Kiss Off

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  And if I fall down a hole as big as the

  Chesapeake Bay, big as my whole

  yummy heart, today's Special of the Day.

  I'll marry it.

  CAROLYN CREEDON

  Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)

  Lana Turner has collapsed!

  I was trotting along and suddenly

  it started raining and snowing

  and you said it was hailing

  but hailing hits you on the head

  hard so it was really snowing and

  raining and I was in such a hurry

  to meet you but the traffic

  was acting exactly like the sky

  and suddenly I see a headline

  LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

  there is no snow in Hollywood

  there is no rain in California

  I have been to lots of parties

  and acted perfectly disgraceful

  but I never actually collapsed

  oh Lana Turner we love you get up

  FRANK O'HARA

  Equinox

  Now is the time of year when bees are wild

  and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped

  loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants

  in the bright, late-September out-of-doors.

  I have found their dried husks in my clothes.

  They are dervishes because they are dying,

  one last sting, a warm place to squeeze

  a drop of venom or of honey.

  After the stroke we thought would be her last

  my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped

  a nurse across the face. Then she stood up,

  walked outside, and lay down in the snow.

  Two years later there is no other way

  to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light

  as an empty hive, and she is breathing.

  ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

  Delight in Disorder

  A sweet disorder in the dress

  Kindles in clothes a wantonness.

  A lawn about the shoulders thrown

  Into a fine distractiön;

  An erring lace, which here and there

  Enthralls the crimson stomacher;

  A cuff neglectful, and thereby

  Ribbons to flow confusedly;

  A winning wave, deserving note,

  In the tempestuous petticoat;

  A careless shoestring, in whose tie

  I see a wild civility;

  Do more bewitch me than when art

  Is too precise in every part.

  ROBERT HERRICK

  At the Gym

  This salt-stain spot

  marks the place where men

  lay down their heads,

  back to the bench,

  and hoist nothing

  that need be lifted

  but some burden they've chosen

  this time: more reps,

  more weight, the upward shove

  of it leaving, collectively,

  this sign of where we've been:

  shroud-stain, negative

  flashed onto the vinyl

  where we push something

  unyielding skyward,

  gaining some power

  at least over flesh,

  which goads with desire,

  and terrifies with frailty.

  Who could say who's

  added his heat to the nimbus

  of our intent, here where

  we make ourselves:

  something difficult

  lifted, pressed or curled,

  Power over beauty,

  power over power!

  Though there's something more

  tender, beneath our vanity,

  our will to become objects

  of desire: we sweat the mark

  of our presence onto the cloth.

  Here is some halo

  the living made together.

  MARK DOTY

  Dealing

  WHEN YOU

  FACE FACTS

  You're finally busted. There's no place left to run or hide from your Hurting, so you have to just face it head-on. It's like the climax of every action movie, where the heroes finally rip off their disguises, drop their weapons, and square off mano a mano. Only the fight you face in Dealing is with yourself, with your memories of the past and your hopes for the future. In Dealing, you're part superhero (the invincibly strong person you strive to be), part villain (the lonely, frustrated person you've become), and part ordinary Clark Kent (the real you, who just wants to live a reasonably happy life).

  This battle is tougher than the one in Reeling, when you tried to wrestle the world into submission. Dealing is more about diplomacy and intelligence gathering than brute force. You're asking yourself hard questions: Why do I keep blaming everyone else for my loneliness? What truly makes me happy? What changes do I need to make on the inside before I can become the person I hope to be? You're negotiating for your own peace of mind.

  Maybe you're still fixated on that perfect guy from five years ago (your soul mate—except he married your roommate), or you believe your life is forever screwed because your mother didn't love you enough, or you took a wrong turn and didn't go to law school and now you're stuck adjusting claims at State Farm. What's important is to face the reality of your life, accept, forgive, and change what you can, and then prepare to move on.

  As the poets in this section tell us, it takes a great deal of self-discipline and hard work to sift the truth from the lies and figure out what's really at the center of our unhappiness. But if we want to reclaim our true selves, if we want to find our place in the world again, well then, we deal.

  “Someone has to tidy up” after every war, Wislawa Szymborska tells us in “The End and the Beginning.” You do feel as if you've been through a war, exhausted, bloodied, and beaten down, but “someone has to shove/the rubble to the road-sides,” and “someone has to trudge/through sludge and ashes,” and this time that someone is you. It's not a pretty process—who wants to dig through a big horrible pile of splintered glass and bloody rags? But if you really want to move on, if you want to reach a place where you can simply lie in the grass gazing at the clouds, you've got to sort through that pile, find the treasures that are worth keeping, and sweep the rest away.

  And sometimes you can't help idealizing the treasures you keep—like your memories of the past, when everything seemed more beautiful and pure than you feel now. Like the speaker in Claude McKay's “The Tropics in New York,” you may long for the dewy dawns and “mystical blue skies,” the old familiar ways of your childhood. You wish you had that innocence back, that ease and trust in the world. But life had its struggles then, too, if you could only remember them. And the fact is you did grow up (you did leave that island for New York). Just because you're older and weathered now doesn't mean you have to abandon your sense of beauty and faith in the world. You may not live on the island anymore, but the tangerines and mangoes of your child-hood past will be part of who you are forever.

  Or perhaps you want to stay put in your memories of glorious, true love. You can't move forward because you think nothing will ever measure up to the perfection of what you once had. So you fixate on the fantasy of an idealized love described so beautifully in Pablo Neruda's “Night on the Island.” The poem paints a picture of two lovers who are so in tune with each other that their very dreams are joined, and their kisses taste of, the “depths of …life.” But we know that the se'cret of life can't be found in a kiss, no matter how wild and sweet, and we know that no other person can be a cup into which we pour our gifts. Even Neruda hints that this love can't last forever—the title of the poem is “Night on the Island,” not “Life on the Island.”

  In Dealing, you must take off the rose-colored glasses and begin to look at the past through a sharper lens of truth: Maybe you did live that passionate night or two with someone you thought you'd be connected to forever—but it didn't save you
from unhappiness then, and it won't now.

  So we let go of the idealized past (see it for what it was) and dig into the real past to find what's worth keeping. You know you want to keep the keen aliveness you felt when you were sixteen—which Shawn M. Durrett evokes so perfectly in “Lures.” Your sensual self was wide awake—he was “all heat and skin/and smoke in throats” against a backdrop of “fall's blaze-red of sumac,” and the impossible blue of the October sky. It wasn't a Pablo Neruda grand kind of romance—it was experimental, liberating, adolescent bliss. You may not have the same hormones or great body you had when you were sixteen, but you can always keep the capacity for this kind of dizzy joy.

  And hold on to the memories that bring hope to the uncertain present. The speaker in Joyce Carol Oates's “Waiting on Elvis, 1956” was twenty-six, married “but still/waiting tables” and remembers when the very young (just twenty-one), still-thin Elvis swaggered into her greasy spoon like he owned the place. She's probably tired, just wants to get through her shift, but she snaps alive and flirts a little with the King, even playfully slaps at him, “feeling [her] face burn.” Elvis, with his honey smile (“the kind of boy even meanness turned sweet in/his mouth”), sees that she's got plenty of edge and sass and charm left. And the waitress knows, looking back, that the world is still full of possibility, that if that could happen to her then—Elvis wanted her!—then anything can happen anytime, even when you're down and out.

  It's a good thing that Dealing has its moments of delight like this, when you discover that even if you can't have the romanticized past back, you can always keep your heart open to beauty and hope. Because you'll need the strength of that moment to help you face the next step of Dealing—taking responsibility for some of the bad stuff in your past.

  Perhaps, like the speaker in Robert Hayden's “Those Winter Sundays,” you've long felt that your family didn't love or appreciate you the way you deserved. You thought your parents just filled the house with “chronic angers,” so you feared them or treated them with sullen indifference when you were growing up. And you blamed them for all the relationships you've messed up in your life. But maybe, like the speaker in the poem, you can finally see not just the dramatic bad moments, but the quiet moments of effort and devotion. His father's cracked hands banked the fires that drove out the cold, and “no one ever thanked him.” Now the speaker understands the “austere and lonely offices” of his father's love. Like him, maybe you can move past the lie of blame and begin to understand your own mistakes and bad choices.

  If we don't reach this point in Dealing, we may wind up like the evil stepmother in Anna Swir's poem “She Does Not Remember.” The subject was truly an evil stepmother, but she stubbornly refuses to remember how she made Cinderella scrub the floor and wear rags—all she knows is “that she feels cold.” If she would only face up to the evil she's done, admit her mistakes, maybe even hope for forgiveness, then she might finally experience the warmth of inner peace.

  Both Johnny Coley and Kim Konopka show us that dealing is not just hard work—it's a lifelong process. In “The Dogs,” the speaker is convinced that he feels anger, terror, and boredom only because he has lost his lover. These feelings, he says, are like dogs that bark nonstop and “chew up everything in the apartment.” If only his lover would return, the “dogs” would calm down and be good. But after his lover has left for the last time, he begins to understand that he is alone with his feelings and must learn to deal with them one by one.

  For the speaker in “The Layers Between Me,” facing the truth about herself and her life is a lot like housework—sometimes tedious, sometimes satisfying. She drags her dust cloth over cluttered tables and book-lined shelves, she rubs clear “the framed smiles of cherished friends,” until finally she comes to a bedroom mirror, “untouched now for several seasons.” She likes the way she looks in this dusty mirror, her reflection softened, lines erased—a subtle deception. But today, she is ready to face her real self, without the illusion the dust adds. Full of resolve, she wipes “the lie away”—but she knows the dust will pile up again, and in a week or a month, she'll have to face the task again. We're always going to have those specks of dust and dirt on our self-image—that's just what it means to be human.

  So what's the reward for this constant cleanup? Look at the speaker in Louise Gliick's “Purple Bathing Suit.” She has just a few problems with the man she's chosen—for one there's that mouth. Then there's the awful purple bathing suit and the fact that no matter how many times she tells him, he still doesn't know how to weed; he's ostensibly working hard, but really “doing the worst job possible.” In fact, if you add up all of his faults, he's “a small irritating purple thing.” So why is she with him? Because she knows there is no absolutely happily-ever-after, no perfect mate— you take the good with the bad. Sure, he may be a dead loss in the garden, but at the dinner table and in bed, he's something else again. Her reward lies in the fact that she can shed her illusions and own up to her complicated feelings: in spite of all of his faults, he is her purple-bathing-suit man. She chooses him, she needs him, and she claims him.

  Ultimately, Dealing is about facing the truth, discarding the lies and then making your own choices. By the time you're through with this internal battle, you might feel a bit like our “lingering Parents,” Adam and Eve, at the end of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Poor old Adam and Eve have been evicted from Eden, burdened with the knowledge of good and evil—but finally conscious. Now Dealing has evicted you from your own false Paradise. You won't keep longing for an idealized past, and you aren't going to expect a miraculously perfect future. You've made peace with yourself, and you're ready to take the next step (even though it may be “wandring” and slow) toward living fully in the glorious, imperfect, real world.

  The End and

  the Beginning

  After every war

  someone has to tidy up.

  Things won't pick

  themselves up, after all.

  Someone has to shove

  the rubble to the roadsides

  so the carts loaded with corpses

  can get by.

  Someone has to trudge

  through sludge and ashes,

  through the sofa springs,

  the shards of glass,

  the bloody rags.

  Someone has to lug the post

  to prop the wall,

  someone has to glaze the window,

  set the door in its frame.

  No sound bites, no photo opportunities,

  and it takes years.

  All the cameras have gone

  to other wars.

  The bridges need to be rebuilt,

  the railroad stations, too.

  Shirtsleeves will be rolled

  to shreds.

  Someone, broom in hand,

  still remembers how it was.

  Someone else listens, nodding

  his unshattered head.

  But others are bound to be bustling nearby

  who'll find all that

  a little boring.

  From time to time someone still must

  dig up a rusted argument

  from underneath a bush

  and haul it off to the dump.

  Those who knew

  what this was all about

  must make way for those

  who know little.

  And less than that.

  And at last nothing less than nothing.

  Someone has to lie there

  in the grass that covers up

  the causes and effects

  with a cornstalk in his teeth,

  gawking at clouds.

  WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

  (Trans, Stanislan Baranczak and Clare cavanagh)

  The Tropics in New York

  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 f
airs,

  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

  Night on the Island

  All night I have slept with you

  next to the sea, on the island.

  Wild and sweet you were between pleasure and sleep,

  between fire and water.

  Perhaps very late

  our dreams joined

  at the top or at the bottom,

  up above like branches moved by a common wind,

  down below like red roots that touch.

  Perhaps your dream

  drifted from mine

  and through the dark sea

  was seeking me

  as before,

  when you did not yet exist,

  when without sighting you

  I sailed by your side,

  and your eyes sought

  what now—

  bread, wine, love, and anger—

  I heap upon you

  because you are the cup

  that was waiting for the gifts of my life.

  I have slept with you

  all night long while

  the dark earth spins

  with the living and the dead,

  and on waking suddenly

  in the midst of the shadow

  my arm encircled your waist.

  Neither night nor sleep

  could separate us.

  I have slept with you

  and on waking, your mouth,

  come from your dream,

  gave me the taste of earth,

  of sea water, of seaweed,

  of the depths of your life,

  and I received your kiss

  moistened by the dawn

  as if it came to me

  from the sea that surrounds us.

  PABLO NERUDA

  (Trans Donald D Walsh)

 

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