Poetry Will Save Your Life

by Jill Bialosky

  Keats and Fanny first met in the midst of personal upheaval. Keat’s youngest brother, Tom, was ill with tuberculosis; it had already killed their mother, and would eventually claim Tom and later Keats himself. It was the autumn of 1818. Keats had recently returned from a walking tour of Scotland with his friend Charles Brown. Brown had rented out his half of the double house called Wentworth Place to the Brawne family. When he returned, the Brawnes moved to Elm Cottage, a brief walk away. But while they had lived at Wentworth Place, they had become close friends with Brown’s neighbors, the Dilke family, also friends of Keats’s. The Dilkes had favorably spoken of Keats, and so when the Brawne family finally met the young poet, they liked him immediately and the romance between Keats and Fanny ignited.

  In “Bright Star,” the poet addresses the “bright” star, Polaris, eternally steadfast in the sky. Like the star, forever watching over earth, the poet wants to experience for eternity the “soft swell” of his lover’s breast “and to wake forever in sweet unrest.” Of course, the impossibility of this conceit is belied by the tone’s melancholic state and our knowledge of his impending death. Keats died far too young—awareness of his own mortality reverberates in each wistful line—and this poem captures that romantic spirit not yet tempered by the wages of time, or altered by experience or the unbridgeable chasm of difference.

  * * *

  The summer before I go to college, in between our summer jobs, we hang out in the barn. The world has grown small. It seems no larger than the four walls of the barn that is home to the three beautiful mares his family owns, and to the sounds of their neighing, their bodies as they shift restlessly in their stalls, and the simple sensation of holding my boyfriend’s hand, feeling the thick callouses formed from his work in the stalls. For a time my mother, my sisters, the morning headlines about how many have been killed in Vietnam, the riots and protests, what I’ve come to see as the superficial values of living in the suburbs that rage in my mind, my fears and worries about who I will be or become vanish and are replaced by an absurd sort of soliloquy that is playing in my head where everything has come to revolve around our togetherness.

  I have never been horseback riding but being in this newly transfixed state of mind, I agree to try it. He saddles the horses and tells me we will follow an easy trail and go slow. He helps boost me into the saddle, takes the horse’s bit, and walks me around the corral where the horses graze, until I get the feel of it. Grip your thighs against his sides. Hold the reins loosely in your hands; if the horse senses your fear he will react to it. My heart is beating crazily. I imagine it leaping out of my chest but I also experience this strange and surreal sense of safety as I watch him guide my horse. He lets go of the bit and I am on my own now, my body rising to the horse’s gait, the breeze blowing back my hair. My mind is in free float. It is almost like I am disappearing. Then he straddles his own horse and opens the gate and slowly, on our horses, mine following his, we are on a trail through the trees. At first it is exhilarating. I can sense the light brush of leaves dust my shirt as we brush past. Then the horse begins to gallop and my heart races with its pace and suddenly the trail broadens into an open space and my horse takes off and I am thrown to the ground. Everything happens so quickly, and for a minute, I lose consciousness and when I open my eyes he is standing over me and telling me not to move. The horse’s back leg is standing on a piece of my waist-length hair and if I move an inch I am liable to get kicked in the face. I look into his eyes as he gently coaxes the horse slowly away. Then he holds out his hand and reaches for me and I see in his eyes his own terror of what might have happened and suddenly I realize everything in my being has become dependent upon him and the sensation is more frightening than when the horse had me pinned to the ground. When I read this poem for the first time I am reminded of my first encounter with horses and how love and attachment blossomed that summer before my first year of college.

  A BLESSING

  James Wright (1927–1980)

  Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

  Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

  And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

  Darken with kindness.

  They have come gladly out of the willows

  To welcome my friend and me.

  We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

  Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

  They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness

  That we have come.

  They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

  There is no loneliness like theirs.

  At home once more,

  They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.

  I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

  For she has walked over to me

  And nuzzled my left hand.

  She is black and white,

  Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

  And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

  That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

  Suddenly I realize

  That if I stepped out of my body I would break

  Into blossom.

  * * *

  This poem shimmies down the page, one line after the other, the lines breaking as thought might break. The poem tells the narrator’s story of turning off the road and witnessing two ponies coming out of the field to welcome him and his friend. They step over the fence to greet the two ponies. They can “hardly contain their happiness,” upon seeing them. “They love each other. / There is no loneliness like theirs,” the narrator tells us, suggesting that implicit in love is loneliness. Witnessing the two ponies in love is internalized, and in describing the sensation, the narrator expresses the idea that if he stepped out of his body, he would “break into blossom.” In “A Blessing,” love—whether platonic or romantic—is a form of “blossoming,” the same as the blossoming of a flower or a tree, and reading the poem fills me with the wonder of this phenomenon. Is this a love poem or a nature poem? No matter. A love poem can be disguised within a nature poem.

  Of writing, Wright said in an interview, “Sometimes there is a force of life like the spring which mysteriously takes shape without your even having asked it to take shape, and this is frightening, it is terribly frightening. It has happened maybe a few times to me—times when I’ve been able to get the poem finished in almost nothing flat. . . . A poem called “Father,” a poem called “A Blessing.” Where did they come from? If you were to ask me that question, I would have to say, how should I know? Being a poet sometimes puts you at the mercy of life, and life is not always merciful.”

  MOTHERS

  MY MOTHER’S FEET

  Stanley Plumly

  Flipping through the college catalogs in the guidance counselor’s office, I come across a small college, Windham, embedded in the snowy hills of Vermont and feel an affinity. It is cold and snowy in the winter and there is something magical and austere about the way in which the collection of white buildings is nestled in the hills. I fall in love immediately, and after receiving a small scholarship and a good financial-aid package, I make my decision to attend. I’m afraid to leave especially my little sister alone with my mother out of fear of my mother’s dark moods, but I have no choice. If I don’t go to college I fear I’ll end up like her, without enough resources to be independent. The plan is that my mother and a close friend will drive me to the campus in Putney, Vermont. My eight-year-old sister will come too. My mother and her friend love to go to flea markets and antiquing, and after they drop me off, they plan to have a holiday of their own, stopping in small towns to antique along the way. All summer they carefully plan the road trip but the night before we are to leave, my trunk already packed to the brim with my jeans and sweaters, my mother becomes ill—pneumonia—and can’t take me.

  I book a flight to New York, where I will change planes and take a smaller plane to Burlington, Vermont. But once I arr
ive in New York, the flight to Burlington is canceled. Unsure of what to do, alone for the first time in a strange airport in a strange city, I panic. I call my mother, and hearing the fear in my voice, she uncharacteristically lashes out at me. How will you manage in college, if you can’t manage this? she says, or something like it, her voice cracks and she begins to cry into the phone and I think this is the first time my mother will be without me and I without her and it is all terrible. I wonder if my leaving has made her sick. I hang up the phone, and once I return the receiver to its holder, I listen to my coins falling down inside the pay phone’s deep throat into the well. I tell myself I have to be strong and pull myself together. This is probably the first day I grow up. I go to the airline counter and book a flight for the next morning and wander into one of the kiosks and wretchedly spend five or six dollars on a fat paperback edition of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for then I did not like to part with my hard-earned money. I go to the gate and sit down with my book and read until the morning, wondering if the boy I’ve left back home is my Angel, like the character in the novel. Nothing is as terrifying to me as that day and night alone in an unknown airport in New York and when I finally land in Burlington and take a cab to the small college in the hills, I recognize I am at a turning point. I step out of the cab and breathe in the fresh, cool Vermont air that smells like pinecones. The years of high school when I feared I’d be stuck in Cleveland forever are finally over. I push back my hair, take a peppermint Life Saver from my pocket and slip it into my mouth, inhale a deep breath to calm my nerves and walk through the college arches to begin my life. In spite of the fact that, due to my late arrival, my new roommate, who has long black hair and is wearing dark lipstick before goth has come into vogue, has already decorated her side of the wall with posters of Kiss and other metal bands, and I am more of a Neil Young and James Taylor girl, it’s all good. Really good.

  I enjoy being shut up in the library where I have a work-study job shelving books and organizing the card catalog, or in my dorm room reading and studying. I like listening out my dorm-room door to the chatter and occasional horseplay in the halls that reek of cigarettes and pot. I like sharing the coed bathroom with the boys on our floor and the routine of going to the cafeteria for my meals, pushing my tray along the line and deciding which item I will take, whether a plate of cottage cheese and fruit or a green salad, mashed potatoes and meatloaf, or the vegetarian lasagna. I like meeting new and more sophisticated friends from Los Angeles and New York City, the spontaneous dorm parties where we all crash in one room, walks in the woods discussing politics or parsing out the meaning behind a Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot poem. It is the first time in my life that I am separated from my family and it is liberating. Unfortunately, the college goes bankrupt after my first year and I don’t know what I’ll do. I spend the summer taking a waitressing job back home, but I’m restless, bored, and unhappy. It doesn’t occur to me—for a reason I can’t recall—that I can consider applying or transferring to another college of my choice. Sister number three is beginning her freshman year at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, known as Athens on the Hill. Without another plan, I decide to join her, packing up my trunk again and hoping once I arrive on campus, they will take me, and miraculously, they do. It is easy since I am an Ohio resident. And, as fate will have it, now a sophomore in college, I sign up for my first creative writing workshop and another new chapter begins.

  In the classroom in Ellis Hall that held our poetry seminar, its open windows facing onto the college green, I am both excited and anxious. I’ve never written a serious poem before, only jottings in my diaries and notebooks. With his shock of salt-and-pepper hair and matching beard, and his gentle yet commanding voice, our professor-poet tells us to write poems about what we know and what hurts. Every week he passes out copies of our poems freshly printed on mimeographed paper—I can still recall the paper’s sharp smell of metallic purple ink—and if we defy his assignment by writing poems with generic or meaningless subject matter, he tears up our poems and tosses them into the wastebasket.

  I lived under the assumption that one must hide hurt and pain, that sadness and sorrow are reserved for the solitude of one’s own private world. I go back to my dorm and think about what my poet-teacher has said. What I know has to do with my childhood and being born into a world of grief and loss and I have been given permission to write about it. My desk faces the window. Outside, it is snowing, an unexpected snowfall in late autumn before all the leaves have fallen and white flakes begin to fill the college green. I remember the snowy winters of my childhood, and the memories evoke a mood I want to capture. But how? Images spring forth. Sisters playing in the snow. A widow in her bed. Houseplants on a windowsill. A tall tree in the yard spreading its fatherly branches over the house. I write into that world of sadness and sorrow I experienced as a young child. Over time the verse evolves into a poem in ten small parts called “Fathers in the Snow” about a widow caring for her small children and the undercurrent of loss permeating their home. For years I’ve been trapped inside my own strange fear and grief, and now it is liberated into verse.

  The idea that poetry should take as its subject matter the painful aspects of my existence opens a new way of thinking for me. I seem to have been waiting for it. I realize that through the artfulness of poetic form, one can trap experience and make it palpable to a reader. A poem might be about what hurts, and most illuminating, the subject might be drawn from one’s own life. A poem could be both personal and communal and save a person from the dark shadow of shame. It may take as its form an address to a person, real or imagined, historical or alive today. It might be an off-kilter love letter to someone as significant as one’s mother.

  MY MOTHER’S FEET

  Stanley Plumly (1939)

  How no shoe fit them,

  and how she used to prop them,

  having dressed for bed,

  letting the fire in the coal-stove blue

  and blink out, falling asleep in her chair.

  How she bathed and dried them, night after night,

  and rubbed their soreness like an intimacy.

  How she let the fire pull her soft body through them.

  She was the girl who grew just standing,

  the one the picture cut at the knees.

  She was the girl who seemed to be dancing

  out on the lawn, after supper, alone.

  I have watched her climb the militant stairs

  and down again, watched the ground go out from under her.

  I have seen her on the edge of chances—

  she fell, when she fell, like a girl.

  Someone who loved her said she walked on water.

  Where there is no path nor wake. As a child

  I would rise in the half-dark of the house,

  from a bad dream or a noisy window,

  something, almost, like snow in the air,

  and wander until I could find those feet, propped

  and warm as a bricklayer’s hands,

  every step of the way shining out of them.

  * * *

  Like Pablo Neruda’s “Ode To My Socks,” this poem showcases how anything—even a pair of feet—can be subject matter for poetry and allow for revelation. “My Mother’s Feet” is not only a love letter from a son to his mother, but also a tribute to the universal “ideal” of mothers. The poem captures that turning point in a child’s life when suddenly he or she recognizes a parent as a person with an inner life, someone who has loved and lived outside her role as a mother. The speaker has watched his mother “climb the militant stairs / and down again, watched the ground go out from under her.” The poem uses the metaphor of feet to document the many worlds his mother has inhabited. Feet are intimate. They’re mostly hidden underneath stockings, or inside slippers, just as our mother’s interior lives are concealed, and when they appear in open sandals or barefoot on the cold stairs, it feels as if we should turn our heads away, that we’ve been exposed to so
mething we aren’t supposed to see.

  Stanley Plumly, my poet-teacher, and the author of this poem, was born in Barnesville, Ohio. His father was a lumberjack and welder who died at age fifty-eight of alcoholism. Of his father, Plumly said: “I can hardly think of a poem I’ve written that at some point in its history did not implicate, or figure, my father.” His mother also figures prominently as the silent, helpless witness of her husband’s self-destruction and we hear reverberations of that witness in the tender and poignant “My Mother’s Feet.”

  I discover this poem years later in graduate school when I’m in my early twenties, no longer a child or a teenager, surrounded by a library of books, my days filled with lectures and the hint of opportunity, far away from my two sisters who have also left home to pursue their education, and my mother and youngest sister now in junior high school still living back home in the house I grew up in. Not a day goes by where I don’t worry or think about them. With all us older sisters gone, they have formed their own unit of two. I pray my mother is in a good period. When her melancholy lifts, her life ignites with new purpose. She goes out with her friends, works part-time at a clothing store in the mall. A window opens. I see my mother separate from me, a woman with her own history, struggles, burdens. She was once the age I am now, when she first married, her life filled with promise and then everything for her had shattered. I swell with empathy and love.

  FRIENDSHIP

  TAKING THE HANDS

  Robert Bly