“Requiem” concludes with the quasi-religious act of a woman kneeling in tears before an “awful beauty” and washing away the stain of death. This is the final cleansing. The poem began with a clear imperative—“Sing the mass— / light upon me washing words / now that I am gone”—and now the service has been concluded. The writer and the reader are bound together in this fierce and pressing chant for the dead.
Peter Everwine
* * *
“Aubade in Autumn”
(2007)
The title of Peter Everwine’s poem “Aubade in Autumn” seems reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’s “Auroras of Autumn.” The beautiful vowel blending, or diphthong (“Aubade in Autumn”), hits the authentic Stevensian note. There is a sense that feeling is discovering itself through sounds. Everwine’s late love poem is a dawn song set in what John Keats called the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (“To Autumn”), a Romantic lyric in the season of farewells. In an aubade the speaker is usually a lover who has parted from the beloved at daybreak.
Aubade in Autumn
This morning, from under the floorboards
of the room in which I write,
Lawrence the handyman is singing the blues
in a soft falsetto as he works, the words
unclear, though surely one of them is love,
lugging its shadow of sadness into song.
I don’t want to think about sadness;
there’s never a lack of it.
I want to sit quietly for a while
and listen to my father making
a joyful sound unto his mirror
as he shaves—slap of razor
against the strop, the familiar rasp of his voice
singing his favorite hymn, but faint now,
coming from so far back in time:
Oh, come to the church in the wildwood . . .
my father, who had no faith, but loved
how the long, ascending syllable of wild
echoed from the walls in celebration
as the morning opened around him . . .
as now it opens around me, the light shifting
in the leaf-fall of the pear tree and across
the bedraggled backyard roses
that I have been careless of
but brighten the air, nevertheless.
Who am I, if not one who listens
for words to stir from the silences they keep?
Love is the ground note; we cannot do
without it or the sorrow of its changes.
Come to the wildwood, love,
Oh, to the wiiildwood as the morning deepens,
and from a branch in the cedar tree a small bird
quickens his song into the blue reaches of heaven—
hey sweetie sweetie hey.
Everwine’s speaker is sitting quietly at his desk. He is not so much writing as listening. Coming from underneath the floorboards, as if from underground, the handyman, Lawrence, is singing the blues. The speaker can’t make out the words, “though surely one of them is love, / lugging its shadow of sadness into song.” That’s a good characterization of the blues feeling on a fall day in the early morning, especially for someone who has parted from his lover.
But here the poem turns, as if naturally, away from sadness, which, Everwine understands, will always shadow us. Instead the speaker summons the memory of his father singing. Thus, he self-consciously breaks from the bluesy sound to hit a more joyful note lifted out of memory. He is listening hard so that he can pick up the distant sound of his father singing as he shaved in the early morning. In a note about writing “Aubade,” Everwine said that everything shifted when his father suddenly entered the poem: “I had a counter-song where I could listen to his hymn and the undercurrent of blues in the same moment of time.” The speaker lets us hear, as he is also hearing, the intimate “slap of razor / against the strop” and “the familiar rasp of his voice / singing his favorite hymn, but faint now, / coming from so far back in time.”
The speaker is intentionally joining two different kinds of song, the hymn and the blues, and listening to them simultaneously. Both are his birthright. And he makes clear that the joy coming from the hymn is a secular joy; it has nothing to do with his father’s religious belief, though the song is called “The Church in the Wildwood.” The speaker is re-creating the sound of the words that are blasting out of memory:
Oh, come to the church in the wildwood . . .
my father, who had no faith, but loved
how the long, ascending syllable of wild
echoed from the walls in celebration
as the morning opened around him . . .
The ellipsis marks the way that the aubade breaks from the past and turns to the present. Attention to the sound of the words themselves shuttles the speaker back to the autumn day spreading out before him. The Wordsworthian memory alerts him to the present morning, which now opens around him in the garden:
the light shifting
in the leaf-fall of the pear tree and across
the bedraggled backyard roses
that I have been careless of
but brighten the air, nevertheless.
The l sounds lilt (“light,” “leaf-fall”), and the b’s connect “bedraggled” and “backyard” to the words “but brighten.” The phrase in the last line, “brighten the air,” recalls the marvelous line from Thomas Nash’s seventeenth-century poem “A Litany in Time of Plague”: “Brightness falls from the air.” As in Richard Howard’s poem “Elementary Principles at Seventy-Two” and Vijay Seshadri’s lyric “Aphasia,” the sounds of words themselves trigger the poet’s thought. For a moment, “Aubade in Autumn” becomes an ars poetica, a statement of the poetics that had been driving Everwine from his first two books of pure poetry, Collecting the Animals (1973) and Keeping the Darkness (1977): “Who am I, if not one who listens / for words to stir from the silences they keep?”
The poem identifies itself as an aubade because love is “the ground note.” Its speaker recognizes, with a wisdom derived from experience, that we cannot manage without love and must also suffer “the sorrow of its changes.” Thus, the hymn morphs into a secular love poem, but one that brings with it the joy of a father’s hymn. The word “love” is now added to the line from that hymn, and the long i is drawn out in the repetition of the word “wildwood” (“wiiildwood ”), thus emphasizing the uncontrollable wildness of love.
Come to the wildwood, love,
Oh, to the wiiildwood as the morning deepens,
and from a branch in the cedar tree a small bird
quickens his song into the blue reaches of heaven—
hey sweetie sweetie hey.
Though Everwine’s poem is a lyric of simple clarity, many songs come together in it: there is the song of the poet, an aubade; the song of the handyman, the blues; the song of the father, a hymn; and the song of the bird, a natural music. The poem is about singing. And all the songs unite in an informal sweetness and intimacy to form a contemporary pastoral lyric, which looks to nature for solace. It closes with what the poet takes to be the lovely vernacular sound of a small bird calling to its lost lover: “hey sweetie sweetie hey.”
Tony Hoagland
* * *
“Barton Springs”
(2007)
O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!” John Keats exclaimed in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey (November 22, 1817)—and that’s what came to mind when I read Tony Hoagland’s poem “Barton Springs” in Poetry magazine in July 2007. Hoagland tended to be a poet of thoughts rather than sensations, a postmodern ironist, a sassy, insightful social critic alert to the changing mores of late-twentieth-century American capitalism, and a tactician of the vernacular. Hidden depths of feeling underlay his poems, but his clever sendups of contemporary reality often obscured them. Veering between comedy and outrage, his edgy poems took aim at the omnipotence and inescapability of mass culture, which surrounds us
everywhere, like a sea.
Hoagland never lost his cutting-edge humorous skepticism, but over time a drift toward more expressive feeling became apparent in his poems. This was heightened as he grappled more and more openly with cancer. Great grief enters his poems about dealing with this disease, along with an increasing sense of gratitude for the fleeting temporal world. This poem, which puts me in mind of Maxine Kumin’s poem “To Swim, to Believe,” discovers an almost religious element in the act of immersion, the work of swimming itself.
Barton Springs
Oh life, how I loved your cold spring mornings
of putting my stuff in the green gym-bag
and crossing wet grass to the southeast gate
to push my crumpled dollar through the slot.
* * *
When I get my allotted case of cancer,
let me swim ten more times at Barton Springs,
in the outdoor pool at 6 AM, in the cold water
with the geezers and the jocks.
* * *
With my head bald from radiation
and my chemotherapeutic weight loss
I will be sleek as a cheetah
—and I will not complain about life’s
* * *
pedestrian hypocrisies,
I will not consider death a contractual violation.
Let my cancer be the slow-growing kind
so I will have all the time I need
* * *
to backstroke over the rocks and little fishes,
looking upwards through my bronze-tinted goggles
into the vaults and rafters of the oaks,
as the crows exchange their morning gossip
* * *
in the pale mutations of early light.
It was worth death to see you through these optic nerves,
to feel breeze through the fur on my arms
to be chilled and stirred in your mortal martini.
* * *
In documents elsewhere I have already recorded
my complaints in some painstaking detail.
Now, because all things are joyful near water,
there just might be time to catch up on praise.
Barton Springs Pool, which extends over a full three acres, is part of Zilker Metropolitan Park in Austin, Texas. It is fed from underground springs, and you can swim in it year-round. When I first read “Barton Springs,” I assumed it was a lyric about Hoagland’s experience of cancer, but in fact he wrote it a full decade before receiving his diagnosis. The imaginative impulse for the poem arose because his friend, the poet Jason Shinder, was sick with two different kinds of cancer. In 2006, Hoagland and his wife took Shinder for a swim at Barton Springs. The poem was born afterward.
“Barton Springs” consists of seven even-keeled quatrains. It’s odd to start a postmodern poem with an apostrophe to life, in the manner of an eighteenth-century allegory. Hoagland’s poem starts in the grand manner—“Oh life, how I loved your cold spring mornings”—but then the speaker brings it down to the quotidian, to dumping his stuff in a gym-bag and crossing the wet grass to the southeast gate, where he pushes a crumpled dollar through a slot. This sweet, funny scene has the texture of authentic daily life. That’s why it takes a moment for the past tense to register: “Oh life, how I loved your cold spring mornings . . .” At the literal level, the speaker is remembering a time when he went swimming every day. But the memory also suggests a sense of finality.
This finality is confirmed in the second stanza. There is a chilling inevitability to the line “When I get my allotted case of cancer . . .” Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Slumbersong” makes the same move: “When I lose you, someday . . .” But whereas Rilke wonders about his lover (“How will you sleep without me”), Hoagland lowers the temperature with a specific concrete wish: “let me swim ten more times at Barton Springs.” This quiet poise, this almost Zen-like quality of calmness—and the notable absence of hysteria—reveals a certain attitude about the future. The speaker knows the forecast is bleak, the darkest clouds are gathering, but nonetheless he wants to get in some swimming. Each of the first two stanzas consists of a single winding sentence and moves along steadily, like a swimmer doing a couple of laps.
Beginning with the third stanza, the sentences become jumpier and crisscross stanzas. Typically jokey, Hoagland lets his speaker comment jauntily on his future cancer, his bald head and “chemotherapeutic” weight loss; he seems determined not to complain. Notice the comic timing in the double pause (line break and stanza break) separating a possessive noun and its object in “and I will not complain about life’s // pedestrian hypocrisies.” The language becomes weirdly distanced as he jokes about “a contractual violation,” as if he had thought about taking death to court in a civil suit. But a subtle prayer is implicit in the lines “Let my cancer be the slow-growing kind / so I will have all the time I need . . .”
Hoagland captures the sensuousness of swimming in Barton Springs Pool. His discursiveness has always been image laden. We’re with the swimmer as he gazes upward through his goggles “into the vaults and rafters of the oaks” and moves through the water in the early morning light. Notice the push and pull in the language, the way the poem immerses us in the vital experience of swimming and then upends it with the witty image of being “chilled and stirred in your mortal martini.” The speaker’s cleverness here seems like a defense against what he is feeling.
The final stanza consists of two balanced sentences. First, the speaker pulls the language even further back to announce: “In documents elsewhere I have already recorded / my complaints in some painstaking detail.” That’s a deft, amusing way to describe earlier poems that complain about the unfairness of life. “Oh life!” Hoagland exclaims in his poem “Personal”: “Can you blame me / for making a scene?”
But as a poem “Barton Springs” takes one final turn. It comes down with fervent immediacy to the present moment: “Now . . .” There is also an argument developing here—“Now, because . . .”—which becomes an assertion of unadorned feeling, of joy: “Now, because all things are joyful near water . . .” This sounds almost like a religious axiom, suggesting baptism, purification by water. And then, with a full sense of the transitory nature of life, the speaker turns to praise: “there just might be time to catch up on praise.”
In the end, Tony Hoagland’s poem about swimming turns into a praise poem, a kind of lyric that restores us to the world again, to our good luck in being here. W. H. Auden once said that “every poem is rooted in imaginative awe.” “Barton Springs” is a poem of thoughts overcome and sensations realized. It carries its dark subject lightly, even buoyantly. And it was written just in the nick of time.
Philip Schultz
* * *
“Failure”
(2007)
There is something unflinching and remorseless, something almost helpless about the way that Philip Schultz keeps returning to the subject of his father’s funeral, one of the darkest moments in his past. He was eighteen when his father died in poverty. It seems he has never been able to shake his family’s immigrant story, his father’s complete inability to make a go of it in America. Schultz has said elsewhere that Samuel Schultz’s bankruptcy essentially killed him and rendered his wife and son destitute, financially and emotionally.
Schultz’s earlier elegy “For My Father” appeared in Poetry magazine in the late seventies. It had a Death of a Salesman quality, presenting the portrait of a man who was always tired at night, whose “vending machines turned peanuts into pennies,” and whose schemes never seemed to pan out. As the poet recalls it, “The morning his heart stopped I borrowed money to bury him / & his eyes still look at me out of mirrors.” Schultz was thirty-three when he wrote “For My Father”; he was sixty-two when he returned to his father’s funeral in “Failure,” a poem that took him three years to complete. This poem adds a humiliating fact: the son not only had to borrow money for the funeral but had to get it from the very peopl
e that his father was still indebted to.
Failure
To pay for my father’s funeral
I borrowed money from people
he already owed money to.
One called him a nobody.
No, I said, he was a failure.
You can’t remember
a nobody’s name, that’s why
they’re called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.
The rabbi who read a stock eulogy
about a man who didn’t belong to
or believe in anything
was both a failure and a nobody.
He failed to imagine the son
and wife of the dead man
being shamed by each word.
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 44
