, except for the amusement
of seeing him so worked up. Every month
I send a dying stamp-collecting friend
stamps saved from letters sent by island aunts,
gaudy virgins, miniature dictators,
flowers so otherworldly my friend says
he’ll soon be seeing native specimens.
The man who cuts my hair spends his spare time
making doll furniture. Each time I hear
of some new passion, I feel gratitude
at one more instance of the many ways
we learn through what we love to love the world—
which might be all that we are here to do.
TOUCHING BOTTOM
Sometimes the best advice comes randomly.
“Please hold through the silence,” the machine voice said,
the best advice I’ve ever come across
for weathering writer’s block. At the restaurant,
my friend tasted her buffalo steak and said,
“It’s not like anything they say it is,”
which words should be engraved upon my heart
and piped into my memory each time
that I assume the saying of the world
is anything at all like living in it.
And yet, I love how words can sound the world,
how they can take you deep inside your life:
you say something simple, and suddenly,
that plank in reason breaks and down you drop—
into a liberating train of thought.
You’re drinking coffee, talking to a friend,
and poetry unravels from her mouth,
an Ariadne string that leads you out
of that dark labyrinth where a minotaur
of your own making has held you in thrall.
“Keep your end level,” my husband advised
as we built shelves, and as the high-strung one,
I took his words to heart. “Take in my give,”
my mother used to say as we made beds,
which words taught me how to conduct myself
in future bedrooms with the men I loved.
My self-made father once said, “We should live
like poor men with money.” When I thanked him,
he asked, “For what?” I said, “Because I just
touched bottom in my life when you said that.”
CLEANING LADIES
I feel so strange when she’s cleaning my house
while I’m writing away in my study.
I’m half-tempted to join her on all fours
scrubbing the tiles, waxing the hardwood floors.
Not only that but she’s an older blonde
(older than me, I mean) and also trim
like a movie star. Back where I came from,
ladies like her have maids who look like me.
How odd to have the tables turned on us—
tables which she has polished, I might add.
I try to ignore her and do my job—
working her language—while she writes me notes,
misspelled and overpunctuated
with exclamation marks: Bathroom lite’s broke!!!
Need more Murphy’s Oil & Mister Clean!!!
Whatever she asks for I indulge her brands.
Once when the local paper did a piece
on my writing, she asked about my books.
I gave her a signed copy of each one.
She never said a word about them.
She probably thinks I’m wasting my time,
writing, rewriting, filling the garbage bin.
(She’s emptied it and seen the dozen drafts.)
One of these days, I’m going to ask her in
and show her that I’m also working hard,
polishing verbs, sweeping out excess words,
mopping up sticky adjectives, adverbs,
hoping to make her feel as much at home
in her own language as she makes me feel
in rooms that rhyme and sparkle with her skill.
TOM
stands before his triptych—three self-portraits—
in the photo I took and later titled
Portrait of the Artist as a Creation
of His Creation, or more playfully,
What Came First, the Real or Painted Tom?
The first two panels show the painted Tom
struggling to lift himself from the backdrop,
as if to free his body from his work,
but sinking back down in the last panel
into the careful brushstrokes of a fire.
Seeing him through my lens, I wonder if
there’s any way an artist can escape
his work and be simply himself, plain Tom?
Tom’s pose seems to suggest it’s possible
to be the young creator in control
of his creation—but behind his back
the triptych mocks him with a triple self
as if to say this making and remaking
is also who you are. It touches me,
this quadruple portrait of the young artist:
the triptych and then my picture of Tom
standing in front of the triptych
in black jeans, black shirt, a white undershirt—
as if all color went into the work,
and Tom’s the washed-out version, what remains
when the feast is over, and the soul joys
in its temporal boundaries, which is why
I’ve hung this photo by my writing desk
as a reminder that we make our art
out of ourselves and what we make makes us.
I DREAM OF ALLEN GINSBERG
April 6, 1997
The night of Allen Ginsberg’s death I dream
he comes to visit me, tearful because
one of the best poets of our times has died.
I embrace him, patting his heaving back
as if I were burping a big baby,
telling him how sorry I am, asking
if he’ll recite some lines by the deceased.
“I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness—” He breaks down sobbing.
Allen, I say, that’s yourself you’re quoting!
“It’s all the same,” he says, and takes me up
on my invitation to spend the night.
He makes mi casa, su casa, all right!
blaring his old LPs, dropping acid
and dirty clothes wherever he takes them off.
Upstairs, I trip on a purple parasol,
which I assume is his. Meanwhile, downstairs
my island familia pulls out all the stops,
cooking sancocho, pastelitos, flan
for el muchacho who needs his strength to grieve.
Vexed by the relatives and added mess,
I stay upstairs, reading the day’s headlines:
“Allen Ginsberg Dies”! It’s up to me
to go tell him. Howling laughter drifts up
as he regales my tías with upbeat
tales of his naughtiness. I brace myself,
descend the stairs with newspaper in hand,
and slip behind his chair, tongue-tied, weeping.
Allen looks up, bewildered. “Jesus Christ!
It’s raining in here! Where’s my umbrella?”
FAMOUS POET, YEARS AFTERWARD
There he is on the podium, the famous poet
who pulled on my toes the night I stayed in his house
over twenty-five years ago—a young MFA-er
invited to crash on the couch by his beautiful wife.
Surely, he’s joking, I told myself back then:
the man is old; he’s already got a girl
for a second wife! Next time it was his hand
tapping my thigh as he read out my villanelle.
“I’m here for poetry,” I protested. He laughed.
“So am I, darlin’! You’ve got to loosen these rhymes!”
This went on . . . I complained to his buddy
who ran the department. He paid me no mind,
complimenting my “talents,” promising
to have a little talk with the old goat,
a nudge and a hand slap over bourbon and rocks.
By then, I had dropped out, feeling ashamed
as women often do when Eden, marriages,
or dreams don’t work—a sin to have refused
to be muse fodder for a great man’s work,
using the lame excuse: I’m here for art.
But then, a glorious revenge ensued:
he disappeared in anonymity!
Over the years, I never heard his name
in writerly discussions, never found his books
whenever I searched the shelves, relieved each time
he wasn’t there: another hammer blow
on the coffin lid of a ghost.—Now, here he is!
(no justice in the life or in the work?)
a grizzled éminence, pronouncing stuff
some girls in the front row are writing down.
WHY I TEACH
Instead of babies, I’ve raised my students,
hundreds of them, truly, thousands of them.
I’ve been an indiscriminate teacher:
September after September, I say, “More!”
Instead of their first milk tooth, baby steps,
I celebrate first sonnets, villanelles,
sestinas, slant rhymes, risky enjambments
when they push over the edge of a line
as if down a steep slide. “Hooray!” I say.
They haven’t heard that since their playground days.
I’ve weathered their stormy rebellions, too,
the adolescence of their young talent,
when all they want to do is write free verse
—with emphasis on free—and only read
Adrienne Rich, Mark Doty, Sharon Olds
since everyone else is dead and white and male.
(But Mark is white and male, I note.)
Wisely, and while they rage, I read their poems,
sending them back for one more revision.
“Aren’t you ever satisfied?” they complain.
They go off pouting to revise their poems.
“Hey, guys,” I want to call out after them,
“This is the writing life! Get used to it!”
though I could just as well say, This is life—
the chance to try a new draft every day,
to work at what you love until the work
becomes a way of life you can’t give up
but have to share with others on the page
and off the page—in subways, nursing homes,
novels, bedrooms, essays, classrooms, poems.
UNDERCOVER POET
Under the cover of novels, I write poems.
Between the first chapter where my heroine
meets her hero and the second where they fall
in love, I scribble a sonnet or I read a poem
by Billy Collins and fall in love again
with poetry. Why go to the trouble
of describing the house, the doctor, the malady,
when all I need is Emily’s fly buzzing
in the sickroom or Blake’s wildflower
to understand eternity in four lines?.
Periodically, I ask myself why. Why
give up my quiet isle of Innisfree
to board a noisy ocean liner, filled
with characters in conflict, squabbling
with each other or themselves until
three hundred pages later they decide
to change their lives? Believe me, I believe
everyone needs a voyage, a week on deck
with all the messy, roiling humanity
a heart can take, but then come home to this.
In Catholic school, I’d tuck my Leaves of Grass
inside my opened catechism book—
How many persons in one God? I’d yawn
and end up poring through the lustier poems
omitted from our Whitman sampler. Did I
already understand that subterfuge
is part of poetry, that I have to tell the truth
but tell it slant? That on board, when asked
by a fellow passenger, “What do you do?”
I should answer, “I write, mostly novels.”
SMALL PORTIONS
The earth is just too big, too beautiful:
I like it small, through a window, catching
the light at the day’s end. I prefer poems
haiku-size; a
pair of binoculars
through which I see one bluebird at a time,
the pink bib at its throat, the lacquered claws
curled upon an apple bough with the fruit
just setting on, a green miniscule globe
in whose meat I can taste Adam and Eve,
the whole sad history of our human grief.
See what I mean? Take one small thing in hand,
open it up, and there’s another door,
and another, long corridors of views
into the heart of darkness or of light.
There’s no such thing as a small portion
once you bite in and savor the flavors.
If truth is in the details, I’m the pope
of the particular, imam of mites,
a god in the minus numbers, a worm
pearling the soil with the teensy bits
I take in and deliver, laboring on
my two-inch by two-inch ivory life.
Friends worry I’m missing the big picture.
But I can hear a chorus in one voice,
and just this morning from my study chair
I watched a master bluebird build Versailles
in a maple’s cubby hole. By the compost bin
I’ve got an ant hill of the pyramids.
My lot’s to be a nibbler at life’s feast.
Bit by bit, I’ll devour all of it!
“POETRY MAKES NOTHING HAPPEN”?
Listening to a poem on the radio,
Mike Holmquist stayed awake on his drive home
from Laramie on Interstate 80,
tapping his hand to the beat of Longfellow;
while overcome by grief one lonesome night
when the house still held her husband’s pills, May Quinn
took down a book by Yeats and fell asleep
reading, “When You Are Old,” not the poet’s best,
but still, poetry made nothing happen,
which was good, given what May had in mind.
Writing a paper on a Bishop poem,
Jenny Klein missed her ride but arrived home
to the cancer news in a better frame of mind,
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. . . .
While troops dropped down into Afghanistan
in the living room, Naomi Gordon clapped
to the nursery rhyme her father had turned on,