I’m still thinking about poetry, poems, and, of course, me. I began re-reading some old favorites, just to see what would happen. And it happened – they invited me to leave the literal, and I followed.
There are poets whose works stop me, create that desire to slow down. Poems I come back to. Ones that took my breath away more than 20 years ago, and still do. I cannot get enough of W. H. Auden’s Funeral Blues, and I’d happily sit through countless viewings of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” just for another chance to hear it spoken with the combination of a British accent and perfectly-captured lovers’ grief.
When I was pregnant, I bought a book of 100 poems, touted as the 100 best poems to memorize. I read them aloud, to my belly. I even had a little headset and a speaker that I placed on my ever-growing abdomen, to broadcast the words above my whooshing, noisy interior. My baby would hear not just my voice, but the voice of poetry. I read Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Blake, Dickinson, Cummings – I recited slowly, with perfect enunciation, sonnets and love poems and even a few diversions, such as Jabberwocky, which I’m not sure I’ve ever understood fully. I couldn’t resist the cadence, the lilt, the sense that my unborn child and I could share a wry smile at the pure loveliness of made-up language. We still do. I still cannot read these lines with a downturned mouth:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
and the mome raths outgrabe.
Repeatedly I came back to The Road Not Taken, awash in the narcissistic resonance of a first-time pregnant woman, feeling as if I was the first person ever to be pregnant, the first woman ever to become a mother, despite the billions of women who have done this before me and who continue to bear children. I was choosing a path that would cleave my life in two, stepping one foot in front of the other, knowing I would never come back to the woman I was before I was a mother. I broadcast Frost’s stanzas along with my tears and the raw terror of not knowing what was ahead for either of us.
I read poetry, for myself and for my as-yet-to-be. I read fluffy poems and new-age essays on motherhood, made sure to absorb the compelling female voices of Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and Adrienne Rich. I read poetry and literature and studiously poured over a book about prenatal yoga to avoid “What to expect when you’re expecting,” or newspaper articles on conjoined twins (an attempt to surgically separate a modern-day set was being publicized widely), both of which instilled disgust and horror in broad daylight, let alone in the numerous nighttime awakenings, the green digital clock face piercing the pitch black, the alienation of a non-pregnant partner’s undisturbed slumber.
I even re-read Ronald Wallace, a poet I learned of when I took an undergraduate poetry class. I will never know if it’s Wallace’s poetry that got under my skin, the happy title of the volume (Tunes for Bears to Dance To), or if the only reason I go back to this work is because it reminds me of the poetry professor. To this day, I come back to two poems, one by a Beat poet I can never remember, since it’s not Ginsberg or Ferlinghetti; one by Cummings. They are favorites. They convey not only what I think the poets originally tried to express, but the mists of what the poems meant to me. I was once adored by a lover who gifted beautiful love poems to me, inscribing his own love notes underneath, professing, “Love as it will always be.” I was his muse, he my adorer; sometimes we switched roles, and I adored him and set him as my muse. Yet that love is gone, most of my memories of the lover are gone. If I met the former lover now, in his early 60’s (I just did the math, and am not pleased to have come up with that number), there would only be the faintest, faded spark, the remaining light long after a star has burned out. He and I never made a life together, not really; we just loved, from two lives that would never be one. I am in my current life, with my current love, muse and adorer to one another in our current iterations of our selves, in a conjoined life. I don’t wish to live on any other star than the one I’m on.
Maybe we all reread favorite poems because they remind us of our previous selves – confirm that we were once the people we were when we first read them; or of a previous lover – who made us feel that for just this instance, we inspired ardor; or of a previous time or place in the world. Or perhaps certain poetry is pure grace, which lures our savage and hurting hearts back to the fleeting possibilities of transcendence.
somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
-E .E. Cummings (1977). Selected Poems, 1923-1958.
NY: Faber.
I Am Coming
I am following her to the wavering moon,
to the bridge on the far waterfront
to valleys of beautiful arson,
to flowers dead in a mirror of love,
to men eating wild minutes from a clock,
to hands playing in celestial pockets,
and to that dark room beside the castle
of youthful voices, singing to the moon.
When the sun comes up she will live at a sky
covered with sparrow’s blood
and wrapped in robes of lost decay.
But I am coming to the moon,
and she will be there in a musical night,
in a night of burning laughter,
burning like a road of my brain
pouring its arm into the lunar lake.
-Philip Lamantia (1967). Selected Poems,1943-1966.
San Francisco: City Light Books