Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,
Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,
And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,
Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,
Set in the window, bringing memories‚
Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,
And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies
In benediction over nun-like hills.
My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing through my body swept,
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.
* * *
Claude McKay was educated by his brother from his library of English novels, poetry, and science books. When he was twenty-three, he published his first collection of verse, Songs of Jamaica. Written in dialect, it recorded the experience of black life in Jamaica. In this poem, the speaker, sitting by a window in a New York City apartment looking at the tropical fruit on his windowsill, longs for the tropics where he grew up. Its elegiac hues of mourning and nostalgia recalled my own mood, a girl from Cleveland, struggling to find my way in America’s largest metropolis filled with inhabitants from around the globe here for the very reasons I am—to push their limits and reinvent themselves from the obscurity from which they came.
* * *
I don’t want it to happen, but jadedness begins to creep in. I doubt I will ever fall in love again or find a partner to marry. My girlfriends and I meet in coffee shops and cafés and discuss the grim pickings. We sometimes go to bars or parties in hopes of meeting someone. If we go out with someone, we come home and share the encounter, wonder if he’ll call again. Usually he doesn’t. Or if he does, he’s not the one we want. I’m grateful for my books, my deep infatuation with literature, and my poems, however nascent. I’ve come to see that the only thing now worth holding on to is the collection of verse accumulating on my desk and in my drawer. They don’t often amount to much, but when they do I sense something alive and crackling, like the sound of stepping on twigs in the woods. In the absence of love, I cling to my work. Literature is the only thing that I can count on; it won’t desert me. I can open one of the many books stacked on the floor in my room, flip through the thin pages of poetry in my Norton Anthology and call forth the passages of experience I’ve already known, or others I might go toward. I can find myself pulled forward and pushed back and sometimes both in one illuminating paragraph or surprising stanza.
I convince myself it is enough. I decide that I’ll pursue a career in publishing and become an editor. I want to find manuscripts that boil under the skin, get under the rind. It’s better than the connections I forge and then can’t seem to hold on to, or the ones I invest too much in and realize they’re flimsy as gauze. And it’s hot in August in New York, suffocating with no air conditioning, and everyone left in the city with nowhere to go seems to have a perpetual mustache of sweat above the lip. I’m sick of hot, airless parties where I come home with smoke in my hair, nights sitting on bar stools sharing a glass of wine with my roommate because we don’t have enough money to each buy a glass, where the only people we meet are struggling actors or penniless poets, or guys who work on sets ensconced in their own mini dramas. I’m sick of artists and writers, some living in cheap sublets in the East Village, others who want to move in, whose own lustful ambitions outpace their desire for intimate connection. I want a grown-up life; a family. For almost a year I saddle myself to an academic who is decent enough to pay the check when he takes me out to dinner, though when he begins to talk about one of the monographs he’s working on, I find my eyes glazing over, until I discover all the while he’s been pining for someone else.
HEAT
Denis Johnson (1949–2017)
Here in the electric dusk your naked lover
tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.
It’s beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,
Our Lady of the Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,
streaming with hatred in the heat
as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin
to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,
and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.
August,
you’re just an erotic hallucination,
just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,
are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,
this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,
the bogus moon of tenderness and magic
you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?
* * *
This poem with its sorrowful, jaded irony is born out of the frustration of being held captive by destructive illusions. It is from Denis Johnson’s Incognito Lounge, his third book of poems, which comes out when I am in graduate school. The poems are deeply personal and depict a moment—a time, a place, a rhythm—that magically becomes equally personal for the reader. Mostly set in an apartment or in bars, the poems depict a desperate yearning—a cup of light—among the ruins.
LEGACY
FURY
Lucille Clifton
DIVING INTO THE WRECK
Adrienne Rich
My maternal great-aunts Harriet and Florence never had children. Aunt Florence is a twin whose sister, Lillian, is in love with a married man from the military. When the affair ends, she suffers a psychotic break and is institutionalized until the day she dies. Aunt Florence never recovers from losing her twin to mental illness. Every Sunday the family piles into the car on an outing to the institution to see Lillian. My mother, I’m later told, is required to wait in the car while they go in to visit. Aunt Florence lives with her own mother, my great grandma Cookie, in a two-bedroom apartment. She works for May Company as a secretary, riding the rapid transit downtown to work and back. Every time we see her she opens a May company shopping bag and takes out a handful of sweaters in different sizes and colors, which she purchases on discount for us. Usually they’re out of style or not quite what we like or don’t fit but we pretend we love them. She’s the eccentric aunt, singing us vaudeville songs she used to perform in high school to entertain us. She passes the evening reading Harlequin romance novels in the bedroom (we see them stacked up on her nightstand) with the twin beds she once shared with her twin. I am not sure if she’s ever fallen in love.
My Aunt Harriet is luckier. She married a veteran from the navy, Uncle Joe with his big belly laugh who became a dentist and is a lodge brother. Every year he takes us to the circus with his lodge group. Aunt Harriet fusses over him, laughs at his jokes, and rolls her eyes when he takes it too far and she’s not amused. She is the perfect housewife. There is never anything out of place in their modest apartment. She always graces the table with her good wedding china and silver when we are invited for lunch. One shelf in the living room holds the souvenirs they brought from their travels abroad, which are a source of great pride to both of them. There’s an oriental fan from Japan and a clock from Sweden. Aunt Harriet’s greatest misfortune is that she could not bear children. Instead, she adopts my mother after my mother’s mother suddenly dies when she is nine. My mother is schooled by these women who were born in the 1920s, with their matching hats, white gloves, and stylish suits or cardigan sets they wear whenever they go out—to smile, wear lipstick, flatter and charm, and never show anyone you’re suffering pain or misfortune. It is their way and my mother’s legacy. “Iris, smile,” they say when we trail into their home, my mother leading her flock of girls for Shabbat or brunch. They’re overjoyed when my mother marries my father, a modest wedding in the rabbi’s study, and heartbroken when my father dies a young death and my mother is left a widow at the age of twenty-five. “Poor, poor Iris,” they say.
The conversations at the dinner table are about how my mother is faring and how we’re doing in school. Uncle Joe slips us dollar bills under the table to put in our pockets, and
at the end of the evening, Aunt Harriet takes my mother into her bedroom where she writes her a check. Even when times are bleak, we pretend everything is fine. Mom sometimes talks about the dates she goes on and if there is someone in particular she likes her eyes light up. But when there’s a dry spell her eyes are dull as old rusted pennies. Most of my mother’s friends and female relatives are married and have husbands to take care of them. When we are in their company I don’t see desperation hidden underneath the layers of careful makeup in the faces of these women. They may be unhappy, but they don’t have to worry about how they’re going to pay the bills. I know my mother wishes her life were like theirs, but it’s not and she still can’t seem to accept it. Even my aunts feel as if she will be crippled if she doesn’t find a new man.
After my mother’s divorce from her second husband, my sisters and I try to push my mother. We urge her to take classes, find a job, and for a time she works as a receptionist, sells real estate, then works in retail, but there is a layer of fatigue and resentment underneath it all. It’s as if she feels she’s still entitled to the life she was meant to have, but there’s no husband at home taking care of her. When I am struggling to build my own life, I worry about my mother still at home in the house I grew up in. I think of all she has sacrificed for her early dream of becoming a wife and a young mother and I wonder whether it was worth it. What might she have become if her aspirations were not confined to the norm of women of her era? What might her life have been like if she finished college before she’d gotten married, if her father and relatives urged and helped her to pursue a vocation? Though it makes no real sense, I feel guilty for her sacrifice of my being in the world. My mother loves her daughters but I know that sometimes we get on her nerves, with all our histrionics, wants, and fighting, and I sometimes wonder if she feels as if it were all a big mistake.
fury
Lucille Clifton (1936–2010)
for mama
remember this.
she is standing by
the furnace.
the coals
glisten like rubies.
her hand is crying.
her hand is clutching
a sheaf of papers.
poems.
she gives them up.
they burn
jewels into jewels.
her eyes are animals.
each hank of her hair
is a serpent’s obedient
wife.
she will never recover.
remember. there is nothing
you will not bear
for this woman’s sake.
* * *
In this scalding poem, a woman’s ambition is sacrificed, a handful of poems thrown into the fire. Now her eyes are fierce as animals. She is the “obedient wife” and she “will never recover.” The woman has sacrificed her ambitions and in that sense she has also surrendered her dreams. At the end, the poem turns and speaks directly to the reader: “there is nothing / you will not bear / for this woman’s sake.” It asks us to consider the sacrifices our forbearers made and the results of those sacrifices, and what we must bear in return. Lucille Clifton once wrote: “I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words. I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.”
* * *
For the rest of my mother’s life, I will mourn the fact that, though she tried to find sustaining work in between the years in which my father died and she remarried and then again after she divorced, like many women of her generation, she never reconciled herself to life without a partner. Every time I come home to visit my mother, the only difference in the house I grew up in is the color of the paint on the walls, or a lamp moved from one table to another. I become more aware of how fortunate I am to be able to forge a life of independence and to secure my own livelihood. My ambition is fueled by my desire to be self-sufficient and not to rely on anyone. It is my mother’s unspoken gift to her daughters.
DIVING INTO THE WRECK
Adrienne Rich (1950–2012)
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it’s a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
We dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
* * *
My mother’s generation of women who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s was the last to view their options as being largely limited to the roles of housewife and mother. The feminis
t movement and its trailblazers, Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and poets like Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, were changing the landscape of possibility for women. But change came slowly. My mother’s generation came of age just under the radar of the women’s movement and hence slipped between the cracks of those women who were still dependent on men for their survival and women who were finding their own way in the world. Bearing witness to my mother’s conundrum set the stage for who I would become and the life I would lead.
“Diving into the Wreck” was written in 1973, two years before I graduate from high school, though I don’t discover it until years later in college. All poems become, to a certain degree, personal to a reader. The human and the divine, sexuality, beauty, enclosure, sacrifice, freedom, discovery, all reside within this poem’s wide breadth. It asks us to consider, among other things, the myths we are borne into and the myths we must challenge. It pushes against the canonical poetry that came before and writes its way into history.
The Irish poet Eavan Boland said of Adrienne Rich’s work: “These poems came to the very edge of the rooms I worked in, dreamed in, listened for a child’s cry in. . . . I felt that the life I lived was not the one these poems commended. It was too far from the tumult, too deep in the past. And yet these poems helped me live it. . . . Truly important poets change two things and never one without the other: the interior of the poem and external perceptions of the identity of the poet.”
When I enter the workplace, it is still dominated by white men. In the literary world, white male poets are in positions of power, chairing committees, choosing poets for prizes and jobs, and all too often denying opportunities to women and people of color. Adrienne Rich wrote about the vicissitudes of injustice in pathbreaking, timeless work, without which a vast cut of present poetry would never have been written or even contemplated. Her work is eerily prescient.
The speaker in “Diving into the Wreck” is alone aboard a “sun-flooded schooner.” She carefully and slowly descends into the ocean looking for a certain shipwreck. She is not a famous explorer like Cousteau with his crew and deep knowledge of the sea; she is a woman alone on the journey, wearing her wetsuit and mask and awkward flippers. She descends from the illusion of reality—the world in which she has read the “book of myths”—into the magical, enlightening reality of the ocean, where the shipwreck lies in black waters, looking up at its distorted image—the sunny schooner from which she came. “I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail,” she tells us.
Poetry Will Save Your Life Page 11