poem is on shelf with coffee

A New Lifestyle

by James Tate

People in this town drink too much

coffee. They’re jumpy all the time. You

see them drinking out of their big plastic

mugs while they’re driving. They cut in

front of you, they steal your parking places.

Teenagers in the cemeteries knocking over

tombstones are slurping café au lait.

Recycling men hanging onto their trucks are

sipping espresso. Dogcatchers running down

the street with their nets are savoring

their cups of mocha java. The holdup man

entering a convenience store first pours

himself a nice warm cup of coffee. Down

the funeral parlor driveway a boy on a

skateboard is spilling his. They’re so

serious about their coffee, it’s all they

can think about, nothing else matters.

Everyone’s wide awake but looks incredibly

tired.

This catalog of frenzied coffee-drinkers, comical in their obsession, brings to mind an old movie favorite, It’s a Mad Mad Mad World.  If you haven’t seen this 1963 classic, find a way, post-Blockbuster, to watch it.  Jonathan Winters riding a little girl’s bicycle is not to be missed.  Winters and an all-star cast including Spencer Tracy, Ethel Merman, Terry Thomas, Peter Falk and Sid Caesar race down the California coast to find $350,000 buried under a mysterious “Big W.”  The characters become increasingly nuts as the chase ensues.  Their money monomania leads them to the top of an out-of-control fire truck ladder and eventually to the hospital.

Recapping the movie, I’m struck by how modest the buried treasure is by today’s standards.  $350,000, really?  At first “A New Lifestyle” seemed similarly dated.  Is obsessive coffee-drinking new?  I assumed that the poem was written pre-Starbucks.  When I discovered it was actually published in a 2002 collection, I read the poem a little differently.  It’s not a straight-up tub-thumping.  It’s also gleeful exercise in the pleasures of tub-thumping.  Tate invents a character, a Rip Van Winkle sort of man, who observes modern habits with a crabby and comic eye.

Clearly Tate has a lot of fun creating characters and listing silly coffee-drinking situations.  His list begins credibly, with pushy drivers stealing parking spaces. But as the speaker gets wound up, the list gets increasingly crazy.  Vandalizing teenagers in a cemetery drink coffee, not beer.  Burly trashmen sip from dainty expresso cups.  By the time we arrive at the dogcatcher racing down the street with his coffee, we know Tate is as intent on amusing as he is on complaining.  When was the last time you saw a dogcatcher anyway?

The speaker’s tirade operates on a logical fallacy, Post Hoc, as I remember from a rhetoric class, or maybe it’s Hasty Generalization:  drivers are drinking coffee; these drivers are rude: therefore coffee-drinking causes rude behavior.  Whatever the name, this kind of false reasoning is common to anyone ranting and raving on the ills of society.

“A New Lifestyle” would be a fun poem for an imitation exercise.  Substitute “coffee” with television, plastic water bottles, Facebook, ADHD medication, the internet, smart phones, or whatever a bile-eyed observer might deem harmful.  Invent characters.  Create absurd incidents.  Make a hasty generalization.  End with a killer statement that shakes up the whole poem and makes the reader shudder with recognition:

Everyone’s wide awake but looks incredibly

tired.

I couldn’t resist re-writing those lines for a poem about cell phone usage, a vice of mine (cell phones, that is, not re-writing):

Everyone’s connected but feels incredibly

alone.

Today being the first day of Lent, a season of giving up certain habits to make room for more important behaviors, it’s a good time to consider obsessions.  “A New Lifestyle” makes me think how sad and empty obsessions can be.  How we move from one obsession to the next.  How we define ourselves by our obsessions.  How what we seek so desperately can end up thwarting what we desire most.  But mostly how darn hard it is for me to give up sweets and Facebook and what I would give for a chocolate chip cookie right now.

Of course I left the poem at Starbucks, that mecca for all obsessive coffee drinkers.   Interesting that the name “Starbucks” comes from Moby Dick.   After rejecting “Pequod,” Starbucks’ founders chose the name of the Pequod’s chief mate, Starbuck.  They wanted to suggest international commerce and coffee trading.  The speaker in “A New Lifestyle” would say they chose well.  Nothing says “obsession” like an allusion to world of Captain Ahab.

Poet James Tate was born in Missouri in 1943.  His father, a pilot in WWII, died in a plane crash when Tate was five months old, and never met his son.  Tate has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and teaches at the University of Massachusettes, Amherst.  In a wonderful interview with Tate in the Paris Review (which you can read here) poet Charles Simic calls Tate “one of our great comic masters.”

Valentine’s Day is about love.  That’s all there is to it.  Yeah, love!  It doesn’t have to be romantic love or hot sexy love or I-don’t-have-anyone-to love.  If you love your parents or your siblings or your friends or your co-workers or your teachers or your dogs or even just the earth (and if not that, best find out what ails you), Valentine’s Day is worth celebrating.  And celebrating doesn’t mean waiting for the roses to be delivered.  Like any other concept connected to love, Valentine’s Day is about giving, not getting.

To celebrate, I went on a Valentine’s Day binge, Poem-Elf style.  I left poems all over town.  A little something for everyone.

At the food court in the mall, I left “What There Is” by Kenneth Patchen.

poem is on side of booth

I sent this one to my kids.  A message of love for everyone!

In the men’s underwear department of Macy’s I left Robert Creeley’s “Old Song.”

poem is in the middle of the top shelf

An Old Song with a new twist:  men enjoy being desired as much as women do.

Target seemed like a good spot for poem-elfing today.  I left “After Love” by Sara Teasdale in the make-up aisle.

poem is in front of the lipsticks

I figured that if you’ve reached the end of a relationship, you just may want some new make-up to cheer yourself up.

For very romantic souls, I left “Although I Conquer All the Earth” on a path through the woods.

poem is on tree on left-hand side of path

I hope the wind doesn’t blow it away before lovers canoodling in the woods find it.

For lovers who enjoy PDA, I left “So Let’s Live–Really Live ” in the city park.

poem is on park bench

The name of the statue behind the bench is Marshall Frederick’s “The Freedom of the Human Spirit.”  Yes, indeed!

I passed an independent living building for seniors and left Grace Paley’s “Hand-Me-Downs.”

poem is taped to the right of the door

Who else can write about old lovers with such tenderness and whimsy?

I left Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Recipe for Happiness” in the flower department of the grocery store.

poem is in the center bouquet of roses

I hope the poem elevates an average-looking valentine bearing an average gift into something magical.

Finally, I left Lorca’s “Variation”  for my own valentine on the window of his office.

We’ve been together since we were 17 and this poem reminds me of young love.  And old love too, goldarnit.

Enjoy Valentine’s Day, everyone!  Spread it around.

Poem is on right side of entry way

MIRAGE

by: Christina Rossetti

THE hope I dreamed of was a dream,

Was but a dream; and now I wake

Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old,

For a dream’s sake.

I hang my harp upon a tree,

A weeping willow in a lake;

I hang my silenced harp there, wrung and snapt

For a dream’s sake.

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;

My silent heart, lie still and break:

Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed

For a dream’s sake.

The best place for Christina Rossetti’s poem “Mirage” would be in the opening credits of Inception II.  That is, if you’re in the camp that believes Leonardo DiCaprio’s character was still dreaming at the end of the original movie.

Inception is about the only place where this poem wouldn’t serve as a gloating over another person’s suffering.  Hidden in a gift shop’s Valentine’s Day display, The hope I dreamed of was a dream,/Was but a dream would be a bad omen or painful reminder.  Tucked in with graduation cards, it would mock the relentless urging to follow dreams.   The college prep section of Barnes and Noble, the cast list for a high school play or a dressing room mirror during bikini season would all be mean-spirited spots to leave this poem.

It seemed less unkind to leave it at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station.  I do hope no Anna Karenina’s staggered nearby who might be driven to the train tracks by the poem’s despair.  I left the poem as a diversion for train travelers, not a mirror, as a reminder that the train they just entered or exited can be a place of dramatic emotions, a scene of separation, the end of a romance. The D.C. station seems particularly appropriate for the poem because D.C., like L.A. and New York City, attracts some of the most ambitious dreamers in the country.   Unlike those other cities, ambition in D.C. is often tied to idealism, a sure combination for the kind of bitter disappointment in the poem.

The hope dreamed of in this poem is romantic, not professional and certainly not political.  It speaks of a heartache I’ve never experienced.  I myself am not one to bet the bank on a romantic dream.  I like to think I have good judgment where men are concerned.  But it’s true that I haven’t had many occasions to exercise said judgment.  Perhaps I try not to want anything so badly that not getting it will crush me.  Enlightened detachment or damage?  An open question.

At any rate, my instinct to detach makes me a terrible consoler for the broken-hearted, especially for one of my daughters who these days seems ever in the throes of romantic dreams.  Many times I’ve mistakenly thought that if I could help her see she’s misreading signals or that a prospect isn’t worth her attention, I could prevent her from feeling exceeding comfortless.  It hasn’t worked.  In fact, my attempts at consolation have earned me the unfortunate nickname of “Dream Crusher.”  Dream Crusher! my husband sings, Put on your boots and crush those dreams!

Dream Crusher reads this poem and says, Get it together, girl!  You don’t want to end up like Ophelia (drowned) or Miss Havisham (cobwebbed).  And next time, sister, don’t pin all your hopes to a man.

But the Poem Elf in me loves this poem.  It’s gorgeous.  It asks to be heard out loud, to be memorized, to be stashed away for gloomy days.

My delight in the despair comes from the intricate way Rossetti uses tricks of sound to suggest more than is actually said.  The rhyme scheme hinges on a single sound, “ake,” which if you didn’t notice can also be spelled “ache.”  The harp, hung up on a tree and broken, carries a sound-suggestion of “heart” even before she mentions the word.  “Lie still” she commands her heart, but the command echoes an accusation she may have thrown at the lover who betrayed her.  The repetition in each verse becomes a keening:  was a dream,/was but a dream, she wails, and we see her rocking back in forth in anguish.

For all its sweet tones, the poem is violent.  Hints of suicide lurk in the stanzas.  The harp is wrung and snapt  like a neck.  It hangs from a tree.  And the lake holds promise of a final silencing, a means to lie still forever.

Christina Rossetti (1830- 1894) was born in London to an Italian family of high Romantic pedigree.  Her father was a poet, her mother the sister of Byron’s friend and doctor, her brother Dante an artist and poet, and her two other siblings writers.  She was a central player in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, serving as the model for several paintings and was certainly the strongest poet in the group.  She lived with her mother her whole life and never married although she had plenty of suitors.   As a very pious Anglican, Rossetti ended one engagement because her fiancé re-converted to Catholicism.  She turned down two others for religious reasons.  She died of breast cancer a few weeks after her 64^th birthday.

I have a t-shirt with one of her poems on it (from a sister’s weekend, see here) and you may have run across “When I Am Dead, My Dearest” searching for a funeral material.  This animated video of her reciting that poem is really creepy, more suited to Halloween than the week before Valentine’s Day.  Sorry, Dream Crusher insisted on posting the link.

But Poem Elf wanted you to see another picture from Union Station:

poem is on edge of chair, lower right corner

Gray Room

by Wallace Stevens

Although you sit in a room that is gray,

Except for the silver

Of the straw-paper,

And pick

At your pale white gown;

Or lift one of the green beads

Of your necklace,

To let it fall;

Or gaze at your green fan

Printed with the red branches of a red willow;

Or, with one finger,

Move the leaf in the bowl–

The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia

Beside you…

What is all this?

I know how furiously your heart is beating.

My sister Wizzie once invented useful terms to describe social situations related to boredom.  “Bororalflatulence” (boring oral flatulence and yes, we like bathroom humor) is boring chatter that goes on endlessly. One can be subjected to another’s bororalflatulence, one can participate in it and still see no way of getting out, or one can be the sole source.  This last situation can lead to the second term:   “constaboreka” is the sudden realization of one’s own boringness.  This epiphany usually occurs mid-sentence.  The building block words are “eureka” and both “constant” and “constipated.”

I experience constaboreka when I think I’m talking to a dull person.  I assume my conversational partner doesn’t know or care about the difference between “fascinating” and “today I folded laundry,” and so I use the opportunity to blabber on and on until I notice stifled yawns.  It’s always a mistake to label someone boring.   A dull person may actually be an electric soul hampered by introverted or socially awkward manners.

A sense that feverish life pulses beneath even the dullest of persons and places was the reason I left Wallace Stevens’ “Gray Room” at the orthodontist office.  Dullness is positively viral at an orthodontist office.  (Perhaps Wizzie should invent a term for the contagion of boredom.)  One of the most boring spots on earth, and I include in that comparison the hardware store and theaters playing Last Year at Marienbad,  orthodontist offices are usually gray or beige, with stacks of dog-eared magazines that promise new new new and latest this latest that but prove stale and tedious.  People thumbing through those magazines rarely converse and avoid eye contact.

But reading this poem reminds me that if we only knew what everyone in the waiting room were thinking or had been through or were waiting for or dreaded or dreamed about, if all those thoughts zoomed our of our heads and zinged around the room, the beige office would rock like a nightclub.  Look, here comes sad-eyed Dr. B, our orthodontic Walter Mitty, bursting into the waiting room, twitching and thrusting in his gray trousers, growling out his suppressed desires.

The day I left Steven’s poem at Dr. B’s office also happened to be the day my daughter got her braces off.  This was one of the most anticipated events of her life so far.  Surely her heart was beating as furiously as the woman’s in the poem and surely there were other excited souls nearby.  But we all sat there like hungover frat boys in a lecture hall, slumping, silent, and hoping for a text message.   Had we only a poet to show us what was hidden, the time might have passed faster.

In Stevens’ “Gray Room” the poet’s careful examination of the room and the woman occupying it becomes an animating force that uncovers energy and color.  The gray room, dull at first, is actually decorated with tones of silver, white, green, red and yellow.  The woman too is not what she seems.  She moves the leaf with a single finger, lifts and drops her necklace.  Her languid movements signal more than boredom.  She is filling the room with her intense sensuality.  The organic materials Wallace mentions—straw, willow, leaf, forsythia—-highlight the throbbing life underneath her tedium.  Like those of us trapped in the orthodontist office, this woman is waiting for something.

My favorite line is the abrupt What is all this?  Stevens calls her out, in today’s lingo, on her pretense of ennui.   Wouldn’t it be astounding and marvelous for someone to walk into the waiting room and say that?  What is all this?  We look up from last month’s People magazine with our hearts beating furiously.  What does each of us answer?

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) must have known something about boredom, working as he did in the insurance industry.  His early ambition was to be a writer, but after a stint as a journalist, he went to law school.  He joined a law firm, left to work in insurance and eventually became vice president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company.  So there’s his gray room.  In his 3-piece suit he looks like a gray man, a softer Herbert Hoover, but looks, as we know, are deceiving.

I’ve never been fond of Stevens because his poems are too difficult for a lazy reader like me.  But this poem and two facts endear me to him:

1.  He seems to have dealt with a writing block that is usually the province of women writers. Parenthood made it hard to write, he said, and he stopped writing for nine years after the birth of his daughter Holly.  Some of his most important work was written after age 50. I do love a late-bloomer.

2.  When he first published poems he wrote under the name “Peter Parasol.”  Such a silly pseudonym for a man Harold Bloom has called “the best and most representative American poet of our time.”

Since I’m making lists, here’s another:

1.  Fun fact:  Stevens’ wife Elsie was the model for the face of the Winged Cap Dime, in use from 1916-1945.  (Roosevelt’s profile followed.)

2.  A less fun fact:  I’ve spent over forty hours of my life at this orthodontist office.  Four kids with braces times 1 hour each visit times an average of 6 visits a year times 2 years (minimum).   I could go on but yikes I’ve been struck by constaboreka.

The easiest poems to memorize were A.A. Milne’s from the wonderful When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.  Funny and sing-songy, his poems practically demanded memorization, like this, from “Disobedience”:

James James

Morrison Morrison

Weatherby George Dupree

Took great

Care of his Mother

Though he was only three.

James James

Said to his Mother,

“Mother,” he said, said he;

“You must never go down to the end of the town, if

you don’t go down with me.”

Fustier and less fun were Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems from Child’s Garden of Verses, but for some reason I still remember the first two lines of one of the poems.  And I never even understood it.  Maybe I just liked the imperative.

Fairy Bread

COME up here, O dusty feet!

Here is fairy bread to eat.

Here in my retiring room,

Children, you may dine

On the golden smell of broom

And the shade of pine;

And when you have eaten well,

Fairy stories hear and tell.

This is all by way of introducing the most adorable youtube video I have ever seen.  Here is a little boy—a three-year old little boy!—-reciting Billy Collin’s “Litany.”  What marvelous parents, to feed their son’s delight in the sounds and flow of language.

If you want to follow along the lengthy poem he’s memorized, click on the “add to” button.

Go ahead and listen—it could be the happiest 2 minutes of your day.  Here’s the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVu4Me_n91Y

poem is on marble pillar, left

The Weakness

By Toi Derricotte

That time my grandmother dragged me

through the perfume aisles at Saks, she held me up

by my arm, hissing, “Stand up,”

through clenched teeth, her eyes

bright as a dog’s

cornered in the light.

She said it over and over,

as if she were Jesus,

and I were dead. She had been

solid as a tree,

a fur around her neck, a

light-skinned matron whose car was parked, who walked on swirling

marble and passed through

brass openings—in 1945.

There was not even a black

elevator operator at Saks.

The saleswoman had brought velvet

leggings to lace me in, and cooed,

as if in the service of all grandmothers.

My grandmother had smiled, but not

hungrily, not like my mother

who hated them, but wanted to please,

and they had smiled back, as if

they were wearing wooden collars.

When my legs gave out, my grandmother

dragged me up and held me like God

holds saints by the

roots of the hair. I begged her

to believe I couldn’t help it. Stumbling,

her face white

with sweat, she pushed me through the crowd, rushing

away from those eyes

that saw through

her clothes, under

her skin, all the way down

to the transparent

genes confessing.

Scenes of impersonation are staples of both romantic comedies and action, thriller and suspense movies.  From Harry Potter to Mrs. Doubtfire, characters disguise themselves to get what they want, be it information, safety or love.  The danger of being unmasked keeps the scene racing forward and keeps me under a blanket.  I can hardly stand to watch as I wait for the inevitable slip in diction or hairpiece, the bosom to drop askew, the polyjuice potion to wear off.

Surely I’m not the only one who found Ron Paul’s glue malfunction more painful than amusing.  Maybe such scenes recall the angst of teenage years, years most of us spent at least some time pretending to be someone else, someone cooler, someone who knew where to find the top 40 radio stations because she really didn’t spend all her time listening to show tunes.  Years later, the shame and humiliation of being exposed aren’t buried very deep.

For instance, I walk through an expensive store like Saks (which I did when I left “The Weakness” the week before Christmas), and suddenly I’m a frousy mouse trying to act like a woman who buys $300 blouses.  You don’t belong here, I wait for the salesclerk to sneer. Poser.

The old Saks in Detroit, now gone

But that squishy discomfort was the worst that would happen to me, a decently dressed white woman in a predominantly white mall.   In this autobiographical poem, masquerading is far more dangerous and damaging.  Derricotte grew up in a middle-class black neighborhood in a segregated and racially tense Detroit.  Just two years before the incident in the poem, a race riot on Belle Isle left 34 dead, 25 of them black.  President Roosevelt had to call in 6,000 federal troops to end the violence.  So it was no small act of courage for Derricotte’s grandmother to walk into Saks like she owned it.

As a light-skinned black, Derricotte could “pass”  (a term we put in quotes because of its toxic suggestion that looking white is succeeding), and her grandmother demands she play along with the impersonation.  But the girl is terrified. Her grandmother’s act has turned everything topsy-turvy.  An old black woman becomes royalty in her fur collar and is deferred to by white salesclerks.  The white salesclerks, with their tortuous wooden collars, become slave-like, kneeling before young Derricotte as they lace up her velvet leggings.  One slip from the little girl and the jig is up.

The weakness in little Derricotte’s legs sets the scene in motion. But hers is not the only weakness in “The Weakness.”  The grandmother, who seemed strong as a tree trunk, is degraded and weakened by the poem’s end.  The last few lines are riveting:

Stumbling,  

her face white

with sweat, she pushed me through the crowd, rushing

away from those eyes  

that saw through  

her clothes, under

her skin, all the way down  

to the transparent  

genes confessing.

She had begun her walk through Saks like a deity.  All the religious imagery in the poem, familiar to the Catholic-schooled Derricotte, is associated with the grandmother.  She walks not on water but on swirling marble, something of a miracle in that time and place.   She speaks with the authority of Jesus and the anger of a punishing Almighty Father.  But in the end she’s a different figure altogether:  Christ at Golgotha, stumbling, de-frocked, exposed, humiliated by the crowd.

Just as Derricotte’s light skin gave her a passport to enter an unfamiliar white world, so the poem becomes a passport for a white person like me to enter an unfamiliar black one.  I worried over writing about this poem, writing about race, writing about black experience.  Once again, I felt like an imposter, stepping cautiously into alien territory.  But really, I don’t need to say anything profound.  The poem is so powerful I just need to open the door to it and stay out of the way

Toi Derricotte was born in Detroit in 1941.   As a young girl she spent a lot of time at the home of her paternal grandparents who ran a funeral parlor in their basement.  Interesting that another Detroit poet, Thomas Lynch, also has an imagination shaped by the funeral industry.

She’s a writer who gives hope to late-bloomers.  She began writing early at age ten, in secret, and finally at fifteen had the nerve to show her poems to an older cousin. He shut her down, told her that her poems were sick.  She didn’t show her work to anyone again till she was 27 and didn’t publish till she was 43.

Now she’s a widely-admired poet and teacher who has won, among other awards, two Pushcart prizes, a Guggenheim fellowship and two fellowships from the NEA.  She teaches English at the University of Pittsburgh and is the co-founder of Cave Canem, a writing retreat for black poets.

Her latest book, “The Undertaker’s Daughter” was published in 2011.

She never lost her friendly nature or her beauty, not through many years of chemotherapy, radiation, and personal tragedies.  Year after year on our annual high school girls’ weekend, my friends and I marveled at how great she looked and how she still kept generating fun.

Of course at the very end, cancer took its usual toll. As terrible as it was to see Christine’s brittle bones protrude from under her skin, it was worse to understand how much she was suffering and had been suffering for so long without complaining.

The second morning after she died, I woke up with a line of poetry in my head.  The lines are from a poem by Roethke, a poem I had read in passing a long way back and hadn’t thought of since.  And yet there it was, presented to me like a breakfast tray an unseen hand had set on my lap.  This is the thought I woke up with:

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones

That was Christine, lovely in her bones.  I hold onto that line when I think of her.  Loveliness in her bones, not cancer.  The poem gives back what cancer took away.  (You can read the entire poem here.)

R.I.P. Barb

Another poem has been floating around in my head since she died.  In this case, I knew the poem but not the particular lines.  I had to look it up.  The poem is “In View of the Fact” by A.R. Ammons.  Last January I had posted the last few stanzas in tribute to my friend Barb who died almost exactly a year before Christine.

I’m glad to have it in front of me again.  Even though the poem is written for an age group years ahead of mine, his words offer needed solace.

It may be long but it’s breezy.  If you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing, skim down to the last three stanzas.

In View of the Fact

by A. R. Ammons

The people of my time are passing away: my

wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who

died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it’s

Ruth we care so much about in intensive care:

it was once weddings that came so thick and

fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:

now, it’s this that and the other and somebody

else gone or on the brink: well, we never

thought we would live forever (although we did)

and now it looks like we won’t: some of us

are losing a leg to diabetes, some don’t know

what they went downstairs for, some know that

a hired watchful person is around, some like

to touch the cane tip into something steady,

so nice: we have already lost so many,

brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our

address books for so long a slow scramble now

are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our

index cards for Christmases, birthdays,

Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:

at the same time we are getting used to so

many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip

to the ones left: we are not giving up on the

congestive heart failure or brain tumors, on

the nice old men left in empty houses or on

the widows who decide to travel a lot: we

think the sun may shine someday when we’ll

drink wine together and think of what used to

be: until we die we will remember every

single thing, recall every word, love every

loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to

others to love, love that can grow brighter

and deeper till the very end, gaining strength

and getting more precious all the way. . . .

poem is on pillar at the bottom of the staircase

Town Water

by Michael Heffernan

There always ought to be a willingness

to receive the roadside’s offering of flowers

to be brought home and put in fruit-juice glasses

on the windowsill above the kitchen sink

so we can stand there and admire alien beauty

the like of which we imagine in a small way

while looking for a speck in a child’s eye

and noticing suddenly that ring of celestial blue.

I hope I used the correct graduation year

I knew just where to put a poem by Detroit native Michael Heffernan:  the entrance to University of Detroit Jesuit High School.  Heffernan attended U of D, just south of the infamous 8 Mile, an all-boy, racially-diverse Catholic institution and the oldest functioning school in Detroit.  There he wrote his first poem.  The poem grew out of homework assigned as punishment after one member of the class left a jock strap on the teacher’s chair.  Heffernan remembers only the beginning of the poem he wrote about the Maine coast—

The rock, untouched by human hands,

Away from all the other stands

but credits the wise punishment with opening his eyes to a career he had never before considered.

I had another reason for bringing Heffernan’s work back to his alma mater.  The school website doesn’t list him among its notable graduates.  That list is headlined by detective novelist Elmore Leonard and rounded out by the head of Google AdWorks and two NFL players.  I respectfully suggest that the winner the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence, two Pushcart prizes, three fellowships from the NEA, and the Iowa Poetry Prize, not to mention the writer of nine books of poetry, should be given his props.

Location fore-ordained, the question was, which poem from those nine books to use?  When a hometown boy makes good, you don’t want him showing up for the parade in a bathrobe.  I wanted to bring the best of Heffernan, but I also wanted him to be read by the students and teachers who passed by on their way home.  I needed a short poem, straightforward, with lots of white space—none of which characteristics are typical of a Heffernan poem.

Fortunately “Town Water” fits the bill, and even better, carries echoes which might be familiar to U of D students. The first line

There always ought to be a willingness

to receive the roadside’s offering of flowers

recalls the opening to William Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow” (a poem which also has four two-line stanzas):

So much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

Both declarations juxtapose grand pronouncements with the commonplace.

Everyone reads “The Red Wheelbarrow” in high school and most everyone thought it silly at the time—who cares about the dang wheelbarrow, says the teenager, most likely in saltier terms.  But more than a few people still remember, years later, that startling image of the white chickens standing next to a rain-glazed wheelbarrow.  So with “Town Water.”  Heffernan’s picture of flowers in a fruit juice glass on the windowsill above the kitchen sink shares the precision and delicacy of William’s imagery.

At the end of the poem comes another echo these U of D students might recognize, from the gospel of Matthew:

How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?

Heffernan’s poem turns that image on its head. The adult looking for a speck in the child’s eye is not, as in Matthew, overwhelmed by his own faults.  He’s overwhelmed by unexpected beauty.  The celestial blue of the child’s iris is a small beauty but startling, just like the alien beauty of the roadside flowers.  Both beauties are small replicas of a larger, unnamed beauty that we can’t fully imagine.  If ever we have hope of seeing such beauty, openness and willingness to see are required.  It’s what Wordsworth is talking about when he writes,

Come forth, and bring with you a heart     

That watches and receives.

Seasonally this poem may be inappropriate for a wintry Detroit landscape, but thematically it’s just right for a building that houses teenage boys.  The halls of U of D funnel boys through an awkward growth as they muscle their way to manhood.  Here they make mistakes, act inappropriately, stupidly sometimes and rude, but suffer silently too, and in dark moments wish they were home.  No less often they act kindly, show brilliance, make adults laugh.  It’s all there.  You just have to see the weeds as “roadside flowers” and be willing to put them in a vase as if they were roses.

My teenage son used to block me when I was rushing around the kitchen and give me a bear hug.  I’d try to cut it short but he’d hold on tight and say, half-teasingly, “Settle down there, Mother.  Someday this is all going to be gone and you’ll wish you had it back.”  How right he was, that far-sighted boy, now gone off to college.  What was I rushing for?  To put the rice in the pot?  To turn off the tea kettle?  Answer the phone?  Check my email?

And there was my gangly flower in the juice jar, saying, notice my alien beauty.

when it was more important to dream than clean my room

When I was a teenager, and like other teens suffering from an awkwardness in inverse proportion to my romantic longings, I liked to sit by the fire during the holiday season and listen to sad music till tears rolled down my cheeks.  It was great.  Certain inchoate desires—to live a happening life, to be loved by a boy, to be Mary Tyler Moore, to just, just experience something I didn’t know what, something beautiful and swooning—such feelings found release there in the darkened rec room with the fire crackling and popping and the scratchy Richie Havens album on the phonograph.  For a really good cry, Haven’s decidedly uncheerful “I Can’t Take it Anymore” was gentle medicine.

I still need a sad song around the holidays.  Listening to music that draws out tears is as beneficial as lancing a cut.  For a short four-tear cry I listen to Lizz Wright’s “Dreaming Wide Awake,” a beautiful and lush song well-served by its title.

For a lighter kind of melancholy, I turn to Wilco’s “One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend).”  Actually, it’s not just a holiday song for me; I’ve been listening obsessively since Wilco released their latest album in September.

The song is about a man struggling with memories of a difficult father.  The man’s dead father was a condemning sort who condemned the son for not believing in a condemning God.  Songwriter Jeff Tweedy explains the spiritual issue at the center of the song:  “Now he’s [the father] going to know he was wrong and that there is an only loving God.”  It sounds heavy in summary, but bouyant and rollicking to listen to.

Tweedy is a real poet if you ask me.  Certain lines in this song, like so many Wilco songs, have earned a life of their own.  They walk around quietly in my head like old people, wise and world-weary.  Here’s one:

What I learned without knowing

How much more I owe than I can give

And another:

I fell in love with the burden

holding me down

You have to listen to the lyrics in context, so I encourage you to link here.  Be sure you have 12 minutes to spare.  And another 12 minutes after that because you may want to listen again and allow a mood of pleasant melancholy to wash over you.  It’s just the loveliest loveliest song.

My husband and I are going to a Wilco concert this weekend and we’ll hear it live.  Surely we’ll have yet another conversation about the meaning of the lyrics.

Here they are:

This is how I’ll tell it

Oh, but it’s long.

One Sunday Morning

Oh, one son is gone.

Against the weather dawning

Over the sea

My father said what I had become

No one should be.

Outside I look lived in

Like the bones in a shrine

How am I forgiven?

Oh, I’ll give it time.

This I learned without warning

Holding my brow

In time we thought I would kill him

Oh, but I didn’t know how.

I said it’s your God I don’t believe in

No, your Bible can’t be true

Knocked down by the long lie

He cried I fear what waits for you.

I can hear those bells

Spoken and gone.

I feel relief I feel well

Now he knows he was wrong.

Ring ‘em cold for my father

Frozen underground

Jesus I wouldn’t bother

He belongs to me now.

Something sad keeps moving

So I wandered around.

I fell in love with the burden

Holding me down.

Bless my mind, I miss

Being told how to live.

What I learned without knowing

How much more I owe than I can give.

This is how I tell it

Oh, but it’s long.

One Sunday morning

One son is gone.

poem is on fence post

Delight in Disorder

by Robert Herrick

A sweet disorder in the dress

Kindles in clothes a wantonness;

A lawn about the shoulders thrown

Into a fine distraction;

An erring lace, which here and there

Enthrals the crimson stomacher;

A cuff neglectful, and thereby

Ribands to flow confusedly;

A winning wave, deserving note,

In the tempestuous petticoat;

A careless shoe-string, in whose tie

I see a wild civility:

Do more bewitch me, than when art

Is too precise in every part.

Poet Robert Herrick’s disheveled object of desire is my sartorial soulmate.  I’ve always thought a woman as loosely dressed as she is, with shoelaces flapping, ribbons untied, and underwear bunching out of a skirt—was more attractive than the starched and pressed variety.  Unfortunately, my own disorder in the dress is somewhat less bewitching than Herrick’s gal, and runs more along the lines of panty lines and perspiration stains. Herrick would have a time of it if he had to write a sonnet about my grooming habits.  Woman, get a hold of thyself!  he might begin.

To picture the dishabille of Herrick’s lady, a short tutorial on women’s fashions of the day might be helpful. In the early 17^th century, women’s clothing relaxed.  Stiff lace collars and heavy fabrics softened.  Wrists were visible through sleeves, and skirts were lifted, tied up with ribbons to show petticoats.  The stomacher was a panel in the center of a dress, from neckline to waist, holding the two sides of the dress together.  It was either sewn in or tied with criss-crossing ribbons.  The lawn was a fine linen put over the shoulders and tucked into a bodice to cover up décolletage to the degree a lady wished.

Although he’s too much a gentleman to come out and say it, here’s what Herrick is hoping for:  with the lace of her stomacher out of place and the lawn so carelessly thrown, he’ll get a good gander at her lady lumps.  Of course he says that much more elegantly.  In any age, even ours, wantonness sounds better than horny.

What’s interesting is that wantonness is kindled not in the poet or in the wearer of the clothing, but in the clothes themselves:

A sweet disorder in the dress

Kindles in clothes a wantonness

It’s as if the clothes act independently to seduce Herrick.  The lace enthralls, the cuff distracts, the ribbons are confused, the petticoat tempestuous.  Such a conceit avoids impugning the virtue of the lady and forms a defense as old as mankind:  Her clothes made me do it!

Most times when I poem-elf I have particular reason for matching poem to place.  Other times there’s no discernable connection:  the choice is instinctual, whimsical, hurried.  This posting fits into the second category.  I left “Delight in Disorder” on the fence post of an urban garden in Detroit’s midtown, a few blocks from the Detroit Institute of Arts.  It’s 2011 and Detroit is facing bankruptcy.  Why leave there a poem  about 17^th century ladies’ fashion written at the time Woodward Avenue was still an Indian trail and French explorers were giving Detroit its name?

The truth: I was rushing out the door and grabbed the poem from a pile (yes, I have piles of poems) for no reason other than it pleased me.  It’s a joyful expression of lust and beauty and art.  It’s lively and lovely.  It sparkles.   It’s a poem about imperfection that’s perfect in every way.

Lovely and sparkle and perfect aren’t words most folks associate with Detroit.  More likely, decay and blight.  Detroit is, after all, number one on CNBC’s List of 20 Cities You Don’t Want to Live In.  It’s a place to film post-apocalyptic movies.  Some see it as a modern-day ruin.  Photographers have flocked here to capture the city’s decline in surrealistic images.

But Detroit was once called “The Paris of the Midwest,” silly as that seems now.  And loveliness is still here, in parts, if you look for it.  For every ruin in Detroit, there’s an anti-ruin.  Midtown, for instance.  The DIA.  The Opera House, Fisher Theater and dozens of other architectural jewels.  Tree-lined neighborhoods. Restaurants new and trendy and restaurants ancient.  Ordinary people and glitzy ones, artists, dreamers, and good, kind people who won’t give up on the city they love.

Maybe if we borrowed a few terms from Herrick we could see Detroit in a different light.  Instead of urban decay, think wild civility.  Replace post-industrial ruins with a sweet disorder in the dress.  The suburbs, in comparison, seem too precise in every part, predictable and decidedly non-bewitching.

Not to get too precious about it.  People have to live here and no one wants to live in ruins.  Disorder is none too sweet when trash pick-up is unreliable and the building next door is abandoned and crumbling.  And the future surely does look bleak.  Without massive budget cuts and layoffs, Detroit will be out of money by April. Some of those laid off will be firefighters and police, and some of the cuts will be to the DIA and other cultural institutions.  State intervention seems likely.

Still, it never hurts to point out the lovely when you see it.  This hopeful little garden, unruly but productive, is a corner of the city worth appreciating.  Leaving the poem here was like reminding a blotchy-faced teen of the loveliness within, a loveliness that someday soon will show on the outside .

Robert Herrick (1591-1674) was born in London, the seventh child of a goldsmith.  When Herrick was still a baby, his father jumped out a window and died. (Early death of a parent is beginning to seem a pre-requisite for the poetic life.)  Herrick was apprenticed to a goldsmith but quit after six years.  He finished his education at Cambridge and took holy orders.  At late age of 39 he was assigned to a rural parish, and worked the rest of his life as a country parson.   I can’t find a good picture of him, but picture Gabe Kaplan of Welcome Back Kotter in breeches.

Herrick addressed 148 poems to various mistresses, but the consensus is that these women were fictional.  He never married and died unknown as a poet.  His poetry was resurrected in 19^th century, over one hundred years after his death, and today he’s widely read and anthologized.

Let’s hope Detroit’s resurrection happens a lot quicker.