Poetry Will Save Your Life

by Jill Bialosky

  can a mother give her daughter but such

  beautiful rifts in time?

  If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.

  The legend will be hers as well as mine.

  She will enter it. As I have.

  She will wake up. She will hold

  the papery flushed skin in her hand.

  And to her lips. I will say nothing.

  * * *

  This poem, by the Irish poet Eavan Boland, articulates the umbilical bond between a mother and a daughter. It is an open-ended poem. Any mother can enter it, whether her child is alive or dead. It takes as its understory the myth of Persephone and Demeter, the mother who lost her daughter to the underworld and bargains her back for half the year. Even after a child dies, a mother continues to live her life through imagination. As each year passes, she thinks of her, of what age she’d be, imagining her among the girls she sees dressed in their school uniforms walking to school, or a girl walking hand in hand with a boy, wondering what she would look like, who she would become. “If I defer the grief, I diminish the gift,” Boland expresses, juxtaposing the mythic underworld with the world of the everyday—of Diet Coke and teen magazines and cable television. About this poem and motherhood, Boland writes: “Motherhood was central for me—I mean as a poet, as well as in every other way. ‘The Pomegranate’ came out of a series of realizations like that. And having said that, I don’t think I realized at the beginning how much the perspective of motherhood could affect the poem in strictly aesthetic ways. Take for example the nature poem: when I was young and studying poetry at University I had a very orthodox, nineteenth century view of the nature poem. That the sensibility of the poet was instructed in some moral way by the natural world. And it was an idea I just couldn’t use. I couldn’t get close to it. But when my daughters were born, that all changed. I no longer felt I was observing nature in some Romantic-poet way. I felt I was right at the center of it: a participant in the whole world of change and renewal. “The Pomegranate” is a sort of nature poem in that way—there’s a deeply seasonal aspect to the raising of children. And I wanted to write that.”

  * * *

  After a year passes, we decide to try to have another baby. When I become pregnant again it’s different. I’m apprehensive. I can’t quite take it all in. We take precautions. I’m on bed rest and am given a procedure to prevent premature labor. I am carrying a boy. Alone during the day, friends bring me muffins and coffee and stay for a bit to chat, but I can’t really pay attention. I’m already trapped in the otherworld, communing with my little boy. Judy, who comes to clean my house, helps me now with groceries and meals. As she is dusting the bedroom, she tells me that more than one clock in a room means death. There is an alarm clock propped on the nightstand like a little soldier of attention and on my bookshelf, a small Tiffany silver clock, a wedding gift commemorating the passing of time with elegant Roman numerals. I am propped on one side to keep the nutrients flowing for the baby and ask Judy to take the Tiffany clock and put it in the living room. Once she leaves and the apartment is quiet again, an ominous shadow descends, and the room darkens, though it’s not quite four. I am obsessed with my pregnancy. I look in the mirror when I get up to go the bathroom and worry that I am carrying small. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I was almost twice the size. The next morning, Judy tells me that boys carry differently than girls, but I don’t believe her. I call the doctor because now I think I don’t remember the last time I felt the baby move. I press my hand on the lower part of my abdomen to see if he will respond, but there is no movement. It all happens quickly. I’m in a cab, then the doctor’s office getting a stress test, and within the hour in the cool antiseptic operating room of the hospital being prepped for a C-section. It turns out that all the hours of lying on one side was futile. The baby isn’t getting enough nutrients and has to come out of the compressed womb of my birthwater into the light of day to grow in an incubator. It is too soon. My boy is born at twenty-six weeks. He’s so tiny you could hold him in one hand, and yet his features are unmistakably those of my husband’s. Within twenty-four hours, his kidneys fail him. “My sin was too much hope of thee,” writes Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, in this moving exploration of the loss of a son.

  ON MY FIRST SON

  Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

  Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

  My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.

  Seven years thou’wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

  Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

  O could I lose all father now! for why

  Will man lament the state he should envy?

  To have so soon ’scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,

  And, if no other misery, yet age?

  Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, “Here doth lie

  Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”

  For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such

  As what he loves may never like too much.

  One day or seven years. No matter. We’ve already imagined days in the park, a toddler tossing a ball, a boy on the living room rug playing with his trucks. “On My First Son” seeks meaning when no meaning is available. Perhaps we turn to poetry because it can fathom and hold the inexplicable, the gasp between words, the emotional hues impossible to capture in everyday speech or conversation. I can’t stop thinking about what Judy said. I take the Tiffany clock and put it in a drawer. I cannot look at it. Lines from Auden’s funeral poem, “Funeral Blues,” with its first line, “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,” take on more meaning.

  FUNERAL BLUES

  W. H. Auden (1907–1973)

  Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

  Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

  Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

  Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

  Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

  Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

  Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

  Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

  He was my North, my South, my East and West,

  My working week and my Sunday rest,

  My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

  I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

  The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

  Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

  Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

  For nothing now can ever come to any good.

  When the babies died I lost the ability to raise them, but I am still a mother. I have given birth to two children. For years, I burn with envy every time I see a newborn child. It is impossible to be around friends with young children without inhabiting the spaces where my own losses and desires lay. I wish I could be a better person and rise above it, but that kind of stoic grace is not available to me. It’s like being hungry all the time and never invited to the feast. When my third child is born full-term, healthy, from the gifted womb and dividing cells of another woman’s body, I can’t take my eyes off of him. When we bring him home, we have nothing. Not a crib, not a diaper, not a onesie or a bottle or a stroller. We are still living in the aftermath of ravaged promise. When we saw our son for the first time, my husband was convinced something was wrong with him, he didn’t seem to have a chin, until the doctor told us that no newborns have chins, that is how far away from hope we had traveled.

  When we finally bring our baby home, sorrow for the two children we will never see again and joy for the one secure in my arms are intertwined; they cannot be separated. There’s something else. My psyche will not quite allow itself to feel the happiness and love that is flooding through every cell in my body. I keep expecting something terrible to happen. Days pass. I feed and diaper, bathe and swaddle, but mostly spend hours watching him, his eyes closed like two little commas or upside down slivers of
moon. I like his solid weight in my arms. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I like the way his little fingers curl around mine. His hot-to-the-touch skin. I am selfish and voracious. I want to be the only one to hold him. It takes months before the fear of losing him goes away. Like the speaker in this magical poem by Sylvia Plath, I am a miner, excavating a rich new world, but always now with hesitation and awareness of life’s fragility.

  NICK AND THE CANDLESTICK

  Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)

  I am a miner. The light burns blue.

  Waxy stalactites

  Drip and thicken, tears

  The earthen womb

  Exudes from its dead boredom.

  Black bat airs

  Wrap me, raggy shawls,

  Cold homicides.

  They weld to me like plums.

  Old cave of calcium

  Icicles, old echoer.

  Even the newts are white,

  Those holy Joes.

  And the fish, the fish—

  Christ! they are panes of ice,

  A vice of knives,

  A piranha

  Religion, drinking

  Its first communion out of my live toes.

  The candle

  Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

  Its yellows hearten.

  O love, how did you get here?

  O embryo

  Remembering, even in sleep,

  Your crossed position.

  The blood blooms clean

  In you, ruby.

  The pain

  You wake to is not yours.

  Love, love,

  I have hung our cave with roses,

  With soft rugs——

  The last of Victoriana.

  Let the stars

  Plummet to their dark address,

  Let the mercuric

  Atoms that cripple drip

  Into the terrible well,

  You are the one

  Solid the spaces lean on, envious.

  You are the baby in the barn.

  * * *

  “Nick and the Candlestick,” its title mimicking a nursery rhyme, is personal, though it also carries biblical and universal overtones. Images of beauty, love, and resiliency reverberate in the lines. “You are the one / Solid the spaces lean on, envious. / You are the baby in the barn,” Plath writes, seeing within her own child infinity and grace. For her, and perhaps all mothers, this baby is a miracle, biblical, “the baby in the barn.” The poet is the “miner” exploring this new world of motherhood, awaking in the first light of a blue dawn to find her son in a “crossed position” in his crib. “Oh love, how did you get here,” she remarks. How is this miracle possible? “The pain you wake to is not yours,” the poem ends, prophetically aware of the history mothers pass on to their children.

  The poem becomes more poignant when we consider Plath’s history. Fifty some years ago she took her life in her flat in London at the age of thirty-one. Her children, Frieda, three, and Nicholas, barely one, slept in the next room. She stuffed towels underneath the space in the door, left milk on the table in the other room for them, knowing the nanny was on her way, and turned on the gas oven and lay her head inside. At the time she was separated from her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes, who was living with another woman. Plath, a young wife, was instrumental in placing her husband’s first book, The Hawk in the Rain, with a publisher in 1957, the year I was born. She typed out almost all of his poems and submitted them to a competition judged by W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore, where it was awarded the prize and published by Harper and Row. Together, they birthed two children and numerous collections of poems. Their work and their professional identity were intricately linked. The night Plath ended her life she had been lonely and perhaps still in love with her husband. It was a cold winter to be alone with two young children. Her mind that night got the better of her. In the months before Plath died, in the early hours of the dawn, she wrote several dozen of the most unforgettable and profound poems in the English language. “Nick and the Candlestick” is one of those poems.

  Perhaps anticipating her critics, she said of her poetics: “I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying—like madness, being tortured, this kind of experience—and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind. I think that personal experience shouldn’t be a kind of shut box and mirror-looking narcissistic experience. I believe it should be generally relevant, to such things as Hiroshima and Dachau, and so on.”

  Plath carried out her own dictum. The intensity of feeling she achieved in her work comes from her poetic control, intelligence, and bravery. Her mastery of metaphor—like the metaphor of the cave in “Nick and the Candlestick” that represents that deep and enclosed and hitherto unknown intimacy between mother and child—extends the poem into another realm. Plath seeks to universalize her experience, to in effect, impersonalize the personal. Some critics have denounced her poetics because of its elements of pathology and brutality. I find it impossible to question her poetic mastery.

  TERROR

  TRY TO PRAISE THE MUTILATED WORLD

  Adam Zagejewski

  One morning in early September I take the bus with my son to drop him off at school on 111th and Amsterdam. He is five years old with blond hair so fine it attracts static, and a personality that is alive, present, and engaged. We can barely walk down the street without him tugging my hand to stop at a shop window or hop up on a bench. When we ride the bus he’s looking out the window, watching the passersby. I drop him off at the bottom of the porch steps of his school and my heart catches when he stops before entering the building to wave goodbye. By eight thirty or nine, I’m at my desk at the publishing house office in midtown, drinking my first cup of coffee, starting up my computer when my phone rings. It’s my sister who works at a gallery uptown. “Are you OK?” She asks after my husband and then the phone goes dead. Outside my office door colleagues are congregating in the hallway. Something’s happening. I look out the window. Smoke envelops the blue sky. A colleague says something about a building collapsing downtown. A plane. Through the window, sirens blare and fire engines scream down Fifth Avenue. My husband’s office is across the street from the World Trade Center. The phone call from my sister clicks in. I begin to panic. I reach for the phone to call him. No signal. I go into the office across the hall to find out more about what has happened. A colleague is watching a report of the incident on his computer. Falling debris and flying paper swirl in the air. We see one tower collapsing, folding in on itself like an accordion. Flames and smoke form their own ghostly tower where the building once stood.

  Outside people are running and shoving. The city is in a state of panic. Colleagues pack up and vacate the office. I don’t know where my husband is but I know that if he’s OK I’ll find him at my son’s school, the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine, uptown. I walk down the flights of stairs, afraid to use the elevator, and follow the stampede heading up Fifth Avenue to escape the pandemonium of lower Manhattan. It is impossible to get a cab or get on a bus and for those moments it’s as if the city and its inhabitants are all one and the same. Then miraculously a cab filled with three other passengers stops and lets me in. One of the passengers says that the plane crash was intentional and a terrorist attack. I don’t know if this is true or not or what to think. Everything is happening in the moment.

  It seems like hours before we make it uptown and the cab drops me off on Amsterdam Avenue. I turn into the close of the cathedral, where hundreds of other parents have gone to fetch their children being let out to parents or caregivers on the porch of the school. Several parents of children of the school work in the towers and there is a strange hush about what’s happened so as not to scare the children. I spot my son’s blond head of hair shining in the sun, his navy blue pants and white polo shirt with the school emblem over his heart, and break into a sweat of relief. I s
weep him into my arms and hold him close. Minutes later, my husband arrives, we all embrace, and I break into tears. White powder from the dust of the tower is on his clothes. His face is ashen and he’s trembling. I’ve never seen him this way before. He witnessed the collapse of the first tower and saw people jumping out of the tower to escape the flames. Once he’s found us, he ushers us along, not wanting to linger, anxious to get us safely home. But is any one of us safe anymore?

  The sky on the Upper West Side, one hundred blocks away from the horrific assault is monstrously blue. The wind carries the whiff of death. The sounds of sirens blaring and ambulances ripping through the streets lasts throughout the rest of the day and night. Later we will learn that nearly three thousand innocent people were killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11, many of them men and women who did nothing that morning other than wake up and go to their places of employment. Fear has cast a pall over our city. Life will never be the same. I remember it all, and especially the relief I felt when I saw the blond head of my son, and minutes later my husband hurrying up the close. Thirteen days after the attack, The New Yorker printed “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” in its pages.

  TRY TO PRAISE THE MUTILATED WORLD

  Adam Zagajewski (1945–)

  Try to praise the mutilated world.

  Remember June’s long days,

  and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.

  The nettles that methodically overgrow

  the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

  You must praise the mutilated world.

  You watched the stylish yachts and ships;

  one of them had a long trip ahead of it,

  while salty oblivion awaited others.

  You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,

  you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.

  You should praise the mutilated world.