The Hide-and-Seek Muse, page 7
you did not understand my critique as servitude.
I was merely asking to be put into your employ.
I happen to like your mud-wash eyes. The mean
bags beneath your eyes. The jitter your hand does.
I don’t actually care about anything but that.
Everything’s been lousy since I left. Someone
smashed my car window just for the hell of it.
I am constantly harassed by thoughts of you.
I have made a poor investment in real estate.
When you took me out into your back yard
and showed me the koi pond you’d filled with
cement, it made me sad.
Then you said you could bring it back.
Cate Marvin’s “Let the Day Perish” situates itself, from the speaker’s first boastful line (“I was meaner than a flimsy dollar the change machine refuses”), in the centuries-old tradition of seduction ballads, and her ambiguously gendered narrator plays with stereotypes of the bad stranger, the reckless itinerant, the rogue passing through, the rake.
That third word, “meaner,” announces from the get-go the poem’s two principle economies—literal and emotional impoverishment, fecklessness and cruelty. But this poem means to be more than a stock tale of a seduction gone predictably wrong (the “perish” of the title derives from the Latin perire: per—detrimentally, ire—to go; that is, to go badly). The luring and deed are over in the second and the third quatrains. Addressing the “you,” the speaker says that I
Bade you come over. Covered your hand with mine.
Bade you lay down. Stroked your neck, allowed your story.
Bade you pull my body down. Bore me half to death.
This is where the what and when happens. Two
people on a couch, liquored up and lousy at the mouth.
In the stanzas that follow, however, the seducer seems unable to cleanly extricate from the victim. Shifting tenses and mood, the narrator mixes up condescending, ruthless dissing (the “you” is criticized for everything from cheap cotton/poly sheets to bad teeth) with a passive/aggressive cruelty that sometimes poses as what may or may not be mock servility:
I wanted nothing more than
to put my tongue to your teeth. I’d have licked
our whole house clean, bought you a crystal set
of glassware …
…. perhaps
you did not understand my critique as servitude.
I was merely asking to be put into your employ.
It is these sado-masochistic tendencies that complicate this psychological portrait. Our “duplicitous” aggressor/narrator flirts at times with various victim poses; after listing all of the things about the “you” that are despised, the speaker admits that “I happen to like your mud-wash eyes. The mean / bags beneath your eyes. The jitter your hand does. / I don’t actually care about anything but that.” When the narrator confesses that “There was a light from your window that bore / right through me,” Marvin’s second use of “bore”—to tire, to invade—suggests that a kind of spiritual or psychic ennui may be at the root of this speaker’s vexing, almost Iago-like motiveless malignancy and of the terrible torpor and paralysis of this closet drama, which seems not to be as much about relationship as it is about the speaker’s own rootless swervings between brutality and a troubled, helpless futility.
The conflation of victim and aggressor intensifies: “Everything’s been lousy since I left,” the speaker complains, using “I” where the reader would expect to see “you,” and one gets the strong feeling that the narrator could well be in conversation with him or herself at this point. But the poem’s final image—anti-Romantic, too fresh to be the figment of a patent fantasy—reminds us that this poem is more than a moralistic or cautionary tale (the poem’s title echoes the well known phrase “perish the thought”—an admonition to guard against mistakes or misbegotten attempts), but is an account of emotional circumstances between an I and a you that are all too genuinely fraught with shame, power-play, hurt, and sadness:
When you took me out into your back yard
And showed me the koi pond you’d filled with
Cement, it made me sad.
Then you said you could bring it back.
In old ballads like “The Blacksmith” (19th-century), the wronged ingénue, when she confronts her fickle lover about his betrayal, is taunted by the rake to “bring your witness, Love, and I’ll not deny you.” Who or what is witness to this psychologically dark, astute “story”—to the complex, murky “what and when” of it? Obviously it must be the reader. The title suggests, too, that the eye of day (the gaze boring through the window) is also what brings these dark passages to light. In January, when the days seem to extinguish early, it is also paradoxically true that day light, like the unlikely but looked for restoration of the koi pond at the poem’s end, is on the comeback. It would be a misreading of this poem to suggest a happy ending for its players. But that Marvin grants the “you” of the poem, in the privileged last line, a wish for restoration, if not the actual means to pull it off, is also undeniable.
SUZANNE BUFFAM
Happy Hour
I’ll have an Icecap.
Make it a double.
Bring me a Fog on the River,
A Niagara Falls on the rocks,
And a Tempest with a chaser of Hail.
I don’t want to be rescued.
I want to crawl through a honeycomb
Of sub-glacial passageways,
Shove my head under God’s faucet
And keep chugging until I pass out.
I want thirst to drink me.
I want to come back as a bucket of blood.
If I were going to sidle up to the bar at, say, Cocteau’s Café des Poètes, and order a Suzanne Buffam cocktail, it would, judging from the intrepid work in her first two prize-winning collections, include a generous, bracing double-shot of Yankee sensuality, a “ripple of [ecological and/or human] extinction,” and a mixer of metaphysical musing. In another poem, “Vanishing,” for instance, she writes, “When I think about the fact // I am not thinking about you / It is a new way of thinking about you.” I’d also get a kicky dash of aphoristic brilliance; one of Buffam’s short poems, “On Last Lines,” reads: “The last line should strike like a lover’s complaint. / You should never see it coming. / And you should never hear the end of it.” Another contains the lines “Experience taught me / That nothing worth doing is worth doing / For the sake of experience alone.” Pass a scintillating capful of forthrightness over a shaker brimming with ice created from an eon’s worth of tears, intensity, time, rue, and humor, and I’d be served up an elixir meant for the mouth, that elemental palate and portal for the unquenchable thirst of the soul.
In “Happy Hour,” Buffam appropriates the lingo of the cocktail hour, the language of intoxication. Her tone is on the one hand ludic (“I’ll have an Icecap. / Make it a double”), playing self-consciously with inebriation, its slang and syntax—nightcaps, pub crawls, chasers, rocks. But this is not social drinking. What this speaker is having, and notice she’s not asking, is the world itself, both poles and everything in between. In fact the poem quickly moves from the indicative to the imperative: “Make it a double. // Bring me a Fog on the River, / A Niagara Falls on the rocks, // And a Tempest with a chaser of Hail.” Our narrator wants the whole, dramatic menu—sublime, high-volume, and straight up.
“I don’t want to be rescued,” the speaker tells us, lest the reader feel inclined to stall the headlong crash course of this increasingly accelerating bender of a poem. At this point the language moves from a fabular, ballsy, hyperbolic braggadocio into the precincts of ecstasy, shot through with the dark romance of oblivion, the apophatic allure of the via negativa. This speaker wants to be brought to her hands and knees in a “sub-glacial” maze that is, in a Petrarchan frisson, both freezing and lusciously honeycombed. With a syntactical and verbal insistence that defies impediment, the speaker’s desideratum turns forceful, even sexual, and undeniable: “I want … // [to] shove my head under God’s faucet / And keep chugging until I pass out.”
This is no fluffy blender drink she’s after, no glass of house white. The intoxication this speaker demands (intoxication < ML intoxicatare, “to poison”) is spiritual, cosmic, almost lethal, and speaks of a desire to take in the world and its mysteries that is so profound that the speaker, like a dervish mendicant drunk on God-lust and the enormity of her own capacity for desire, is brought to the very edge of her being and then beyond: “I want my thirst to drink me.”
The last line is a killer. Allusions to the 1959 eponymous comic horror film aside, Buffam bellies up to the “blood bucket,” Western slang term for an especially raucous saloon, taking her vision as far as she can. Consumed by her own immense thirst, the speaker wants to come back transformed by the entirety of what has transpired—melting polar caps, all manner of ferocious forces, not the least of which is her own passion. That “bucket of blood” reminds the reader of the six quarts of blood that comprise the human body—enough to fill a bucket—and we see that this is not just a poem about being wildly on fire for experience and the protean and manifold reaches of desire. The poem reminds us that this is who we are—we are polar caps, ice melt, seawater. We are what we love. As for the ending of this poem, I did not see it coming. And I want never to hear the end of it.
MONICA FERRELL
The Date
This time we’ll come gloved & blindfolded,
we’ll arrive on time.
With bees in our hair,
with an escort of expiring swans.
We’ll appear to out-of-date & out-of-tune
violin music, we’ll lie on our side.
Wearing rotting lotus behind our ears,
musk between our thighs.
This time we’ll be tied down.
We’ll cry out.
We’ll only smoke if surprised
by tragedy’s approach, as it noses closer.
This time we’ll fall in love
with the blood color
of the sunset as we’re walking home
over the bridge that takes us
between here & there.
This time we’ll forget
how ancient Sarmatian lions go on
bearing marble messages for no one
who can understand their sarcophagus language,
forget sloths who climb so slow
they die before mating.
We’ll grow improvident & stop believing
there was ever such a thing
as alone, such a hard
nail in the coffin
for one.
“I like a look of Agony,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Because I know it’s true— / Men do not sham Convulsion, / Nor simulate, a Throe—.” I think of these lines, betraying my own mild agony, I suppose, as I trawl the greeting card aisle of a local drugstore, looking for Valentine cards (there has to be something between the saccharine puppies and the thong-clad cupids draped suggestively over cases of beer) to send to my grown children and my nieces and nephews. The fluorescent-lit, dropped ceiling above is hung with pre-cut hearts and the row itself, tucked between aisles of cold remedies and foot treatments, is festooned with red crepe-paper ribbons and flanked by a wincingly pink and red display of cards, whose messages of affection are dross. Where is the Valentine that rings true?
I find myself fantasizing about another kind of missive printed with real love poetry—poems that confront what is difficult, transgressive, jealous, obsessive, and unconventional in matters of the heart. Imagine, for instance, opening a folded piece of cardstock and finding inside this homoerotic excerpt from Cavafy’s “The Bandaged Shoulder” (translated by Don Paterson):
… to be honest—I liked looking at the blood.
That blood. It was all part of my love.
When he left, I found a strip torn from the bandage
under his chair, a rag I should have thrown
straight in the trash—but I picked up and raised it to my lips,
and kept there a long while:
his blood on my lips, O my love, my love’s blood.
Or this passage from Dickinson’s “If I may have it, when it’s dead,” with its dark whiff of necrophilia and wild possessiveness:
Think of it Lover! I and Thee
Permitted—face to face to be—
After a Life—a Death—we’ll say—
For Death was That—
And This—is Thee—.
There’s an appeal to the ungenerous love poem, one which doesn’t let its addressee off the hook, perhaps because, as Dickinson says, such expression rings true. When Keats writes
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would[st] wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you,
we believe that he means what he says: if I were dead, he asserts, you would feel so bad that you didn’t love me while you could. So love me. Now.
Monica Ferrell’s “The Date” is such a love poem, playing naughtily, at least at first, in a decadent kind of Djuna Barnes-meets-Cindy Sherman way, with the patent expectations and artifice of dating/mating rituals and the fetishizing of coupledom. Her couplets, smartly enjambed, and her use of a conflated present/future tense keep any notion of a credible fairy tale romance/happy ending precarious even as she indulges in arrestingly gothic, extravagant scenarios:
This time we’ll come gloved & blind–
folded, we’ll arrive on time.
With bees in our hair,
with an escort of expiring swans.
We’ll appear to out-of-date & out-of-tune
violin music, we’ll lie on our side.
Wearing rotting lotus behind our ears,
musk between our thighs.
Just as the speaker urges a kind of abandonment to hedonistic desire, with hints of bondage as freedom,
This time we’ll be tied down.
We’ll cry out.
A sense of foreboding is also present in this erotic tableaux, so that even the expected post-coital cigarette (“We’ll only smoke if surprised / by tragedy’s approach, as it noses closer”) must be confronted both as cliché and as the inevitable heeding of a certain impending demise. “This time we’ll fall in love,” the speaker says, a sentiment Ferrell immediately, expertly enjambs and complicates “with the blood color // of the sunset as we’re walking home / over the bridge that takes us // between here & there.”
Although she knows where things are heading, Ferrell’s speaker can’t help but linger a moment on the bridge, and with “This time we’ll forget” she moves into a Keatsian “More happy love! more happy, happy love!” passage, in which “ancient Sarmatian lions go on / bearing marble messages for no one” and “sloths … climb so slow / they die before mating.” As the lines telescope and abbreviate, however, the reader senses the dissolution of the artificial coupling of “the date” and the contraction of the poem’s indulgences until the poem brings us to a line of monometer and the ultimate solitude that is the real truth of the poem:
We’ll grow improvident & stop believing
there was ever such a thing
as alone, such a hard
nail in the coffin
for one.
Ferrell’s “The Date,” then, is deliberately “out-of-date”—with its readers’ expectations of romance, with its own story. Obsessed with time (“this time,” “on time”), the poem insists on the significance of “date” in all of its implications—a particular day, a special occasion, an anniversary of a beginning or an ending, something we come to blind or with hyper-awareness, even date as fruit, with its attendant connotations of first fruits, carnal knowledge, and the fall from paradise. And the poem does so even as it “stops believing” in its own fiction of its lavish, improvident belief “that there was ever such a thing / as alone.” Now that’s a different kind of valentine.
VERSE’S RICH WEB PORTALS
VERSE’S RICH WEB PORTALS
Like many who live in a university or college burg, I am keenly aware, despite lots of town/gown collaboration and mixing in restaurants, coffee houses, private homes and apartments, art galleries, places of worship, music halls, bookstores, apple orchards, yoga studios, streets, food banks, the aisles of supermarkets, and the classroom, of the fact that our community is comprised of the members of an institution of higher learning and everyone else. A weathered sign on the roof of a now defunct local pancake shop still reads “Where Students, Tourists, and Townspeople Meet.” One bar, also closed, advertised its watering hole as a gathering place for “Mountain Men and Debutantes.” Though I’m not exactly sure how the distinctions play out in this last slogan, it would be disingenuous to think that some vestigial sense of “the university” in relation to the rest of the city does not endure and affect our identities and interactions.
The culture of poets in the academy can be afflicted by similar demarcations. Those “inside” tend to be acutely conscious of poets teaching at other institutions, many of whom were our former teachers, classmates, or students. We teach one another’s books, invite each other to give readings, and await one another’s new publications with an interconnected anxiety and eagerness. Our professional publications and conferences feature, print, and advertise the work being published by university presses and by colleagues in the nation’s plethora of writing programs.
All the more reason to be grateful, then, for the protean community of writers both in and outside of the halls of higher education made manifest and widely accessible—and in a genuine way created—by the manifold, diverse internet websites, blogs, and other cyber-interactive spaces available to poets and readers of poetry. On an afternoon in mid-2011, for instance, a Google search of “poetry websites” yields some 4,710,000 results. “Poetry blogs” turns up 7,950,000. Some of these links will, in turn, offer their assessment of the best (and worst) of these sites. Clearly, a boundary-obliterating, ever evolving legion of readers and writers of poems burgeons.
