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Three Valentines to the Wide World
I
The child disturbs
our view. Tow-head bent, she
stands on one leg and folds up the
other. She is listening
to the sound of her fingernail on a scab on
her knee.
If I were her mother I would think right now of the
chastening
that ridiculous arrangement of bones and bumps must go
through,
and that big ear too, till they learn what to do and hear.
People don't perch like something seen in a zoo
or in tropical
sections of Florida. They'll have to buy her
a cheap violin if she
wants to make scraping noises.
She is eight years old. What in the
world could she wear
that would cover her hinges and disproportions?
Her face is
pointed and blank, the brows as light as the
hair.
"Mother, is love God's hobby?" At eight you don't
even
look up from your scab when you ask it. A kid's squeak,
is
that a fit instrument for such a question?
Eight times the seasons
turned and cold snow tricked
the earth to death, and still she
hasn't noticed.
Her friend has a mean Dad, a milkman always kicks
at the dog, but by some childish hocus-pocus
she blinks them
away. She counts ten and sucks in her cheeks
and the globe moves
under the green thumb of an Amateur,
the morning yelp, the crying at
recess are gone.
In the freeness of time He gardens, and to His
leisure
old stems entrust new leaves all winter long.
Hating
is hard work, and the uncaring thought is hard;
but loving is easy,
love is that lovely play
that makes us and keeps us? No one answers
you. Such absurd
charity of the imagination has shamed us, Emily.
I remember now. Legs shoved you up, you couldn't tell
where the
next tooth would fall out or grow in, or what
your own nose would
look like next year. Anything was possible.
Then it slowed down, and
you had to keep what you got.
When this child's body stretches to
the grace of her notion,
and she's tamed and curled, may she be free
enough to bring
mind and heart to that serious recreation
where
anything is still possible--or almost anything.
ii
I have
never enjoyed those roadside overlooks from which
you can see the
mountains of two states. The view keeps generating
a kind of pure,
meaningless exaltation
that I can't find a use for. It drifts away
from things.
And it seems to me also that the truckdriver's waste
of the world
is sobering. When he rolls round it on a callus of
macadam,
think how all those limping puppydogs, girls
thumbing
rides under the hot sun, or under the white moon
how all those
couples kissing at the side of the road,
bad hills, cat eyes, and
horses asleep on their feet
must run together into a statement so
abstract
that it's tiresome. Nothing in particular holds still in
it.
Perhaps he does learn that the planet can still support life,
though with some difficulty. Or even that there is injustice,
since he rolls round and round and may be able to feel
the
slight but measurable wobble of the earth on its axis.
But what I
find most useful is the poem. To find some spot
on the surface and
then bear down until the skin can't stand
the tension and breaks
under it, breaks under that half-demented
"pressure of
speech" the psychiatrists saw in Pound,
is a discreetness of
consumption that I value. Only the poem
is strong enough to make the
initial rupture,
at least for me. Its view is simultaneous
discovery and reminiscence. It starts with the creature
and
stays there, assuming creation is worth the time
it takes, from the
first day down to the last line on the last page.
And I've never
seen anything like it for making you think
that to spend your life
on such old premises is a privilege.
iii
Your yen two
wol slee me sodenly;
I may the beautee of hem not
sustene.
-Merciles Beaute
When, in the middle of my life,
the earth stalks me
with sticks and stones, I fear its merciless
beauty.
This morning a bird woke me with a four-note outcry,
and
cried out eighteen times. With the shades down, sleepy
as I was, I
recognized his agony.
It resembles ours. With one more heave, the
day
sends us a generous orb and lets us
see all sights lost when
we lie down finally.
And if, in the middle of her life, some
beauty falls on
a girl, who turns under its swarm to astonished
woman,
then, into that miraculous buzzing, stung
in the lips and
eyes without mercy, strangers may run.
An untended power--I pity her
and them.
It is late, late; haste! says the falling moon,
as
blinded they stand and smart till the fever's done
and blindly she
moves, wearing her furious weapon.
Beauty is merciless and
intemperate.
Who, turning this way and that, by day, by night,
still stands in the heart-felt storm of its benefit,
will plead
in vain for mercy, or cry, "Put out
the lovely eyes of the
world, whose rise and set
move us to death!" And never will
temper it,
but against that rage slowly may learn to pit
love
and art, which are compassionate.
The Gentle
Snorer
When summer came, we locked up our lives and fled
to
the woods in Maine, and pulled up over our heads
a comforter filled
with batts of piney dark,
tied with crickets' chirretings and the
bork
of frogs; we hid in a sleep of strangeness from
the human
humdrum.
A pleasant noise the unordered world makes wove
around us. Burrowed, we heard the scud of waves,
wrack of
bending branch, or plop of a fish
on his heavy home; the little
beasts rummaged the brush.
We dimmed to silence, slipped from the
angry pull
of wishes and will.
And then we had a three-week
cabin guest
who snored; he broke the wilderness of our rest.
As
all night long he sipped the succulent air,
that rhythm we shared
made visible to the ear
a rich refreshment of the blood. We fed in
unison with him.
A sound we dreamed and woke to, over the
snuff
of wind, not loud enough to scare off the roof
the early
morning chipmunks. Under our skins
we heard, as after disease, the
bright, thin
tick of our time. Sleeping, he mentioned death
and
celebrated breath.
He went back home. The water flapped the
shore.
A thousand bugs drilled at the darkness. Over
the lake a
loon howled. Nothing spoke up for us,
salvagers always of what we
have always lost;
and we thought what the night needed was more of
man,
he left us so partisan.
Woman Waiting
Over
the gray, massed blunder of her face
light hung crudely and
apologetic sight
crossed in a hurry. Asking very little,
her
eyes were patiently placed there.
Dress loved nothing and wandered
away
wherever possible, needing its own character.
Used to
the stories, we wise children
made pleasant pictures of her when
alive, till
someone who knew told us it was never so.
Next,
wisely waited to see the hidden dancer,
the expected flare leaping
through that fog
of flesh, but no one ever did.
In a last
wisdom, conceived of a moment
love lit her like a star and the star
burned out.
Interested friends said this had never
happened.
Death by Aesthetics
Here is the doctor, an
abstracted lover,
dressed as a virgin, coming to keep the tryst.
The patient was early; she is lovely; but yet
she is sick, his
instruments will agree on this.
Is this the place, she wonders,
and is he the one?
Yes, love is the healer, he will strip her bare,
and all his machinery of definition
tells her experience is
costly here,
so she is reassured. The doctor approaches
and
bends to her heart. But she sees him sprout like a tree
with
metallic twigs on his fingers and blooms of chrome
at his eye and
ear for the sterile ceremony.
Oh tight and tighter his rubber
squeeze of her arm.
"Ahhh" she sighs at a chilly touch on
her tongue.
Up the tubes her breath comes crying, as over her,
back and breast, he moves his silver thumb.
His fluoroscope
hugs her. Soft the intemperate girl,
disordered. Willing she lies
while he unfolds
her disease, but a stem of glass protects his
fingertips
from her heat, nor will he catch her cold.
He
peels her. Under the swaddling epiderm
her body is the same blue
bush. Beautiful canals
course like a postcard scene that's sent him
often.
He counts the tiptup, tiptup of her dutiful
valves.
Pain hides like a sinner in her mesh of nerves.
But
her symptoms constellate! Quickly he warms
to his consummation,
while her fever flares
in its wick of vein, her wicked blood
burns.
He hands her a paper. "Goodbye. Live quietly,
make some new friends. I've seen these stubborn cases
cured with
time. My bill will arrive. Dear lady,
it's been a most enjoyable
diagnosis."
She clings, but her fingers slip on his starchy
dress.
"Don't leave me! Learn me! If this is all, you've
swindled
my whole booty of meaning, where is my dearness?
Pore
against pore, the delicate hairs commingled,
with cells and
ligaments, tissue lapped on bone,
meet me, feel the way my body
feels,
and in my bounty of dews, fluxes and seasons,
orifices,
in my wastes and smells
see self. Self in the secret stones I
chafed
to shape in my bladder. Out of a dream I fished
the ache
that feeds in my stomach's weedy slough.
This tender swelling's the
bud of my frosted wish.
Search out my mind's embroidery of scars.
My ichor runs to death so speedily,
spit up your text and taste
my living texture.
Sweat to hunt me with love, and burn with
me."
But he is gone. "Don't touch me" was all he
answered.
"Separateness," says the paper. The world, we
beg,
will keep her though she's caught its throbbing senses,
its
bugs still swim in her breath, she's bright with its
plague.
A Relative and an Absolute
It has been cool
so far for December, but of course the cold
doesn't last long down
here. The Bible is being fulfilled so rapidly
that it looks like it
won't be long until Jesus will come in
the air, with a shout, and all
those who have accepted Jesus as
their own personal Saviour will be
caught up to meet him
and then that terrible war will be on earth.
The battle of
Armageddon. And all the unsaved people will have to go
through the great tribulation. Hope you are both well.
Bye.
An aunt, my down-to-earth father's sibling, went to stay
in Texas, and had to continue by mail, still thanklessly,
her
spiritual supervision of the family.
Texas orchards are fruitful.
A card that would portray
this fact in green and orange, and even
more colorfully say
on its back that Doom is nearly upon us, came
regularly
at birthday, Easter and Christmas--and sometimes
between the three.
That the days passed, and the years, never
bothered her prophecy;
she restressed, renewed and remailed its
imminence faithfully.
Most preaching was wrong, she felt, but
found for her kin on Sunday,
in one voice on one radio station, one
truth for all to obey.
Salvation being thus limited, it seemed to
me
there was something unpleasant about that calm tenacity
of
belief that so many others would suffer catastrophe
at any moment.
She seemed too smug a protegee.
Otherwise, I rather liked her.
Exchanging a recipe
or comparing winters with neighbors, she took
life quietly
in a stuffy bungalow, among doilies of tatting and
crochet.
She had married late, and enjoyed the chance to baby
a husband, to simmer the wholesome vegetables and see
that
vitamins squeezed from his fruit were drunk without delay.
Though
she warned of cities and churches and germs, some modesty
or
decorum, when face to face with us, wouldn't let her convey
her
vision of Armageddon. But the postcards set it free.
It was
hovering over the orange groves, she need only lay
her sewing aside,
and the grandeur and rhythm of its poetry
came down and poured in
her ear, her pencil moved eloquently.
She wrote it and wrote it.
She will be "caught up," set free from
her clay
as
Christ comes "with a shout in the air" and trumpeting angels
play,
and "the terrible war will be on earth" on that
Judgment Day,
expecting all those years her extinction of body
would be
attended by every creature, wrapped round in the tragedy
of the world, in its pandemonium and ecstasy.
When she died
last winter, several relatives wrote to say
a kidney stone "as
big as a peach pit" took her away.
Reading the letters, I
thought, first of all, of the irony,
then, that I myself, though
prepared to a certain degree,
will undoubtedly feel, when I lie
there, as lonesome in death as she
and just as surprised at its
trivial, domestic imagery.
A Kind of Music
When
consciousness begins to add diversity to its intensity,
its value is
no longer absolute and inexpressible. The felt variations
in its
tone are attached to the observed movement of
its objects; in these
objects its values are embedded. A world
loaded with dramatic values
may thus arise in imagination;
terrible and delightful presences may
chase one another
across the void; life will be a kind of music made
by all the
senses together. Many animals probably have this kind of
experience.
--Santayana
Irrelevance characterizes
the behavior of our puppy.
In the middle of the night he decides
that he wants to play,
runs off when he's called, when petted is
liable to pee,
cowers at a twig and barks at his shadow or a tree,
grins at intruders and bites us in the leg suddenly.
No
justification we humans have been able to see
applies to his
actions. While we go by the time of day,
or the rules, or the notion
of purpose or consistency,
he follows from moment to moment a
sensuous medley
that keeps him both totally subject and totally
free.
I'll have to admit, though, we've never been tempted to say
that he jumps up to greet us or puts his head on our knee
or
licks us or lies at our feet irrelevantly.
When it comes to loving,
we find ourselves forced to agree
all responses are reasons and no
reason is necessary.
Excerpted from Selected Poems by
Mona Van Duyn
Copyright 2002 by Mona Van Duyn. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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