In the notes to Incarnadine, Szybist dedicates this poem to the poet Donald Justice, who died in 2004. He is the unnamed would-be addressee. The dinner that she refers to in the poem occurred on a lovely summer evening in the Northwest, which reminded her of a beautiful passage on mortality in Bede’s History of the English Church and People, which she also includes in the notes:
Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a lone sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you sit in the winter months to dine with your thanes and counselors. Inside there is a comforting fire to warm the room; outside, the wintry storms of snow and rain are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from wintry storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the darkness whence he came. Similarly, man appears on earth for a little while, but we know nothing of what went before this life, and what follows.
“On Wanting to Tell” begins with a dash, in a rush, almost offhandedly, in the middle of a conversation. The speaker is so eager to tell her dead friend about the adorable young girl so gleefully trying to eat the eyes out of dead fish that she just starts speaking to him, as if he were alive, as if she were calling him on the phone immediately after the dinner with friends. Then she is immediately brought up short, cut off.
The speaker turns to address her friend directly at the beginning of the second stanza: “You died just hours ago.” Perhaps she is reminding herself even as she is informing us. The friend has suffered a death so long and slow that it estranged reality, as if he had started looking at the world through a hallucinatory gauze. The images of fishermen swirling sequins and fishnets entangled in the moon refer directly to Justice’s last poem, “A Chapter in the Life of Mr. Kehoe, Fisherman” (2004), which envisions Mr. Kehoe dancing on the dock in moonlight with his eyes half-shut, dreaming.
The third stanza of Szybist’s poem refocuses the world in the present tense: “Now the dark rain / looks like dark rain.” It’s a kind of meditation on the limitations of metaphor and communication, an idea that echoes through this poem. The speaker keeps coming back to the strange truth that things are what they are; they are only themselves. This is partly sorrowful (she can’t forget that her friend has just died) and partly marvelous (the young girl has a feverish liveliness). The third stanza presents the scene in which everyone toasts the friend who has just died, while the young girl—“elfin, jittery as a sparrow”—hops from place to place joyfully, taking the eyes out of each and every fish. Whereas some children might shrink back from such a spectacle, this one embraces it.
The speaker in this poem finds it hard to give up her fantasy—she so much wants to go to her friend and revive him: “You must be a little alive still,” she says. She would love to put the little girl in her friend’s lap, to show how greedy the young girl is for life, how fearlessly she digs out the eyes of fish. In the penultimate stanza these eyes come to resemble the coins that were put under the tongues of the dead as payment to Charon, who would ferry them to the other world: “She is placing one on her tongue, / bright as a polished coin—” Perhaps the coin for the ferryman is the last remaining sliver of the great energy and appetite that we begin with as children.
The poem closes with a three-line stanza. First, the speaker talks directly to the girl: “What do they taste like? I ask.” She then describes the child: “Twisting in my lap, she leans back / sleepily.” The punch line belongs to the girl: “They taste like eyes, she says.” The girl simply refuses to describe the eyes as anything else but themselves. We don’t normally think of tasting eyes. What would they taste like? The fearless little girl has a very clear, almost magical answer. The world tastes exactly the way it does. It is what it is. It doesn’t represent something else.
Mary Oliver
* * *
“Lead”
(2005)
Mary Oliver was a devotional poet—her volume of selected poems is titled Devotions—who paid close attention to the natural world. She was a walker who daily applied the fifteenth-century French theologian Nicolas Malebranche’s maxim: “Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.” Or as she put it: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” Oliver was a religious poet with a light, nondoctrinaire touch, and there is a solitary, sacramental element to everything she wrote. Here is her imperative poem “Lead”:
Lead
Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
This short poem on the death of a loon stands beside Hayden Carruth’s poetic essay on the death of animals, but it also has a mythical quality that makes it kindred to Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s tragic goat-song. It takes its place with Oliver’s poems “The Loon” and “The Loon on Oak-Head Pond.” Oliver begins her poem as a storyteller placing a moral claim upon us: “Here is a story / to break your heart.” She is didactic and addresses the listener directly, one to one: “Are you willing?” The stakes are high. If you are willing to open yourself up to the story, she suggests, then you are simply going to have to have your heart broken.
The poem unfolds in one stanza, thirty short, crisp, and utterly clear lines. The two- and three-beat lines are shorter than iambic pentameter, the baseline of English prosody, and make you feel as if something has been cut or taken away. These lines isolate phrases and convey the information, piece by piece, dramatically, in time. The speaker seems calm, but the information is extremely upsetting. This is the anecdote she has come to tell you.
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
The unexpected phrasing at the end of this sentence—we usually expect things to die for a noticeable reason—puts additional emphasis on the word “nothing.” What the people on the shore cannot see is why these common loons, the so-called spirit of northern waters, are dying. Hence the title: at first it seems somewhat neutral but, in fact, ends up pointing to something toxic. In New England, lead poisoning is the leading cause of death for adult loons, who die from inadvertently ingesting lead sinkers and lead-headed jigs.
The speaker recounts a friend’s story of a single loon, interpreting its poignant cry as “the long, sweet savoring of its life.” She claims outright that anyone who has heard the loon knows that its cry is “a sacred thing.” If you haven’t heard loons, she suggests, you had better rush to the places where they still hide because their song may not exist for much longer. She cannot resist an editorial comment (“believe me, tell no one”) urging readers to safeguard the places where these birds still thrive. But then she returns to the primary anecdote of the poem.
Notice how Oliver carefully breaks the next sentence into six distinct lines:
The next morning
this loon, speckl
ed
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
First, she isolates the phrase “The next morning,” then she presses together three stressed words, “thís lóon, spéckled,” and carries over the line with two conjunctions, “speckled / and iridescent and with a plan,” thus stressing both the loon’s shimmering beauty and its utter practicality. She lays out the loon’s intention in two succinct lines: “to fly home / to some hidden lake.” But that wasn’t to be. Instead, the loon ends up dead. Notice how the last two five-syllable lines are balanced for effect (“to some hidden lake, / was dead on the shore”). The words “lake” and “shore” clinch the lines and echo each other, almost act like rhyme-words.
As an environmental poem with a purpose, “Lead” is quietly accusatory about how human beings interact with nature, how we fail to protect wild and endangered things—indeed, how we endanger them ourselves. Oliver frames this poem with a commentary both at the beginning and the end, returning now to explain precisely why, like the ancient mariner, she has collared us, why she has to tell each of us this heartbreaking story:
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
Oliver wants to break your heart, she says, not for its own sake, but for one reason only—so that it will “break open and never close again.” She is asking us to be porous, not just to pay attention to the environment, which we should and must do, but to open up and expose ourselves to the suffering of other creatures, and to the suffering world itself. We have started out listening to a story about loons and ended up opening our hearts to the rest of the world.
Anya Krugovoy Silver
* * *
“Persimmon”
(2005)
Anya Krugovoy Silver considered herself a poet of witness to the experience of chronic and terminal illness. She was pregnant when she discovered that she had a particularly rare and virulent kind of inflammatory breast cancer. She gave birth to her only son, Noah, had a mastectomy, and continued to teach literature at Mercer College in Macon, Georgia. Living with metastatic breast cancer also fueled and intensified her poetry. “My poetry got better,” she told an interviewer in 2010. “Nothing focuses your mind and helps you see clearly what’s important quite like cancer. It made me want to explore, even more, the beauty and divinity of the ordinary world.”
The rigors of treatment and a dark prognosis were two of Silver’s ongoing ordeals and subjects. She was a sufferer. But she was also a poet of desperate, tenacious Christian faith. She displayed a kind of God-hunger, a Christianity born of need. The poem “Persimmon” initially appeared in Image (2005), a journal of art, faith, and mystery, and found a context five years later in a section of poems about cancer in her first book, The Ninety-Third Name of God.
Persimmon
I place you by my window so your skin can receive the setting sun,
so your flesh will yield to succulence, lush with juice,
so the saints of autumn will bless your flaming fruit.
* * *
Because cancer has left me tired.
* * *
Because when I visit God’s houses, I enter and leave alone.
Not even in the melting beeswax and swinging musk of incense
has God visited me, nor when I’m bowed or kneeled or sung.
* * *
Because I have found God, instead, when I’ve crouched in bathrooms,
lain back for the burning of my skin, covered my face and cursed.
* * *
Persimmon: votive candle at the icon of my kitchen window,
your four-petaled stem the eye of God in the Temple’s dome,
tabernacle of pulp and seed,
dwelling place for my wandering prayers,
* * *
I am learning from you how to praise.
* * *
Because when your body bruises and softens, you are perfected.
Because your soul, persimmon, is sugar.
This poem fulfills Ezra Pound’s Imagist axiom—that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” The persimmon is a species of the genus Diospyros, and one folk etymology construes that Greek name as “divine fruit” or “God’s pear.” Silver’s sixteen-line poem begins with a simple act. The speaker talks directly to the persimmon as she puts it by the window. Like Mary Szybist, Silver seems especially attracted to apostrophe because of its resemblance to prayer. Notice how she purposefully repeats the soft sound of the letters c, s,and sh to bind the words together across all three lines:
I place you by my window so your skin can receive the setting sun,
so your flesh will yield to succulence, lush with juice,
so the saints of autumn will bless your flaming fruit.
She also opens the percussive c’s and the two u’s in the word “succulence” leading into the phrase “lush with juice.”
There is an argument developing and a religious vocation being implied here: “I place you . . . so your skin can receive”; “so your flesh will yield”; “so the saints of autumn will bless . . .” By deeming the simple passage of time “the saints of autumn” and characterizing the persimmon as a “flaming fruit” (a phrase that sounds as if it’s been lifted from the King James Version of the Bible), the speaker loads the evidence and builds her case. The lush, orange-colored persimmon becomes the exemplum of her religious quest, the object and repository of her terror and devotion.
In the next line, which is separated out and presented as a one-line stanza, she explains why: “Because cancer has left me tired.” This proposition represents an enormous leap—it’s not immediately clear why you would place a persimmon by the window because cancer has left you exhausted. It is as if the body of the fruit will somehow compensate the speaker for what is happening to her own body.
The rest of the poem will try to explain that action as a leap of faith. First, she states that God does not come to her in religious sanctuaries, where one would expect this to happen. He never comes to her in prayer. This is the second proposition of the poem:
Because when I visit God’s houses, I enter and leave alone.
Not even in the melting beeswax and swinging musk of incense
has God visited me, nor when I’m bowed or kneeled or sung.
God does not companion her in the house of worship. Note how the negatives build up—“Not even,” “nor when”—and the speaker represents herself as passive here; she does not bow, kneel, or sing; rather, she has been physically pushed down, used, forced into the position of a supplicant, “bowed or kneeled or sung.”
The third stanza also begins to clarify the structure of this short poem. Like a piece by Christopher Smart, that great, eccentric, half-crazed eighteenth-century religious poet of praise, the rest of this lyric is structured around anaphoric repetition, in this case, of the conjunction “Because.” Repeating the same word at the beginning of each line in a series is one of the key devices of religious poetry, especially in the Hebrew Bible, which stands behind Silver’s confessional lyric. Longinus considered it a key feature of the sublime. We have seen it used in remarkably different ways by Primo Levi, Philip Levine, and Harryette Mullen. In Silver’s poem, the repetition links the observations, which might otherwise seem disconnected. Each one is a sentence fragment, a large step in a spiritual argument and journey.
The poem turns in the fourth stanza to the decidedly unexpected and unsanctified places where the speaker actually does find God. This is the third and decisive proposition.
Because I have found God, instead, when I’ve crouched in bathrooms,
lain back for the burning of my skin, covered my face and cursed.
Notice the repetition of the hard c’s and r’s (“crouched,” “covered,” and “cursed”) and the doubling of
b’s (“back,” “burning”) in this forcefully closed couplet. It is not when she is praying but when she is physically humbled, radically reduced, that the speaker finds the God she needs. She found him not when she prayed, as one would expect, but only when she cursed—that is, said something damnable.
Now the speaker returns to address the persimmon directly again:
Persimmon: votive candle at the icon of my kitchen window,
your four-petaled stem the eye of God in the Temple’s dome,
tabernacle of pulp and seed,
dwelling place for my wandering prayers,
The language in this quatrain is lush, heightened, sacred, as the poet playfully applies an extravagant religious vocabulary to the persimmon’s natural color and shape (“votive candle,” “the eye of God in the Temple’s dome,” “tabernacle of pulp and seed”), thereby characterizing it as a sacred object, “a dwelling place” for her wayward prayers.
The next line stands alone as the penultimate stanza of the poem. A simple declaration, it states the purpose of the poem, which is the education of the speaker: “I am learning from you how to praise.” The final two-line stanza clenches the argument, biting down on the letter b and softening the mouth with the letter s:
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 41
