The Hide-and-Seek Muse, page 18
Hadas’s poem “Hugger Mugger Road,” below, recounts with formal dexterity the disorderly, muddled, “hugger mugger” path she traverses with her husband after his illness becomes known to them. The poem—which affects the reader with the force of Hadas’s memoir, writ small—evokes with humor, dignity, despair, guilt, uncertainty, and courage the corrosive erosions of dementia. Although the disease is ubiquitous (facts support that the dementias are prevalent—5.4 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s, according to the Alzheimer’s Association), there is absolutely nothing commonplace about the individual stories of those affected by it, as Hadas’s memoir and moving poem (“So long as I am sentient—then our son— / You won’t have disappeared without a trace”) attest.
Hugger Mugger Road
i On the Road
He walked into her room (she was in bed)
and tried to drape a blanket over her head.
“That’s the last straw!” the Director cried.
No; one more step on Hugger Mugger Road,
not first, not last. I follow in his wake.
He strides, then slows. The final goal will take
how long to reach? Oh do not estimate.
So zigzag is the path that its few straight
stretches seem deceptive. So stand still.
The road is winding, but it’s all downhill.
What’s the hurry? This is not a race.
Sometimes I feel sunlight on my face
and rest a little, shift the heavy load
as he and I proceed down Hugger Mugger Road.
ii The Thirty-Sixth July
Unlikely now, that first remote July
when we met and everything aligned
to fuse two ways to one trajectory.
It might have been sheer happenstance, the blind
bumping of spheres. We didn’t need to know.
A path had opened up, so on we strode,
swathed in the safety of our ignorance.
I scrambled to keep pace on the long road.
Call us two children, each with a good mother.
Two teachers – lucky mutuality,
each of us bringing something to the other.
Fast forward to this anniversary.
The weight has shifted. Mine is to remember,
report, interpret for you, and translate;
to hold onto some sense of who you were;
to reminisce and laugh and mediate.
A heavy vessel balanced on my head,
I must walk slowly so as not to spill,
crossing each threshold at a stately pace.
It’s you I carry, so I must stand tall.
So long as I am sentient—then our son—
You won’t have disappeared without a trace.
This morning I climbed from the box of dream
still hearing your voice,
witty and urgent as you used to be.
Many nights lately I have heard you speak.
How natural—you have things to say to me.
Everything is fine. And then I wake.
iii The Book of Days and Nights
Look after what you wrongly think’s your own.
Sad castle, no foundation, in the sky.
Hope? Patience? Flip the pages with your thumb.
Youth and beauty ride the IRT.
House in a hollow; a deep bowl of light.
Flip the pages: anger, grief, and loss.
Sleeping in a shadow bed each night,
I am dowered with a silent ghost.
One thing has changed lately: now I ride
the subway north, get out at a new station.
Gratitude, weariness, uncertainty:
the book has ample room for variation.
iv To Reconcile the Raspberries
Where this path goes I know.
How long, and winding how, there is no telling.
Nor is there ever any turning back.
The pace varies: slow to very slow.
Wait, whose path? I seem to have forgotten.
His or mine?
Can I step off to the side,
let him trudge on alone?
Can I say in tomorrow’s light
yet again “This episode is over,”
this incident,
this latest misdemeanor from last night?
Garden, heat lightning, crescent moon—not mine.
Where the track’s rough, I teeter to and fro.
Does he recognize you?
That question comes over and over again.
So many questions. Answers? I can say
another morning will come. That I know.
I do not know how to reconcile ripe raspberries
with this long winding way.
Here is the hammock slung in its old place
between two trees. Our son hung it there
for me. Oh stillness, oh pine-scented air!
But how to reconcile a dream of rest
with the long road? The hammock in my mind
I can lie down in, I can sway and read.
The raspberries are hanging velvet ripe.
Not a breath of wind.
v On the Beach
I and our son are bouncing up and down
in shallow surf and batting back and forth
the only topic all this gold and azure
boils down to, the old question
to which there is no answer, though we toss
the ball of speculation to and fro.
Here he is now – how could I not have seen him?
Tall sea creature, unspeaking,
smiling a little, bouncing in the waves
along with us, leaping and lithe, his silence
lost in the splash and spray
as the shriek of a child is covered by a gull’s cry.
Parallel to the horizon, this strip of sand
has no beginning and no end.
George Edwards passed away in October 2011; a moving tribute to him by Edwards and Hadas’s son, Jonathan Hadas Edwards, can be found at http://www.rachelhadas.com/Rachel_Hadas/In_Memoriam_George_Edwards.html.
CLAUDIA EMERSON
Ephemeris
The household sells in a morning, but when
they cannot let the house itself go for
the near-nothing it brings at auction,
the children, all beyond their middle years,
carry her back to it, the mortgage now
a dead pledge of patience. Almost emptied,
there is little evidence that she ever
lived in it: a rented hospital bed
in the kitchen where the breakfast table
stood, a borrowed coffee pot, chair,
a cot for the daughter she knows, and then does not.
But the world seems almost right, the near-
familiar curtainless windows, the room
neat, shadow-severed, her body’s thinness,
like her gown’s, a comfort now. Perhaps
she thinks it death and the place a lesser
heaven, the hereafter a bed, the night
to herself, rain percussive in the gutters—
enough. But like hers, the light sleep of spring
has worsened—forsythia blooming
in what should be deep winter outside
the window—until it resembles the shallow
sleep of a house with a newborn in it,
a middle child she never saw, a boy
who lived not one whole day (an afternoon?
an evening?) sixty years ago in late
August. And as though born without a mouth,
like a summer moth, he never suckled
and was buried without a name. She had waked to that—
that cusp of summer, crape myrtles’ clotted
blooms languishing, anemic, the cicadas
exuberant as they have always been
in their clumsy dying.
This middle-born
is now the nearer, no, the only child.
The undertaker’s wife has not bathed
and dressed him; the first day’s night instead
has passed, quickening into another
day, and another, and he is again awake,
his fist gripping a spindle of turned light,
and he is ravenous in his cradle of air.
Perhaps because we abide in bodies, which themselves provide a kind of ambivalent shelter, houses make emotionally and somatically charged images. As Gaston Bachelard puts it in The Poetics of Space, “Our house is our corner of the world …. it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.” In Claudia Emerson’s “Ephemeris” (the title denotes both an accounting of astronomical bodies and the fleeting transience of vanishing), the contents of an elderly dying woman’s house have been sold, and she has been moved out, presumably to a nursing home or hospital. However, when the woman’s grown children “cannot let the house itself go for / the near-nothing it brings at auction,” they “carry her back to it.” There, on a hospital bed in unfurnished rooms, in a “light sleep” state between waking and sleep, ebbing life and incipient death, the old woman dredges up from the deep well of her experience a memory of a child she once had who died shortly after being born:
A middle child she never saw, a boy
who lived not one whole day (an afternoon?
an evening?) sixty years ago in late
August.
With her gift for uncanny image-making (as Charles Simic says, the image is the closest thing poets have to working wordlessly, as in painting or photography or film), Emerson creates a terrifying, even sublime sense of her subject’s Dickinsonian “nearness to her sundered things,” hauntingly evoking what it might be like to be on the cusp of being unhoused.
It is always unsettling to feel out of synchronicity with the weather or a season, literally or figuratively. Classic examples are, of course, phenomena like holiday depression—the grief and vexation of being sad amidst predominant festivity—or the experience of the ecstatic, newly married couple who step beaming out into the world despite a cold, glowering, unrelenting wedding day storm. The dying must perforce feel dissociated from the living realm, and for Emerson’s subject this sense is certainly exacerbated by the “almost emptied” house, “where there is little evidence that she ever / lived in it: a rented hospital bed / in the kitchen where the breakfast table stood, a borrowed coffee pot, chair, / a cot for the daughter she knows, and then does not.” The emptied house is so surreal, in fact, that the speaker speculates that the dying woman might think “it death and the place a lesser / heaven.” Also disturbing is the way in which, outside, it is a restive, preternaturally early spring, rather than a season that might more closely resemble the dying woman’s condition. A quenching rain is “percussive in the gutters” and “forsythia [blooms] / in what should be deep winter.” And surely this edgy sense of internal and external weathers being slightly off (“until it resembles the shallow / sleep of a house with a newborn in it”) contributes to the unbidden memory of the lost child:
… And as though born without a mouth,
like a summer moth, he never suckled
and was buried without a name. She had waked to that—.
Suddenly, it is no longer the early spring of the poem’s “real time” or the symbolic winter of her dying, but again that late summer, that August long ago, “that cusp of summer, crape myrtles’ clotted / blooms languishing, anemic, the cicadas / exuberant as they have always been / in their clumsy dying,” when her own body lost irrevocably what it had for nine months housed.
With the return, the restoration, of the lost child, the narrative of the poem pivots and intensifies, and time collapses and blurs. With a clear nod to Dickinson (“the first day’s night instead / has passed, quickening into another / day, and another”), a poet also capable of finding language for the ephemeral passages and wages of dying, Emerson makes the lost child, who has already crossed over into death, “the nearer, no, the only child.” He is again “awake, / his fist gripping a spindle of turned light, / and he is ravenous in his cradle of air.” The literal house disappears, is irrelevant, and the dying woman, about to be parted from her body, awakens at the last to its purpose. She is once again a young mother who must rise in the night and feed her voracious child. She is her own last house (Bachelard says that “all really inhabited space bears [its] essence”). She is her own final sustenance and her own hunger, and the power she must confront, unnamed but wielding its scepter/scythe of light, is ephemeral and implacable.
MEGHAN O’ROURKE
In Defense of Pain
So now the sleighs have slid away
and the ice on the trees cracks,
sharp champagne pops, toasts
silenced by the snow-bound woods.
Half asleep beneath an eiderdown
stitched with dawn-red-thread,
you are in a painting, walking the high slopes
of a mountain
above the timberline.
Even as you climb you are turning past the overlook.
None of us can see the switchbacks as we rise.
Below, the forest shudders in wind.
You have been here before,
in this painting, on this gray-green rock,
staring across the valley—
For years, you thought there was a door
on the other side, a sky scrap,
redbirds and red cedars and more—
now you see the door
is the scar of a bulldozed home:
the red earth ugly
on the mountainside, a scalp
bleeding from a sore.
Does that mean you won’t
come here anymore?
A few years ago, when I was seeing a hand specialist for some temporary nerve damage, the intake nurse would point at each visit to a chart on the wall that showed a series of ten round Emoticon-type faces lined up below a numerical scale marked from one to ten. At the “one” end of the spectrum, a green orb grinned happily, but at “ten” the accompanying visage was scarlet and contorted. Even with prompting (is it throbbing? pulsing? burning? more like a stabbing?), I often found it difficult to “rank” my pain, and even harder to put a description of it into words.
I am not alone. In The Body in Pain, a definitive study of physical pain and its language, Harvard professor Elaine Scarry writes that “physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.” And responding to Virginia Woolf’s complaint about the scarcity of literary representations of pain (“The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to explain a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry”), Scarry goes on to say that “even the artist—whose lifework and everyday habits are to refine and extend the reflexes of speech—ordinarily falls silent before pain”—pain whose sources are somatic and emotional, even existential.
This is not the case in Meghan O’Rourke’s “In Defense of Pain.” Readers familiar with O’Rourke’s poems, essays, and reviews, which appear regularly in places like The New Yorker, Slate, Poetry, The New Republic, and the New York Times, will already know that there would seem to be no challenging subject beyond the reach of her eloquent and questing intelligence, be it horse-racing, bullying, gender bias in literary culture, or prevailing trends in marriage and divorce. Over the past two years, O’Rourke has published a number of essays about the processes of grief and bereavement inspired by the untimely death of her mother by cancer on Christmas day 2008. A memoir, The Long Goodbye, recounts her experience.
“In Defense of Pain” would appear to begin in winter, at the start of a new year:
So now the sleighs have slid away
and the ice on the trees cracks,
sharp champagne pops, toasts
silenced by the snow-bound woods.
The lines that immediately follow—“Half asleep beneath an eiderdown / stitched with dawn-red thread”— at first read like a further description of those snow-bound woods, but into this quiescent scene of aftermath and hush the poet introduces a subject, a “you,” who, it turns out, is asleep beneath the eiderdown and who is, surreally, also “in a painting, walking the high slopes of a mountain / above the timberline.” Is this a dream?
It doesn’t matter. Like Emily Dickinson, O’Rourke’s sister poet of the wake of grief and the experience of pain (“‘Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch, / That nearer, every Day, / Kept narrowing it’s boiling Wheel / Until the Agony // Toyed coolly with the final inch / Of your delirious Hem”), O’Rourke is unafraid to use pronominal slippage (at one point “you” becomes “us” and “we,” and of course the poem is haunted by an “I” who is clearly conflated with / disassociated from the “you”) and distortions of time and place (“You have been here before” and “For years you thought there was door” and “now you see the door”) to speak her truths. There are frames within frames, doors within doors of perception here, and “we” are implicated in this journey into the deepest reaches and sources of anguish.
This territory above the switchbacks and the overlook is not new (“You have been here before / in this painting”). Perhaps it is the ontological terrain of our human exile from paradise, Adam (“man of the red earth”) and Eve’s imagining of some sort of escape from their travail, an instinct intuited from childhood. “For years,” the poet tells us, we’ve stared at the other side of a valley where we thought there was a door and something on the other side of it [heaven (“a sky scrap”?), the natural world going on without us (“redbirds and red cedars and more”)?]. Deeply into her reverie, the difficult climb, the you has an epiphany:
