by Robin Morgan
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Death Benefits
Poems
Robin Morgan
for Florika Remetier 1946–1979
Contents
Publisher’s Note
Death Benefits
Battery
Birthright
Peony
About the Author
Publisher’s Note
Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.
But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, “Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page.” Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?
In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.
But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.
Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s “Disclaimer” as it appears in two different type sizes.
Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of “Disclaimer,” you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading “Disclaimer” on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead” is a complete line, while the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn” is not.
Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.
Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.
Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.
DEATH BENEFITS
What might I do to get beyond
living all these lives of quiet
courage too close for comfort
to endurance or mere suffering
or graceless martyrdom—all of which
equal cowardice: the unsaid, undone, unheard,
unthought of, and undreamt undoing of what
I’ve undeniably understood
this undertaking would unfold
or even (unconventionally) unify?
“Leave your loved ones
fixed for life,” the saying goes—and stays.
Life insurance and death benefits
are what a sensible person hopes for.
Meanwhile, Denial
leaks from our containment vessels
and passes through the doors and walls
of houses, flats, lungs, conversations,
an odorless, tasteless, non-discriminating
equal opportunity destroyer,
the blinded head proud in its even,
ceaseless, swivel.
Is it Denial then I follow in a burst
of irritation with my own obsessive focus
on one subject: this man, this woman, their
tiresome and pretentiously embattled love?
Others are aging and dying, sharing a crisis
of energy, sickening, telling kind lies,
outgrowing commitments, not getting involved.
Others, long starved into hatred, are killing
still others with the death benefit that reassures
them they are not merely part of a tactical phase.
Others glide through back alleys, blunted
triangles of shadow, movable famines, bolts
of coarse cloth whispering How disrespectful
to god it would be to appear
out in public not wearing scar tissue.
&nbs
p; Besides, it’s protective, they add, turning
away. Why is that swivel familiar?
How can Denial deny coexisting
with the fiddlehead fern even as it exudes
its own Bach Air for cello too loud
for our ears? Or, wordless, deny
how a cat celebrates its own tongue
with each sauve coral yawn? Still,
before Affirmation becomes a denial
remember that this time cat, frond, and
melody too will be forced
to share benefits deadly as our own
denial of what they have never protested to be
their own innocence—too pure for that.
Which is not a disclaimer. I too have had policies,
kept up my payments, gone veiled, benefited
from death—and denial of death.
And thought of cashing it in, more than once,
really fixing my loved ones for life,
escaping now, here, eluding what’s due to me
anyway on its maturity, swiveling once and for all
beyond any benefits I could accrue
through denial of what is denied to be life.
To deny that insurance, of course, breaks
the scar tissue open, leaking what we yet could
say, do, hear, think of, understand, dream
from the containment, leaking a different
radiance over bared heads.
What might I do then to get beyond
dying so many lives of affirming Denial?
Who is this figure I swivel behind like a shadow?
Who are the woman and man I’m being drawn back to—
again, the flaw here, the fall now, the original
schism, the atom entire?
Policies lapse. Nothing is sure
any longer. That fact alone is
a renegade benefit, something like grace,
green, mimetic, audacious—daring to bleed,
sing, embrace simply each other, to find
in those arms a planet entire, swivelling up
at us its azure, full face,
blinking new eyes, yawning into a loud
rain of relief to be home. Almost as if,
this late, unveiled and forgiven, even
Denial might weep again. And if not here,
where, you ask; if not now, when? Oh my dear,
who am I to deny?
BATTERY
The fist meets the face as the stone meets water.
I want to understand the stone’s parabola
and where the ripples disappear,
to make the connections, to trace
the withholding of love as the ultimate violence.
Battery: a word with seven letters, seven definitions:
1) Any unit, apparatus, or grouping
in which a series or set of parts or components
is assembled to serve a common end.
2) Electrical. One or more primary or secondary cells
operating together as a single source of direct current.
3) Military. A tactical artillary unit.
4) A game position. In baseball, the pitcher
and catcher together.
5) Law. The illegal beating or touching of another person.
6) Music. The percussion instruments of an orchestra.
7) Optics. The group of prisms in a spectroscope.
I want to understand the connections
—between the tower where Bertha Mason Rochester
is displayed to Jane Eyre as a warning
—with this place, this city my doorstep
where I’ve learned to interfere between
the prostitute’s scream and the pimp’s knife
is to invite their unified disgust.
I want to understand the components:
—the stone’s parabola, the percussion instruments,
the growth of battered children into battered wives
who beat their children,
—the beating of the fallow deer in Central Park Zoo
by unknown teenage assailants,
—the beating of these words against the poem:
to hit, slap, strike, punch, slash, stamp,
pound, maul, pummel, hammer, bludgeon, batter—
to hurt, to wound,
to flex the fist and clench the jaw and withhold love.
I want to discover the source of direct current,
to comprehend the way the primary or secondary cells
operate together as that source:
—the suburban community’s defense of the fugitive Nazi
discovered to be a neighbor,
—the effect of her father’s way with women
on the foreign policy of Elizabeth Tudor,
—the volunteers for a Utah firing squad,
the manner in which kwashiorkor—Red Johnny,
the Ghanaians call this slow death by starvation—
turns the hair of children a coppery color
with the texture of frayed wire.
I want to follow the refractions of the prism:
—the water’s surface shuddering in anticipation
of the arching pebble,
—the oilslick mask imposed on the Pacific,
—the women of the Irish peace movement accused
of being traitors to tactical artillery units on both sides,
and replying, “We must accept that
in the next few months we will become their targets.”
—The battering of dolphins against tuna nets,
—the way seloscia, a flower commonly known
as coxcomb, is bulbous, unpetaled, and a dark velvet red—
and always reminds me of a hemorrhaging brain.
The danger in making the connections
is to lose the focus,
and this is not a poem about official torture
in Iran or Chile or China, or a poem about
a bald eagle flailing its wings as it dies,
shot down over Long Island.
This is a poem called “Battery” about a specific woman
who is twelve-going-on-seventy-three and who
exists in any unit, grouping, class, to serve a common end.
A woman who is black and white and bruised all over
the world, and has no other place to go
—while the Rolling Stones demand shelter
—and some cops say it’s her own fault for living with him
—and some feminists say it’s her own fault for living with him,
and she hides her dark red velvet wounds
from pride, the pride of the victim,
the pride of the victim at not
being the perpetrator,
the pride of the victim at not knowing how
to withhold love.
The danger of fixing on the focus
is to lose the connections, and this is a poem
about the pitcher and the catcher together:
—the battery of Alice Toklas, conversing cookbooks
with the other wives while Gertrude Stein shared her cigars
and her ideas with the men,
—the sullen efficiency of Grace Poole,
—the percussion of my palm striking my husband’s face
in fury when he won’t learn how to fight back, how to outgrow
having been a battered child, his mother’s battered wince
rippling from his eyes, his father’s laborer’s fingers
flexing my fist, the pitcher and the catcher together
teaching me how to withhold love;
the contempt of the perpetrator for the pride of the victim.
The collaboration, the responsibility, the intimate
violence, the fantasy, the psychic battery, the lies,
the beating of the heart.
To fear, to dread, to cower, cringe, flinch,
shudder, to skulk, to shuffle.
Wing-beat, heart-beat,
the fist meets the face as the stone displaces water,
as the elbow is dislocated from the socket
and the connections shatter from the focus;
—the knifeblade glimmers in the streetlight;
—it could be a drifting eagle feather
or cigar smoke rising
graceful as a doe who leaps in pain,
rising livid as a welt, livid as a consciousness
of my own hand falling to dispense
the bar of soap, the executioner’s axe, the tuna nets,
the rifles, and at last the flint
for Bertha Mason Rochester to strike,
to spark the single source of direct current,
to orchestrate the common end emprismed
in the violent ripples of withheld love.
Batter my heart, seven-petaled word, for you
as yet but flower inside my brain;
that I may understand the stone’s parabola,
make the connections, remember the focus,
comprehend the definitions,
and withhold nothing.
BIRTHRIGHT
Bringing what could not be borne to birth—
her heart’s decision, reached above your head
indifferent to your wish, but tangled as a myth
wound round your throat insistent with her blood—
surely the hardest of all her simple choices
was this mere waiting until it was too late.
Remember her dreams baring their teeth? her voices
counseling death? You’ve shared them since, a birthright.
Yet whatever hatred husbanded her will,
that will is yours. Whatever love accedes
accedia, however at home your hell
or lost your bearings, let your death recede
in fear of such raw labor, laugh, and learn
how to let what never can be borne be born.
PEONY
What appears to be
this frozen explosion of petals
abristle with extremist beauty
like an entire bouquet on a single stem
or a full chorus creamy-robed rippling
to its feet for the sanctus—
is after all a flower,
perishable, with a peculiar
history. Each peony
blossoms only after
the waxy casing thick around
