Variation on a Theme by Rilke

by Denise Levertov

A certain day became a presence to me;

there it was, confronting me–a sky, air, light:

a being. And before it started to descend

from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with

the flat of a sword, granting me

honor and a task. The day’s blow

rang out, metallic–or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Did anyone else finish “Variation on a Theme” with an urge to sing Ding dong ding dong ding? In my head the lovely Jean Simmons, her short locks loosened on her forehead and her Salvation Army uniform dangerously unbuttoned, has flung her arms around this poem, as unlikely an attachment as hers to Marlon Brando.

But wait, another artist has boarded this train of associations–illustrator N.C. Wyeth.  The particular Wyeth painting the poem reminds me of is The Giant.  Wyeth’s towering figure, seemingly grown out of the clouds, could be a visual version of the shape-shifting in Levertov’s poem.

Along with an atmospheric freshness of sky, air light, the poem and the painting share a Romantic delight in dramatic events, the sublime and mythology.

“Variation,” like ancient mythologies, hinges on personification.  But Levertov brings to life a certain day, rather than a bigger and more general Day deity, and she allows her reader to witness the creation of this being as it grows into form.   Later she disassembles her creation when she wonders if the awakening blow came not from a certain day, but from herself:

or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self 

The personified day that Levertov creates is clearly a superior being, one that resides in the sky and knights her with a sword,

granting me

honor and a task.

This ordaining gives her power.  The poem ends with her unshakeable confidence that the task that has been set before her can be accomplished.  Compare her mantra of I can with that of The Little Engine That Could.  He barely gets himself up the hill with I think I can.  Her bold and strong I can countenances no doubt.  Does her assuredness come from beyond herself, or has it been there all along, needing only to be awakened?

Regardless, there’s a clear sense that the task for which she is commissioned is something difficult, something she previously didn’t think she could do.  What separates this speaker from an athlete in a Nike commercial or anyone visualizing success in order to increase sales, run faster, plank longer, lose weight, parkour, stop smoking or swallow slugs is that the speakers’ unnamed task carries moral weight.  She’s granted more than fearlessness and strength.  She’s been given or has found courage.

This train of thought left me counting the number of times I’ve been called on to show courage.  And whether I’ve responded I can or I can’t or Not now or Please don’t make me do that.

Which is a lot of boxcars to get me to the junction of this poem and the Underground Railroad.

Recently I took a walking tour of Detroit.  Our group stopped at Hart Plaza on the Detroit River to look at “Gateway to Freedom,” a statue commemorating Detroit’s role in the Underground Railroad.  The figures in the sculpture look across the river to Canada, where a sister statue, “Tower of Freedom,” has been erected.

Before the Civil War, six or seven different routes of the railroad funneled through Detroit, transporting somewhere between 40,000 to 100,000 slaves to Canada.  Arriving in Detroit, fugitives (refugees might be a better word) hid in church cellars and barns.  At night they took canoes to cross the river to Windsor.

Looking up at the statue, I thought about the moment a man or woman who had known only a life of slavery decided to walk thousands of miles on foot, traveling in the dark, knocking at strangers’ doors, crossing rivers, hiding from slave catchers, and risking hunger, drowning, capture and death.  I’m in awe of the courage such a journey demanded of the travelers and those who assisted.  Of all the poems in my backpack, “Variation on a Theme” called out the loudest for a place in the city that was the last stop to freedom.

Denise Levertov was born in a suburb of London in 1923 to politically active parents.  Her mother was Welsh and her father was from a Russian Hassidic Jewish family.  Levertov was homeschooled and she began writing early.  From age five she had a strong sense of her destiny to be an artist, and when she was 12 she sent T.S. Eliot some of her poems.  He responded with two pages of encouragement and advice.

During the London Blitz, she served as a civilian nurse.  She married an American writer and eventually became an American citizen.  She was poetry editor of The Nation and Mother Jones and taught at Stanford, among other universities.

Later in life she converted to Catholicism and became a political poet, speaking out against Vietnam War, nuclear arms, the U.S. involvement in El Salvador, and the Gulf War.

Levertov died in 1997 at age 75.

One last thing:  can anyone help me with the title of this poem?  What theme of Rilke’s is this a variation of?

They may not look like much, but as with people, what’s inside holds the most importance.

Let’s open the book first.  I read once that Jackie Kennedy had her children hand-copy and illustrate a poem every year for her birthday.  These she kept in a scrapbook.  I’ve never been a big Jackie fan—her affected whisper suggests manipulative tendencies—-but she did shine in tragedy and motherhood.  Fortunately it’s only her character in the latter state that I’ve had cause to imitate, so nine years ago I asked my children to start a poetry book for me.

Some years the book sits dormant.  Then one of them will remember the project and I’ll get the lovely surprise I did last Sunday.  Here’s a page from this year:

When I asked Lizzie why she chose this poem, she said she loves “crazy Ruth Stone.” But I suspect she also loves the word “orifices.”

Sometimes the kids write an original poem.  (My son has found cause to rhyme “great mother” and “Dad’s lover.”)  Here’s the first part of an original poem written in the book this Mother’s Day:

Yes, you read that right.  “She waddled and pushed.”  Might be good on my tombstone.

The rest of the poem is too personal to include here.  But I will mention (bragging again) that the structure is not only intricate, it’s color-coded too.

The Twinings tea box rattled when shaken.  I couldn’t imagine what was inside.  Really I couldn’t, could never, because here’s the contents:

Aren’t they wonderful?  Now I have to come up with a creative plan to use them.  If you have any ideas, or if you want one, let me know.

Rarely does my neighborhood offer peculiar sights.   There’s a walker who charges down the street with ski poles in the middle of summer and a very tall cross-dresser I haven’t seen in years.  During swim team season toilet paper hangs gracefully from trees, and in the spring girls in prom dresses duck into limousines.  That’s about all that’s worth rubber-necking except for a family of deer and the occasional dog in the middle of the road who’s jumped the electric fence.

But this morning I drove past a scene that caused me to double-take.  Children waiting for the schoolbus stood in a single file line.  No parent was near.  Silent, unsmiling, hunchbacked with heavy backpacks, the kids stared straight ahead or down at the ground.  The tableau was so strange and depressing that I was instantly reminded of the statue at the FDR memorial in Washington, D.C. of grim-faced men waiting in a bread line.

No doubt the children’s well-intentioned mothers instituted the single-file line to prevent them from knocking each other into the street and getting hit by a car.  But this sleepy suburban corner is hardly a high-speed highway.

I resisted the impulse to jump out of the car and stir up movement as I would a flock of pigeons on a sidewalk.  I wanted to yell, Hey kids, use your last few minutes of freedom and get your ya-ya’s out!  Here they were, about to go off to school where they would stand in line to go to the bathroom, to the lunchroom, to music class, to recess, and from where they will graduate to go to more school and wait in more lines until they are out in the world with the rest of us, waiting in lines at the bank, the post office, at Starbucks and amusement parks, waiting their turn to vote, to renew a driver’s license, to order fast food, to turn left, to buy the newest Apple product.

I’m not against lines or orderly conduct.  But as we tell our children, there’s a time and a place for everything.

The rest of the story is that when I came home I found out that Maurice Sendak died.

I may be stretching the connection here, but if there ever was one not to stand in line, it was Sendak.  If ever books encouraged nonconformity, they were his.  Reading the many tributes to Sendak, I learned that his art was inspired and haunted by relatives killed in the Holocaust.  Relatives who no doubt stood in lines to be exterminated like cattle.

I’m fond of Sendak—you can link here to Stephen Colbert’s funny interview with Sendak to get an idea of what a cranky genius he was—and his death makes me wistful for many a bedtime when I read his books to my children and many a trip to the library when I was a girl myself and attracted to his illustrations of sturdy, confident and often indignant children.

I felt not an ounce of nostalgia when the other popular figure of children’s literature, Jan Berenstain, died this past February.  I hated her books refused to read them to my children.  The illustrations were overly cartoonish, the message-driven plot unbearable.  Show me a child who cleaned her room, told the truth, ate less junk food, or watched less TV because she read a Berenstain Bear book, and I’ll show you a specter of your own wishful thinking.

By contrast, Sendak’s books were unpredictable and wildly imaginative.  The plot and illustrations could go off in any direction, often in dark directions.  You don’t have to have read Bruno Bettelheim to know that children naturally experience dark thoughts and emotions, and fairy tales and literature like Sendak’s offer safe avenues for dealing with such.  As a firm believer in the uses of enchantment, I’ve always avoided picture books that read like Hallmark cards.  Love You Forever and that incredibly boring book with elongated rabbits about how much the mother rabbit loves her baby rabbit always seemed too trite and desperately earnest to force upon children.  Put the bunny book up against Margaret Wise Brown’s brilliant Runaway Bunny and you see how insipid and unimaginative the imitation is.  Better to just tell Junior in your own words that you love him and always will.  And then read him good books like Sendak’s and Brown’s.

And for pete’s sake don’t force him to stand in line when he doesn’t have to.  Let him and his schoolmates examine the grass, sit on the curb, chase each other, chatter, grunt, shout, cackle, draw their names in the cement with rocks, blow dandelion seeds into the air, kick acorns.  No one will get killed doing that. Or even remotely ruined.  Let the wild rumpus begin, folks.  It ends all too soon.

But how sad if the rumpus never begins all.

Poem is taped to sign in foreground

Could Have

by Wislawa Szymborska

It could have happened.

It had to happen.

It happened earlier. Later.

Nearer. Farther off.

It happened, but not to you.

You were saved because you were the first.

You were saved because you were the last.

Alone. With others.

On the right. The left.

Because it was raining. Because of the shade.

Because the day was sunny.

You were in luck — there was a forest.

You were in luck — there were no trees.

You were in luck — a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,

A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant . . .

So you’re here? Still dizzy from

another dodge, close shave, reprieve?

One hole in the net and you slipped through?

I couldn’t be more shocked or

speechless.

Listen,

how your heart pounds inside me.

The linking verb “could have” is the rear view mirror of the predicate world.  Ordinarily it signals regret and works as antacid, a crutch, a wound-licker for all who didn’t finish first, who had bad luck, bad timing or bad judgment, for the Mama Roses and Anthony Weiners, the Wally Pipps and the Zola Budds, the understudy to the star who never twisted her ankle, the quarterback who did, the dreamer with a one-way ticket to Palookaville muttering down on the waterfront about being a contender.

But in Wislawa Szymborska’s “Could Have,” could have expresses the opposite of regret.  Ostensibly the poem expresses relief that the bad thing that could have happened didn’t.

The poem begins with a breathless response to some disaster, as if the speaker is processing as we listen.  The speaker uses every trick of punctuation and rhetoric to make sense of senseless tragedy:  dashes, ellipsis, sentence fragments, questions, parallel structure.  She creates a list of the situations and artifacts that separate survivor from victim.  But as the list develops, contradicting itself and throwing out smaller and smaller reasons for survival until it ends with a quarter-inch and an instant, relief becomes terror.  There are no foolproof rules to follow that will detour disaster.  Shade/sunny, left/right, forest/no trees—no place and no circumstance are fully protected, and no person is either.

Recently my sister was talking to a man about her worries that her son going to college would be safe.  Years before this same man had lost his college-age son in a house fire.  His counsel to my sister was not reassuring.  “Listen,” he said to her, “it’s all luck.”  Fate is fickle and those who pray and those who don’t, those who wear helmets to roller skate and those who throw footballs on ski hills, those who run marathons and those who sit on couches, all are vulnerable to disaster.

Finally the speaker gives up on the list and addresses the survivor with a series of playful questions.  You think it couldn’t happen to you?  she seems to say.  Because it could have.

After such a conclusion, why doesn’t the poem end in despair?  The turn in the last lines is deft and almost miraculous.  Instead of saying, listen, it’s all luck, the speaker says:

Listen,

how your heart pounds inside me.

In the end there’s no safety, only connection.  I love the image that embodies that connection.  It’s one of the most beautiful last lines I’ve read.  One more time, maestro:

Listen,

how your heart pounds inside me.

I have my own list of could have’s in regard to “Could Have.”  Where else could I have left the poem?  Driving around, looking for an appropriate spot, I started with the idea of a body shop.  I didn’t think that would be too unkind, given that a person with a car that can still be repaired was probably not killed in the damage.  But then I drove by an insurance agency and decided that the door to the agency would be less in-your-face.  A poem about risk assessment for a company that does the same.  Perfect.  But I didn’t slow down in time and soon I was headed for a country club.  Country clubs are protected spaces that offer security from trespassers and other agents of harm including denim and poverty.  I got as far as the sign that pointed guests in one direction and deliveries in the other before I turned around, unable to decide which one I was and sure that I was being watched.

I settled on this fortress of a house under construction.  The difference in the lighting between the two pictures happened because I posted the poem at night (I should re-name myself Poem Chicken), but didn’t get a clear picture of the whole deal, so I had to go back during daylight hours.  The poem was still there, but only for that morning.

Everytime I’ve driven past this house I think, Who builds something like that?  What is the motivation besides displaying wealth?  My answer is the same as my assessment of country clubs:  people who build castles want to keep things out.   Great wealth allows people to separate themselves from tedious chores and hassles, and allows the illusion that harm and pain can be distanced as well.

No one needs this poem to puncture holes in that idea—the deaths of Princess Diana and Brooke Astor are common knowledge—but I left the poem here as more than a finger-wagging at the rich.  “Could Have” connects the construction workers in their hardhats to the builders in their offices to the future owners to the drivers who gawk at the excess.  It could happen to any of us and so It happens to all of us.

Wislawa Szymborska was born in 1923 in Poland and just died this past February at age 88.   Early in her career she was a communist intellectual but later grew disillusioned and became active in the Solidarity movement.  She had a modest career as a reviewer at a literary magazine and a poet popular in Poland but unknown elsewhere until she was the surprise winner of the Nobel Prize in 1996.

Like fellow Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who was her friend and mentor, Szymborska lived through Poland’s dark days of Nazi occupation and Communism. I’m always amazed that anyone experiencing such hardship doesn’t write exclusively of darkness and despair.  But a playful spirit was her trademark.  In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, she had this to say about humor and sadness in her poems:

The two things are easily reconciled. You cannot have just one feeling toward the world. Going through this adventure, which I call life, sometimes you think about it with despair, and sometimes with a sense of enchantment. Sometimes the motivation for poetry is being awed by things. As a child I was never surprised by anything; now I am surprised about everything. Every little thing I look at, a leaf or a flower, I say, “Why this? What is this?”

There is also another motivation: Curiosity. I am curious about people, their feelings, what they live through, their fate, what this life means. So this wonderment, curiosity and sadness, all of that comes together for me.

Sunday’s Times features “’Record My Voice, So That When I Get Killed, at Least You’ll Have Something of Me,’” a profile of an Afghani women’s literary collective.  That the article was published during National Poetry Month suggests an irony too bitter to savor:  while the Academy of American Poets tries to charm, challenge and otherwise cajole Americans into reading poetry, women in Afghanistan face grave danger for writing it.

Women in rural, Taliban-controlled areas must compose poetry in their heads– putting poems to paper could lead to beatings—and “publish” by calling in their work to a hotline.  Poems are then transcribed and shared with other women poets.  One young poet was beaten by her brothers when she was overheard reciting her poems on the telephone.  She later set herself on fire and died.

Sad and angry as the article left me, some of the poems made me smile.  I’ll share two I especially enjoyed.

The first is a biting four-line poem addressed to the Taliban.  The poet is all of fifteen years old:

You won’t allow me to go to school.

I won’t become a doctor.

Remember this:

One day you will be sick.

The second is from a 22 year-old woman whose father married her to an old man when she was a young teen:

Making love to an old man is like

Making love to a limp cornstalk blackened by fungus.

Take that, you old goat.

I keep poems I’ve copied and can’t use for my blog the way some people keep slices of meatloaf in the freezer—-why throw away what can be consumed later?   I had dozens of poems leftover from my niece’s recent wedding (link here), two or three extra copies of poems I’d already written about, as well as a handful of poems that were either too long to post or were written by poets I’ve already posted a poem from.

So when I received two emails reminding me that today is National Put a Poem in Your Pocket Day, I knew my re-use and recycle moment had arrived.    I spent last evening wrapping a shoebox and taping signs to it.  Here’s the result:

Why is everything I do slightly askew?

Either my crafting skills stalled around fourth grade or I took Emily Dickinson’s dictum to “tell all the truth but tell it slant” a little too literally.  In my defense, I was hurrying because Revenge was coming on soon.

Anyway, my box does the job. A nice clerk at the post office okayed my display in the lobby.

I wish I had the dolphin-shaped surveillance camera that Revenge‘s Nolan uses so I could watch my box to see if anyone participates in this national whimsy.

Next on my list of tasks related to Poem in Your Pocket Day is to change out of my yoga pants (which I have no business wearing in public anyway) into clothing with pockets.

Deciding which poem to pocket could take me half the morning.

My daughter sent me a video I want to share.  The title, “Free to Be You and Me,” sounds like a coloring book for a self-esteem presentation.  Self esteem presentations make me gag.  But I didn’t gag watching this.  Mostly I laughed, and when I finished I wanted to dance and did.

Tommy Franklin, the subject of the short film, loves to dance in public spaces.  Cynics will call him an attention hound.  I call him a really really great dancer who’s spreading joy and kookiness in a world that needs both.

I love his advice to viewers:  ”If you’re out of your cage, by all means, flap your wings.”  If I had a tattoo, that would be it.  If you’re out of your cage, by all means, flap your wings!

I relate to this guy in a particular way because when I was in 7th and 8th grade and as odd as odd can be, I used to tap dance on my patrol post in the morning.  (Which was, by the way, an entry ramp to the Capital Beltway along a very busy road—no kid would be given this responsibility today.)  A classmate’s father later told me that he’d see me on his way to work and it made his day to see me shuffling away on the sidewalk. Yes, I was showing off (albeit in a socially suicidal fashion), but doggone it, I was born to flap my wings.

Here’s the link.  Enjoy!

And R.I.P., Mr. Mullholland.  That was a beautiful compliment to share, one I’ve held onto all my life.  And, er, uh, I take back what I said about self-esteem presentations.  The one he gave had me smiling for hours.  Years, even.

There’s no poem hidden in this picture but I do think I captured one in her expression. Look how she grips her father as she walks down the aisle towards her beloved with such transparent joy.  She can hardly hold it all in.  If I could have placed a poem on her person it would be this, from an unknown Chinese poet:

If I were a tree or a plant

I would feel the soft influence of spring.

Since I am a man . . .

Do not be astonished at my joy.

But I did manage to hide a few poems over the weekend.  I tied a Rumi poem to the bouquet Tricia used for rehearsal:

You can’t go wrong with Rumi for a wedding.

Tricia was a very happy bride, dancing and laughing all night, but at no point did she reach the “disgraceful” or “crazy” stage.  Neither did Poem Elf, I’ll have you know.   Still the poem’s a useful reminder to switch gears from planning to  celebrating.

Tricia didn’t notice the dangling poem until I pointed it out.

I planted another poem in the office of the father of the bride, my brother Donnie.

poem is taped to phone in foreground

I found “The Giving” in a collection of poems by someone named Max Ellison in a used bookstore in northern Michigan last summer.

I’ll reprint the words because I’m sure someone searching on “wedding poem” will want to copy them:

The Giving

by Max Ellison

Who give this woman to be wed?

Her mother and I.

We gave her dawn.

We gave her grace.

We stamped our image

On her face.

We gave her books,

And through the years

We calmed her early

Childhood fears.

We gave her faith.

We gave her prayer.

She walked our road.

She climbed our stairs.

And now in solemn troth

We swear,

We can not give.

We only share.

I love this poem.  At first I had reservations about the whole idea of “giving” a woman to a man or “sharing” her, but in the face of such loving fatherly sentiments, those reservations be darned.  This poem is just flat-out sweet and true.  We are each of us a gift to the world.

Poet Max Ellison was less obscure than I originally thought.   Well-known in his hometown of Bellaire, Michigan, he sold his books on street corners, spoke at Governor Milliken’s inauguration, and may have been—although I can’t confirm—the poet laureate of Michigan. He lived simply in a house he built called “Frog Holler,”  which had no running water or electricity.  His poetry is also simple, in the best sense:  clean and straightforward and honest.  No frippery.

In the goody bags for the out-of-town guests staying at the hotel, I left Dante’s “La Vita Nuova.”

I’ve already written about this poem, so I’ll include the link, post the picture and not say one more word about it:

Poem Elf got fancy with vellum and ribbon

Finally I included this poem (or excerpt from a poem) with the newlyweds’ wedding gift, a lamp.  I forgot to take a picture of the actual lamp with the poem, so I put another copy in my front window:

The poem provides an answer to the question Rodgers and Hammerstein posed in Cinderella:

Do I love you because

you’re beautiful

or are you beautiful

because I love you?

I can’t find a thing on the poet, Fulvia Lupulo, except that’s she’s Mexican.  Tricia’s husband is also of Mexican descent, so I hope this poem finds a special place in his heart.

And here’s the bridegroom himself, with my mother at the rehearsal dinner:

I can’t resist including two more pictures of my mother at the wedding.  First, dancing with one of her grandsons:

And then surprised by her grandsons’ Zou Bisou Bisou:

Ain’t love grand?

Let the celebration begin.

Whoop-di-doo.

Let your inbox fill with unread poem-a-day emails.  Let national magazines feature a token article about the relevancy of poetry. Let teachers assign haikus and limericks to display in cinder block hallways.  Let the New York Times hand over the op-ed page to poets for one day of the year.

I’ll break from my sourpuss act for a moment to admit that as far as secular celebrations go, National Poetry Month is as good as any.  Just as well to celebrate poetry as to celebrate amateur radio and soft pretzels (also on the national calendar for April).  But the designation smells of resignation.  It’s as if poets and poetry publishers have given up on anyone reading poetry during the rest of the year and are trying to shove a whole bunch of poems down the national throat in one month, like a hostess pushing leftovers on guests who didn’t like the dinner in the first place.  Need it be said that no one finds it necessary to have a National Pornography Month or National Young Adult Dystopia Novel Month?

Maybe I just don’t like excessive scheduling.  Pull out the iphones, folks, time to schedule a love for poetry!   As much as I wish it weren’t true, an enjoyment of poetry can’t be forced and a need for it can’t be penciled in the calendar.   Poet Jane Hirshfield, in an interview in The Atlantic, speaks to this point:

People talk about poetry’s having a diminished life in the current culture, or else they talk about its current renaissance, but I think that in good times or bad times for poetry as a whole, people will always have periods in their lives when they turn to poetry. Dealing with grief or falling in love, people will look for a poem or perhaps write one in the attempt to sort through and understand their most powerful experiences. Or, for the occasions of large transition — a marriage or a funeral — they will ask someone to read a poem that marks and holds the feeling. One of the jobs of poets is to keep making those holding words available, so that when other people need them they will be there.

My search stats confirm the truth of her words.  For those of you who don’t blog, let me explain.  Host sites provide statistics on how many views a blog gets, how many clicks to links in a post, how many referrals, how many subscribers, and most entertainingly, what search terms lead readers to the blog.  Sometimes these searches are funny, sometimes creepy, sometimes sweet, and sometimes—many times actually—affirming of the need for poetry in everyday life.

Not a day goes by when at least one person isn’t looking for a mother of the groom poem.  During the past seven days at least fifty people have searched for a mother of the groom poem.  From June of 2010 when I first posted Seamus Heaney’s “Mother of the Groom,” over 1,000 people have searched the words in the title.  That’s a significant number for a blog with a small readership like mine.

Other common searches are poems for a daughter, children, or kids leaving home (thank you, Linda Pastan); good poems for teenagers; grief poems; poems for a funeral; and even what someone called pissed off poems.

Lots and lots of people want funny Valentine poems, but only in February.  Readers want elf poems year round.   Students always need poems, or at least an analysis of one when a search on enotes turns up nothing.  I can often tell when a teacher or professor has assigned a certain poem:  I’m flooded (okay, to the extent that I can be flooded—maybe dripped on is more accurate) with searches for one particular poem along with the words explanation, what does it mean, what kind of poem is it.   Lately it’s been Louise Gluck’s “Gretel in Darkness,” a poem I love and posted but did not, sorry kiddos, analyze.

Some of the searches touch me right to my very poem-elfing soul as I consider the specific ways people need poetry:  poem for a nephew going into the navy, poem today’s pain will pass, tumor poems, great poem for a great mom, will you go to prom with me poems.

Some searches leave me wondering how quickly a reader realized that what was being sought would not be found on Poem Elf and how quickly the search terms were erased from the user’s computer:

Hungarian girl on toilet

deep panty line

panty stain

woman jockstrap

women and underwear in sexy situations

mistress flush slave head in toilet

which poems of Christina Rossetti are graphic

(Have no fear, at least from me, if you’re an oversexed lover of poetry with a secret interest in Hungarian girls and their underwear.  I have no way of knowing who searched on what.)

Other searches make me laugh or at least smile, as if I were hearing, like Whitman himself, America singing:

my first baby poem

poems that will make my grandma cry

poems for spring cleaning

poems about body odor (this search has come up more than once)

poems I love my husband’s smell

And so, on with the celebrations!  Turn on the transmitter, eat your soft pretzel, and read Yeats!  NOW!  I mean it!

poem is on left-hand side of glasses case, just below middle metal bracket

Meeting the Light Completely

by Jane Hirshfield

Even the long-beloved

was once

an unrecognized stranger.

Just so,

the chipped lip

of a blue-glazed cup,

blown field

of a yellow curtain,

might also,

flooding and falling,

ruin your heart.

A table painted with roses.

An empty clothesline.

Each time,

the found world surprises—

that is its nature.

And then

what is said by all lovers:

“What fools we were, not to have seen.”

This poem bears the weightless distinction of being one of the first poems I copied and kept.  After years and years of being passed from drawer to drawer and folder to folder and finally to an envelope in my purse, the paper is crinkled and worn, its print the merest shade darker than faded.  I found it so long ago I can’t remember why I wanted to save it.   Maybe I liked the image of the shabby chic kitchen and wanted to sit at that painted table next to the opened window.  Maybe I liked the sounds:

the chipped lip

of the blue-glazed cup.

Maybe it was the first time I came across a poem, post-college, whose language was vernacular, whose ideas were transparent or seemed to be.   Maybe it spoke to me about the surprises of life, how unimportant things can become important, how every moment is pregnant with possibility and meaning.

How the poem ended up in the Costco optical department is another story.  Because my eyes have gotten increasingly sensitive to sunlight as I’ve aged and I can’t wear contacts all the time, I decided to get prescription sunglasses.  I wanted to “meet the light completely,” so to speak.  Mirrored lenses, I figured, would keep the sun out best.  Big mistake.  Trying on my new insistently reflective sunglasses, I deceived myself that I looked less like a blind lady than Neo in Matrix, and I wore them, nervously checking the rearview mirror at every stoplight, until I picked up my daughter from school.  She cringed at the sight of me.  “Coraline’s parents,” she said, referring to the animated character’s frightening black-button-eyed torturers.

Within the hour I was back at Costco with the offending glasses in my purse and-–egads—a good poem to tape to the glasses display.

I hadn’t realized until I left the poem amongst the glasses how much the poem is about seeing.  All the images are visual, the observations of someone who is looking carefully.  But the poem is also about what can’t be seen.  Meeting the light completely would lead to blindness, at least that’s the strong impression my dad made when he would take us outside to look at a solar eclipse through sunglasses.  We can be blind to the meaning of things as we experience them.  Only with distance or through a glass darkly can we perceive reality.

In the beginning and end of the poem, the act of not seeing amps up romance:

Even the long-beloved

 was once

 an unrecognized stranger.

Essayist Geoff Dyer tells a charming story that illustrates those lines.  He was in a lingerie shop with his girlfriend and while she was in the dressing room, he was briefly enamored of another shopper.  “It wasn’t just that she was beautiful,” he writes, “she transfixed me totally.  My heart went out to her.”   Six months later, he broke up with his girlfriend and later got married.  Months after the wedding, he woke up one morning and “realized, immediately and with absolute certainty, that the woman lying next to me, Rebecca, my wife, was the woman I had seen that day.” He and his wife, with the benefit of extraordinarily detailed diaries, figured out that indeed both of them had been at the lingerie shop at the same time. He had forgotten seeing her but not completely:  “The memory developed as I slept, its colors becoming deeper, more distinct: the ghost of a dream, but permanent, lovely.”

Meg Ryan built a whole career on that same trope, What fools we were not to have seen.   Consider You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, Addicted to Love, even Sleepless in Seattle in its own way.

All well and good but for the troubling middle section of the poem, the furnished section.  Here the act of seeing doesn’t lead to love.  Instead it can ruin your heart.  Setting aside the nod to William Carlos Williams’ “so much depends/ upon / a red wheel / barrow,” could a yellow curtain ruin your heart?

That would be a good creative writing exercise (write a story where a yellow curtain ruins your heart) because writers work with details and these details, let’s call them objects, carry memories and associations.  Reminding the observer of something else, something painful or beautiful, objects can ruin your heart.

Or is ruin your heart a misanthropic phrase for falling in love?  I don’t think the luminous Hirshfield, a practicing Buddhist, is capable of misanthropy.  So why the brokenness and ruin in the middle of such a romantic poem? The cup is chipped, the curtain flooding and falling.  The arc of the billowing curtain suggests that both in love and then out of love we can fail to see.  When we love we can be blind to faults; when we’re out of love we can be blind to virtues.

(Love is blind, but the neighbors ain’t, my dad used growl before anyone in the house went on a date.  Years later I found the lines the precede his little ditty:

While kissing

at the garden gate,

remember, love is blind

but the neighbors ain’t.)

The opposition of flooding and falling plays out in the images that follow:

A table painted with roses.

  An empty clothesline.

Roses are a traditional symbol of love; the emptiness of the clothesline suggests absence and loss.  Flooding and falling again, and yet, the poem isn’t dark or broken-hearted.

The poem is more complicated than I had realized, and I don’t have a handle on exactly what it means, as if meaning itself slipped out between the white space and the opened window.  All those years I thought I owned it, but I didn’t.  Which is just what the poem predicted:

Each time—

the found world surprises

Jane Hirshfield was born in 1953 in New York City.  After graduating from the first Princeton class to include women, she moved to San Francisco to study Zen Buddhism for eight years.  She has published seven books of poetry and, as a translator of Japanese poetry, has helped popularize tanka in the United States, a form which now has a solid place in fifth grade English curriculums.

She’s also an extraordinarily beautiful woman.  Her picture is a visual translation of “Tupelo Honey,” my favorite Van Morrison song.  In my mind it’s Jane Hirshfield on the cover of that album—her curly hair flooded with sunlight and hanging over the white horse who gently leads her through the woods.

Sans mirrored sunglasses of course.

(I can’t mention the Costco optical department without giving a shout-out to the lovely women who work there.  Gentle spirits all, and patient, they handle customers like good fairies dispensing graces.)