Poetry Will Save Your Life

by Jill Bialosky

  The shipwreck is the left world where patriarchy ruled and reigned its havoc, and the ocean is the world in which there lurks the possibility of becoming. The quest in the poem becomes a critique of the old myths, the treasure is knowledge of whatever truths will be found there: “the thing I came for / the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth . . . in which our names do not appear.”

  MARRIAGE

  SONG FOR THE LAST ACT

  Louise Bogan

  It is a few months before Thanksgiving and the holidays. A time that reminds me of what I have longed for since before I can remember: a family. I walk along the streets on the Upper West Side and it seems as if every woman my age is pregnant, or maybe I just hadn’t been paying attention before. I notice couples my age walking hand in hand, window shopping. I go on Sunday afternoons to an Italian café smelling of roasted beans for a cappuccino, bringing with me a manuscript to edit or a book to read, but I find sitting at the small café table that I can’t focus on the page. Instead I listen to the sound of an Italian opera coming through the speakers and look around at couples at other tables seemingly enjoying themselves and I find myself longing for a certain closeness and intimacy I haven’t yet found. I am twenty-eight years old and rapidly realizing that I may not find it. The heroines I always worshipped in literature, I’ve lately come to dislike or not quite feel the same empathy for them I once did. Why didn’t Anna Karenina recognize that eventually Vronsky would grow weary of exile from society and tire of her? Madame Bovary is overly sentimental, a fool. Why do Jean Rhys’s and Kate Chopin’s protagonists die in the face of love? And Daisy Buchanan, shouldn’t she get her comeuppance? Katherine Mansfield’s bleak stories of loneliness and disconnection leave me in despair. Why should passion be sacrifice? Mr. Darcy doesn’t exist. I listen to birds chirp outside my window, drunk on berries, as if they are lusting for something impossible to have.

  I become more immersed in my work as an editor, and on the weekends I translate my heartache and despair into lines of poems. It is the only way I know to distract myself from loneliness. At work in the mornings I sort through the stacks of mail (this was in the days before email). One day, a man whom I knew vaguely in high school writes to me care of the publishing house where I work. Years ago, during a summer home from college, a mutual friend of ours and I go to visit him in the country outside of Cleveland where he is living, taking time off from college to work on a novel. We spend hours talking and when it is time to leave I feel a tug of regret. Since then we lost touch. He writes to say he read a poem of mine published in a literary magazine. He lives in Boston and is working at a think tank on a secret project. He invites me to come to stay with him in Cambridge for the weekend. He mentions there is an attic room in his house where I can write my poems. I’m intrigued. I slide into hope, and after we exchange more letters, I eventually decide to go. We spend a long weekend together sharing memories from high school, connecting over stories about our parents, our siblings, and our high school relationships that had outworn their welcome and gone on too long. We take walks with his dog across the bridge over the Charles and watch the rowers. Wander into used bookstores. Drink dark cups of espresso and later wine. A crack in the universe is opening, but I sense something I want to ignore. Why is this man living in this huge house, big enough for a family, on his own? Something isn’t right. I push aside my doubts. After the weekend is over I reluctantly return to my small studio apartment in New York City and relive the experience in my mind as it slowly evolves into wistfulness, holding on to words that were said and promises made and ponder if what I felt between us was real. I wonder if he sensed how lonely and desperate I’ve become. Does it show in my face, trap itself in the spaces between my words, hide in the tender compartments of my body?

  Our ten-year high school reunion is approaching over Thanksgiving weekend. The plan is to meet again there in Cleveland. Still, I wonder as each day passes why he hasn’t called. In the hotel lobby where the reunion is held, I position myself near the entrance and peer over shoulders and heads. I remind myself that I’m a poet and editor living in New York. I’m dressed in stylish black stretch pants, flowing black silk blouse and high boots, but inside I’m still the uncomfortable-in-my-skin, awkward girl from Cleveland willing the man from Cambridge to walk through the door. He never shows. Maybe I had imagined the encounter? Maybe he was a ghost of my austere imagination? As the night wears on, my spirits sink. Then, in walks another man. I vaguely remember him from high school. He’s wearing a navy-blue turtleneck, a jacket, and black jeans and has a friendly, slightly ironic smile and clay-colored eyes that exude warmth and generosity. He’s down-to-earth, present, not a ghost. A former athlete, he’s in his second year of law school. I don’t know what it is about him exactly. He seems more grown-up than the men I’ve been dating. He’s sound and practical, with a vision for his future. He offers to drive me home in the wintery, snowy twilight, his car occasionally sliding on the road, and when I say goodbye to him, on a lark I reach over and kiss him on the cheek, and it is sealed. Two years later we marry.

  The first year of our marriage he’s a young associate at a firm. I am an associate editor publishing my poems in literary magazines and shopping around a first book of poetry. On weekends and evenings he studies for the bar exam. I read manuscripts and work on my poems and write what seems like hundreds of drafts of a first novel. We live in a studio apartment the size of a closet. At night we drink cheap wine and eat bowls of pasta. A year later, celebrating our hard-earned raises, we graduate to a fourth floor one-bedroom walk-up with views into a back garden. In the garden are vines of wisteria and a cherry tree, and pink and blue hydrangeas that bloom at the beginning of summer. Though we have only five hundred square feet to call our own in this vast city, it feels like paradise. It is only the beginning.

  We celebrate anniversaries, births, bar mitzvahs, and graduations; a first book publication, the formation of a law firm, signing of a mortgage for a new apartment, deaths of loved ones. Together we endure days of joy and disappointment, loss, ill parents, setbacks, small victories, and distresses. Ten, twenty years pass. We attend the wedding of a cousin’s son and his bride in their early thirties and for a moment I can’t catch my breath. Were we ever that young and innocent? We witness this lovely couple say their scared vows in a Catholic church and throughout the autumnal afternoon, relish in its warm afterglow. They look so hopeful and full of promise, two lovers swooning into the embrace of the future, dedicating themselves to something beyond the external noise of politics, protests, and injustices that fill the newspapers and incite the media. I think about all that is waiting before them, how each milestone will change them in ways that in this moment, as they look into each other’s eyes, are impossible to comprehend. How do we commemorate the daily rituals of getting up each morning to the familiar sound of the alarm clock, the creak of the shower turning on, the briefcase clicking shut, the meals across the table, disappointments, and quarrels as we evolve as a couple across the passage of time? How does the quotidian shape our psychic lives? What mysteries lie in togetherness?

  SONG FOR THE LAST ACT

  Louise Bogan (1897–1970)

  Now that I have your face by heart, I look

  Less at its features than its darkening frame

  Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,

  Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.

  Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease

  The lead and marble figures watch the show

  Of yet another summer loath to go

  Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

  Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

  Now that I have your voice by heart, I read

  In the black chords upon a dulling page

  Music that is not meant for music’s cage,

  Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.

  The staves are shuttled over with a stark />
  Unprinted silence. In a double dream

  I must spell out the storm, the running stream.

  The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

  Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

  Now that I have your heart by heart, I see

  The wharves with their great ships and architraves;

  The rigging and the cargo and the slaves

  On a strange beach under a broken sky.

  O not departure, but a voyage done!

  The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps

  Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps

  Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

  Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

  * * *

  “Song for the Last Act” memorializes the breadth of unconditional, sometimes irrational love. It exemplifies how we mysteriously “shift in the dark” as it documents the passage of two lives spent together and the ways in which this union allows us “to read,” “to look,” “to see” in a different key.

  Poet Richard Howard called Louise Bogan “the best American woman poet between Dickinson and Bishop.” I discover her bewitching poems in an all-women poetry seminar at the University of Iowa chaired by the poet Carol Muske-Dukes. In that classroom we probe the ways in which Bogan’s poems articulate unsaid truths and conundrums about the interior lives of women.

  The poet Marianne Moore said of her poems: “Louise Bogan’s art is compactness compacted. Emotion with her, as she has said of certain fiction, is ‘itself form, the kernel which builds outward form from inward intensity.’ ”

  GRIEF

  MUSÉE DES BEAUX ARTS

  W. H. Auden

  ONE ART

  Elizabeth Bishop

  My youngest sister takes her life at twenty-one. She is my mother’s last child, who once renewed our spirits and for a time saved my mother’s second marriage. I am blindsided and heartbroken. I am thirty-one, married, an editor and poet living in New York City, pregnant with my first child, my own life slowly coming together. All in an instant, a dark wind, the hand of a brutal heaven, has knocked me out. From one moment to another the world has changed and I am no longer safe. No one I love is. How did this happen? Where did everything go wrong? Why hadn’t we known? The questions swirl around me creating a vortex I can’t climb out of. How is this possible? I think of my childhood friend Mary, who also took her own life, beautiful girls nearly the same age at the precipice of becoming. There are no words. I cannot speak about it for years.

  What happened? people ask. I have no answers. I have entered the world of I don’t know. It is unrecoverable. No one close to her understood she was suicidal, and the night she carries out her death wish, perhaps hoping to be found, that flicker of hope to sustain her is not available. The loss of this bright, beautiful girl who transformed my childhood is unreal and at times unendurable. She is in my dreams. My memories. I see her everywhere. In the faces of young women on the subway or those I pass on the street. I am in a state of disbelief and shock; it seems as if I’m not quite living, but existing in another country marked by grief. We sit shiva for a week, gathering in my childhood home to receive visitors. When it is time to return to work, it is as if I am navigating a strange new land. I’m worried about my mother and how she’ll go on. She never fully recovers. How could she? Among friends or colleagues, I go through the motions, but I’m not quite there. I’m an onlooker, lost in a dark wood and I wonder if I will ever again be able to find my way out and return to the daily, unburdened life I once led. It is as if there is an invisible wall separating me from others.

  MUSÉE DES BEAUX ARTS

  W. H. Auden (1907–1973)

  About suffering they were never wrong,

  The Old Masters: how well they understood

  Its human position; how it takes place

  While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

  How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

  For the miraculous birth, there always must be

  Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

  On a pond at the edge of the wood:

  They never forgot

  That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

  Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

  Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

  Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

  In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

  Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

  Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

  But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

  As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

  Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

  Something amazing, a boy failing out of the sky,

  Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

  * * *

  W. H. Auden documents the otherworldly state of grief and tragedy; how it strikes families while others are doing the dishes or taking the dog for a walk. Even dogs continue on their doggy life. The poem is inspired by a trip to the Musée des Beaux Arts, where Auden came across the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Peter Brueghel the Elder. The poem contains two storylines. First is the story of the speaker recounting the wisdom and knowledge of the Old Masters, the painters who understood the nature of suffering and loss—that it happens internally. Second is the story of the myth of Icarus, the subject of Brueghel’s painting. In the myth Daedalus and his son, Icarus, are imprisoned in the labyrinth by King Menlos. Daedalus makes two pairs of wings out of feathers and wax. He gives one pair to his son and cautions him that flying too close to the sun will cause the wax to melt. Icarus becomes ecstatic with his ability to fly and forgets his father’s warning. He flies too near the sun and plunges to his death in the sea.

  In the painting, Brueghel depicts the onlookers, the ploughman who hears the splash of Icarus hitting the sea, and all those for whom the loss is not personally important, and shows how they turn away. Perhaps in the poem Auden meant for us to see how unimportant we are as individuals in relation to the universe. Or perhaps he meant it ironically—that each loss and the onslaught of grief are particular only to the mourner. For instance, how can anyone else know what it’s like to see my sister’s wildflower blue eyes look up at me?

  In an interview in the Paris Review, Auden was asked if he had any aids for inspiration. He did not have high-minded ideas of the muse or of poetry in general. He hoped that the reader might find his or her journey in his poetry. “Poetry is not self-expression,” he said. “Each of us, of course, has a unique perspective, which we hope to communicate. We hope that someone reading it will say, ‘Of course, I knew that all the time but never realized it before.’ ”

  * * *

  I read. I go to movies. I see art. I work. I write. I call my mother long distance. Have dinners with my sisters. I slide into my husband’s arms at night and I let “dreadful martyrdom” run its course. I don’t know where the pain and grief go. Sometimes it materializes in subconscious anger and resentment. Other times it is as if it burrows into the corners and at moments when I am least aware jumps out. I stuff it back. I will spend years trying to capture the experience of suicide in a prose work, a book that I eventually publish. Poems remain a sustaining source of comfort. This poem that I have known for ages suddenly takes on new power and meaning. I find myself sometimes at night in bed, unable to sleep, reciting its lines in my head as if to master it.

  ONE ART

  Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

  so many things seem filled with the intent

  to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

  Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

  of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

&nb
sp; The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

  Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

  places, and names, and where it was you meant

  to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

  I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

  next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

  I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

  some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

  I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

  —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

  I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

  the art of losing’s not too hard to master

  though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

  * * *

  Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry is defined by vivid descriptions of the physical, everyday world and is infused with a powerful sense of morality. Her father died before she was a year old. After suffering from mental instability, her mother was committed to an institution. Elizabeth Bishop was five; it is not surprising that her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief, solitariness, exile, and longing.