Achilles slays the man who slew his friend, pierces the corpse
behind the heels and drags it
beyond the chariot like the cans that trail
a bride and groom.
The simile—dragging a corpse behind a chariot like a string of cans behind a wedding car—is purposely anachronistic and discordant. The tone is jaunty—everyone sits down to feast at a banquet, and the grief hasn’t really set in.
The second stanza turns to the second slaughter, the true subject of the poem: “The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief.” The entire stanza is one sentence long. It takes up the sacrifice of animals, a sacrifice that cannot appease or comfort Achilles, who is blinded by his own feelings. The speaker of this poem is first of all a reader, though in a recitation of the poem Perillo offhandedly mentioned that she was reading the Iliad for the first time. She was thus coming fresh to the twenty-third, penultimate book of the epic. Achilles, who is still out of his mind with grief, has heaped the flayed carcasses of sheep and cattle on the funeral pyre for Patroclus. He has set two-handled jars of honey and oil beside the bier “and then with wild zeal / slung the bodies of four massive stallions onto the pyre.” The image of the four horses heaved into the fire seems to shock Perillo out of the text she is reading. This leads to the structural turning point in her poem.
Formally, the first stanza of “The Second Slaughter” has seven lines, and the second six, as if something has been quietly cut off, foreshortened. It isn’t until the third stanza that we begin to see a pattern emerge: alternating seven- and six-line stanzas. This creates a kind of symmetry that is also slightly off balance. We can feel the rhythm caused by something imperceptibly being taken away, then added. The stanzas jump from one subject to the next, but the narratives accrue into the perpetual story of human cruelty to animals.
Like Natasha Trethewey in “Graveyard Blues,” Perillo signals the volta, or turn, in her poem by using the word “turn” itself: “And here I turn my back on the epic hero . . .” The speaker is closing the book in disgust because of its murderous, unappeasable hero. It fits with the subject of the poem that Perillo focuses on how Achilles slit the throats of two of Patroclus’s dogs but doesn’t mention the twelve “brave sons / of the proud Trojans he hacked to pieces with his bronze.” Perillo’s speaker intentionally mixes up the action of the Iliad with her experience of reading it. She banishes the hero from her presence with a certain arch formality: “Let him repent / by vanishing from my concern / after he throws the dogs onto the fire.” Achilles’s actions have become so real and repugnant to her that she can no longer bear to be in his presence: “The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.” She closes the Iliad for good and turns to the subject of two recent American wars.
The epic poem narrates a legend (“Whatever else the epic may have been,” the scholar M. L. Finley declares, “it was not history”), but the American interventions are unfortunately historical. Perillo had now found a place for her stanza related to the invasion of Iraq. The speaker of the poem is well aware that the larger, more newsworthy story about the burning of the oil fields does not affect her so much as the tale of the birds, which triggers her mournful imagination. It’s hard to shake the image of those birds “covered in tar,” the image that triggers one more conclusive turn in the poem.
The stanzas in Perillo’s poem tend to operate as paragraphs—they are all intact—except for this last one, which proceeds with an informal argumentative tone: “But once // I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals / my first lament. So now . . .” But the speaker doesn’t back down from her argument. Instead, she takes it underground. There is a highly self-conscious awareness in this poem that the first slaughter, the first lament, is usually reserved for human beings. Some people, like the man in Perillo’s last stanza (one can’t help but notice how definitively she specifies his gender), consider it “inhuman” to lament for animals before one grieves for other human beings. But Perillo sneakily, ironically, decides to “guard” her “inhumanity,” which she doesn’t believe is inhumane at all, by comparing herself to a jackal, who somewhat magically “appears behind the army base at dusk, / come there for scraps with his head lowered / in a posture that looks like appeasement / though it is not.”
Perillo told an interviewer that the jackal in the poem is based on a real one, from Jonathan Trouern-Trend’s book Birding Babylon, a soldier’s field notes and online journal from his two tours of duty in Iraq. What she picks up from the golden jackal is an attitude, a deceptive way of being, a posture. She too seems to be making concessions to a larger dictatorial power, an enforced morality. But she is not sorry; no, she is not at all sorry. Her resistance is evident. She is grief-stricken, clear-eyed, and empathic. And she memorializes the slaughter of the animals.
Michael Waters
* * *
“Old School”
(2010)
Michael Waters took the title for his tenth book, Celestial Joyride, from his poem “Old School.” The title puts together two words that make an unlikely match: “celestial,” a Latinate word with a sense of the divine, and “joyride,” a slang word with connotations of recklessness, of driving around dangerously. It has a jolt of lawlessness. The oxymoron of a divine joyride fits the character of the poem—and the book.
Old School
Seth wrestled the Camaro with one fist & popped
Handfuls of pills while the pistol rode on my thigh.
I shouted Is it loaded? over Grandmaster Flash.
Amateur thug, he slipped the piece into his boot
& swaggered like a bounder into the funeral home.
* * *
Sunglass’d still & jittery, he scanned the room,
Swept past uncles to the open coffin, knelt there,
Then wedged the gun between our father’s thumbs,
Insurance for the celestial joyride, & tattooed,
Pierced, & fucked up, bowed his shaven skull and wept.
“Old School” is a poem of reckoning. The title suggests an old-fashioned way of doing things, at one time considered the best and right way, which has now lapsed. How is that idea going to manifest itself here? One feature of this short poem is its tactical release of information, which heightens the drama. It unfolds quickly but carefully over the course of two five-line stanzas, presenting a terrifically compressed story in just ten lines. The capital letter at the beginning of each line, the poised free verse, a near iambic pentameter, and the well-conceived symmetrical structure all give the poem a feeling of formality. But the pacing, the jittery vernacular, and even the ampersands create a contrary feeling of haste and informality. As the two impulses jostle, they create a dynamic and purposeful tension.
“Old School” unfolds in the past tense and thus seems positioned as a memory. It starts off with what we may think of as a somewhat typical “joyride.” You could almost film the scene. It all happens fast, and we’re immediately thrust into the situation: there’s an out-of-control driver named Seth who “wrestled the Camaro with one fist.” The Camaro is a symbol of old school American muscle power. With his other hand, Seth is popping pills. At the same time, the speaker is nervously pressing Seth’s pistol under his thigh and shouting “Is it loaded? ” over the blasting music of Grandmaster Flash, that pioneer of old school hip-hop who made “scratching” popular in DJ-ing. The situation appears to be dangerous—a sketchy character zipping around with a skittish friend in what could be a stolen car. But at the end of the stanza we learn that this so-called thug, who, after all, is only just an “amateur”—in other words, not a true or professional thug—is entering an extremely unlikely place, a funeral home. That’s not where this joyride had seemed to be taking them, or us.
The next and final stanza consists of a single twisting sentence. The second line suggests that the two of them are going to the funeral of a relative, though it’s not until the end of the third line that we discove
r the surprising fact that the protagonists of the poem are brothers; the person who has died is their father. We also learn that one brother is putting the gun in their father’s hands for “insurance” on his ride into the next world. It’s an unlikely gesture. He is doing what he can for their father, who, he believes, just might need firepower for the journey after death. After all, he might be meeting up with some unsavory characters on the other side.
It’s not until the conclusion of the poem that we feel the genuine grief of a son, “tattooed, / Pierced, & fucked up,” over the death of his father, the parent he cannot really help but somehow still wants to protect by arming him. The unexpected way that Seth, seemingly so tough, suddenly breaks down catches us off guard and floods us too. A father has died, but this poem is not so much an elegy for him as a touching portrait of a screwed-up brother lost in sorrow. The grief of both brothers is unexpected and genuine. The outright expression of such grief is truly “old school.”
“Old School” is a dramatic monologue. It is so emotionally convincing that I initially took it as a straightforward if possibly exaggerated autobiographical story. But that was naive. Later, I discovered through an interview that Michael Waters is an only child. He got the idea for the poem from a time when his cousin, a prison guard in Ossining, who had been drinking, brought a gun to his own father’s funeral. Waters’s father, a former detective, figured out what was going on and got him to hasten his cousin out of the funeral home. That was in 1990. It lodged in the poet’s mind and eventually became the genesis of “Old School.”
Michael Waters has said that in the poem the speaker and his brother, Seth, seem like two versions of himself, a person who is somehow both reckless and responsible. He was split in two and still trying to figure out how to mourn his father, who died in 1993, when he wrote this poem seventeen years later.
Lucie Brock-Broido
* * *
“Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room”
(2013)
Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room” is the lead poem in Lucie Brock-Broido’s last book, Stay, Illusion (2013). It first appeared in The New Yorker under the title “The Noctuary.” The archaic word noctuary suggests a nightly journal, or a journal of nocturnal incidents, and this meaning continues to carry into the poem, which, in some sense, consists of a series of singular night statements, each an entry unto itself. But the revised title also has a richer, more Dickinsonian flair and suggests the majestic possibilities of an imagination that cannot be confined by a tiny space. It also has an overtone of the limitless imagination roaming free in the confined space of the body.
Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room
Silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.
If it is written down, you can’t rescind it.
Spoon and pottage bowl. You are starving. Come closer now.
What if I were gone and the wind still reeks of hyacinth, what then.
Who will I be: a gaudy arrangement of nuclei, an apple-size gray circle
On the tunic of a Jew, preventing more bad biological accidents
From breeding-in. I have not bred-
In. Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not
Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin.
The flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness.
Blue-footed mushrooms line the walkway to my door. I would as soon
Die as serve them in a salad to the man I love. We lie down
In the shape of a gondola. Venice is gorgeous cold. 3 December,
Unspeakable anxiety about locked-in syndrome, about a fourth world.
I cannot promise to say. The violin spider, she
Has six good eyes, arranged in threes.
The rims of wounds have wounds
as well.
Sphinx, small print, you are inscrutable.
On the roads, blue thistles, barely
Visible by night, and, by these, you may yet find your way home.
Brock-Broido followed a circuitous route in her poems, and each line in this mysterious summary is like a station stop on a secret journey. As in Michael Collier’s “An Individual History,” there is extra space between the lines, a strategy of lineation she probably borrowed from her friend the poet Henri Cole, who has made it one of his signatures. Here, the lines are almost all end-stopped, single sentences, or fragments of sentences. This gives each one the feeling of a solo journal entry. Yet taken together, these entries are also connected by an inner logic, an allusive set of associations that are not immediately clear. The poem establishes its own method and accrues meaning as it proceeds.
The first line marks the terrain of Brock-Broido’s baroque lexicon and strategic imagination: “Silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.” This refers to the “silk spool,” or elegant spiderweb, of a solitary as she “confects” or creates something elaborate, an exaggerated, perhaps even pathological story. This fragment points not just to the poem we are reading, but to the entire body of work that is being created by the recluse in her small room, a miniaturist’s space. She is weaving a story about herself that will eventually seem legendary. The word mythomania, which derives from the Greek mythos (“myth”) and the Late Latin mania (“insanity, madness”), feels ancient though it derives from the early twentieth century. So too Brock-Broido’s work can feel archaic while being utterly new.
The second line establishes the method of the poem and jumps from the third to the second person: “If it is written down, you can’t rescind it.” The speaker is talking to herself, positing and acknowledging that what is inscribed cannot be taken back. The implication is that she would continue to “rescind it,” whatever “it” is, if it were not written down. She is an endless procrastinator, a reviser, who continually rethinks what she has just said. The writing of the lines is thus a firm commitment.
As “Infinite Riches” continues, we come to understand it as a cryptic and elliptical self-portrait. Hence the third line where the speaker refers to herself, in a sort of nineteenth-century way, as someone who is perpetually hungry: “Spoon and pottage bowl. You are starving. Come closer now.” The italicized word emphasizes that the speaker is hungry right now—even as she writes this. Like a figure out of Dickens, she is alone with her “spoon and pottage bowl.” She may be anorexic, but she is also starving in a variety of ways, which includes being starved for company. After all, whom is she asking to “come closer now”? She seems to be talking to herself, but also to some unseen listener. The address creates a greater feeling of intimacy. The reader leans in.
This intimacy is intensified by the next question: “What if I were gone and the wind still reeks of hyacinth, what then.” The fact that this beautiful line ends not with a question mark, but a period, makes it seem rhetorical. The speaker is talking about her own mortality. The reference to hyacinth, an especially fragrant flower, brings to mind the figure in T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land”: “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; / They called me the hyacinth girl.” It seems relevant to invoke a woman speaking and remembering a long-ago time when someone gave her hyacinth flowers. Eliot’s disjunctive, collage-like method stands distantly behind Brock-Broido’s more personal lyric form. Here she seems to be asking what will happen if (and when) the fragrance of hyacinth outlasts her.
Now she wonders what will persist of her self after death: “Who will I be: a gaudy arrangement of nuclei, an apple-size gray circle.” She still retains some part of her gaudy self even as she has been reduced to an arrangement of “nuclei,” nothing more than a circle of ashes no larger than an apple. This leads to an association with her Jewish ancestry and a kind of joke about biology. We note too that these are the first lines in the poem that carry over to the next:
. . . an apple-size gray circle
On the tunic of a Jew, preventing more bad biological accidents
From breeding-in. I have not bred-
In. Each
child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not
Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin.
The comic thought about biblical clothing and ancestral “breeding” leads the speaker to make a more vexed statement about her own childlessness. Notice how she breaks up the line: “I have not bred- / In.” Associating more rapidly now, the speaker makes a large, quite marvelous statement about the unique light inside every young person: “Each child still has one lantern inside lit.” The word “still” suggests that children may once have had more than one source of light. No matter how many others have been extinguished, a single lantern, an old-fashioned type of light, continues to burn for each one. The sentence twists in such a way that it ends on the word “lit.” And this in turn is followed by a sort of prayer. There is a special emphasis on the injunction, the word “not”: “May the Mother not / Blow her children out.” The lantern has become a metonym for the spirit of the children. The speaker shows an awareness that the Mother is aging: “She says her hair is thinning, thin.” The speaker purposely capitalizes the word “Mother.” She also doesn’t say “my Mother” but “the Mother,” a larger, more representative or allegorical figure,
The poem continues to utilize a disjunctive method and moves to the garden outside: “The flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness.” The scene is bleak, a black flowerbed, but the speaker characterizes the emptiness of a garden in winter as “sumptuous.” She keeps finding words—“gaudy,” “sumptuous”—for her own method of finding “infinite riches” in an otherwise empty space.
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 46
