She Walks in Beauty Read online

  where they’ve waited, paper and more paper

  taking in the ocean air, about to sprout.

  Mother’s sitting on the bed

  with her tattered list of dispersals—who gets

  what among the treasures she hopes

  I’ll find, but I know I’m seeing

  what she doesn’t want me to see,

  the daughter cleaning doing what the son

  would never do. After an hour of excavation

  the console TV emerges from beneath

  forgotten sweaters and balled up nylons

  saved for stuffing puppets, a long ago church project—

  the TV arrived in 1966 same day I crushed

  the fender of the car, upsetting

  the careful plans she’d made for payment.

  She wants to leave so much behind. Hours later

  I’ve found nothing I want but the purple mache mask

  I made in the fourth grade. I like its yellow eyes.

  She looks at each magazine I remove, saving

  every word about my brother, the coach. He’s sixty

  and a long dead mouse has eaten the laces

  of his baby shoes. I want order. I say

  I’m old myself, I’ve started throwing things away.

  I’m lying. I’ve kept everything she’s ever given me.

  Ode

  ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

  I love all the mom bodies at this beach,

  the tummies, the one-piece bathing suits,

  the bosoms that slope, the wide nice bottoms,

  thigh flesh shirred as gentle wind shirrs a pond.

  So many sensible haircuts and ponytails!

  These bodies show they have grown babies, then

  nourished them, woken to their cries, fretted

  at their fevers. Biceps have lifted and toted

  the babies now printed on their mothers.

  “If you lined up a hundred vaginas,

  I could tell you which ones have borne children,”

  the midwife says. In the secret place or

  in sunlight at the beach, our bodies say

  This is who we are, no, This is what

  we have done and continue to do.

  We labor in love. We do it. We mother.

  Vietnam

  WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

  “Woman, what’s your name?” “I don’t know.”

  “How old are you? Where are you from?” “I don’t know.”

  “Why did you dig that burrow?” “I don’t know.”

  “How long have you been hiding?” “I don’t know.”

  “Why did you bite my finger?” “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you know that we won’t hurt you?” “I don’t know.”

  “Whose side are you on?” “I don’t know.”

  “This is war, you’ve got to choose.” “I don’t know.”

  “Does your village still exist?” “I don’t know.”

  “Are those your children?” “Yes.”

  A Child

  MARY LAMB

  A child’s a plaything for an hour;

  Its pretty tricks we try

  For that or for a longer space—

  Then tire, and lay it by.

  But I knew one that to itself

  All seasons could control;

  That would have mock’d the sense of pain

  Out of a grievéd soul.

  Thou straggler into loving arms,

  Young climber-up of knees,

  When I forget thy thousand ways

  Then life and all shall cease.

  blessing the boats

  LUCILLE CLIFTON

  (at St. Mary’s)

  may the tide

  that is entering even now

  the lip of our understanding

  carry you out

  beyond the face of fear

  may you kiss

  the wind then turn from it

  certain that it will

  love your back may you

  open your eyes to water

  water waving forever

  and may you in your innocence

  sail through this to that

  SILENCE AND SOLITUDE

  WE ARE ALL AFRAID of being alone. To teenagers, the idea of being alone is almost as bad as the idea of dying, which at least has a certain romantic appeal. But by the time women have young children, we would sacrifice almost anything to be by ourselves in a quiet house—if just for an hour. As we reach middle age, the fear returns. Every woman I know is filled with dread at the prospect of an empty nest. Though our sons may tower over us, and our daughters know more than we do about everything, we still wait up to make sure they are safely home, we volunteer to drive them miles out of our way hoping for a few moments of conversation, we clean their filthy rooms, and offer to give them things they don’t particularly want. Just when our children are about to go out in the world as we raised them to, we realize we have become as dependent on them as they are on us.

  Middle age is a time to rearrange our lives and enjoy the chance to reflect rather than react. Silence and solitude may take some getting used to, but in my experience, the people who are happy being alone are often the people everyone wants to be around.

  Involuntary solitude is another story. The pain of loss, the terror of being abandoned, or an echoing loneliness forces us to confront the most fundamental questions of existence and mortality. Perseverance, fortitude, and faith can help us salvage meaning and connection out of emotional devastation. Reading and writing poetry can help us find a pathway. Poets put universal feelings into words and remind us that in a world of language and feeling, we can never really be alone.

  Often, poets celebrate the freedom of solitude. Emily Brontë and Rainer Maria Rilke write of the exhilaration of being unfettered by the world. Li Po, the eighth-century Chinese poet, writes of surrendering to nature and merging with something larger than oneself. Each of these strategies can help us accept the times in our lives when we may be alone, to appreciate them, and to learn from them.

  One of my favorite lines of poetry is found in Wallace Stevens’s “The Poems of Our Climate.” Stevens describes a world from which everything has been subtracted, leaving only stillness and a bowl of white carnations. Yet the room is full, because of the presence of the “never resting mind.” Through our humanity, we have the power to create new worlds, alone and with others. Stevens concludes with a line celebrating life: “The imperfect is our paradise.” A feeling that women can surely embrace.

  I’m happiest when most away

  EMILY BRONTË

  I’m happiest when most away

  I can bear my soul from its home of clay

  On a windy night when the moon is bright

  And my eye can wander through worlds of light

  When I am not and none beside

  Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky

  But only spirit wandering wide

  Through infinite immensity

  Keeping Things Whole

  MARK STRAND

  In a field

  I am the absence

  of field.

  This is

  always the case.

  Wherever I am

  I am what is missing.

  When I walk

  I part the air

  and always

  the air moves in

  to fill the spaces

  where my body’s been.

  We all have reasons

  for moving.

  I move

  to keep things whole.

  We All Know It

  MARIANNE MOORE

  That silence is best: that action and re-

  Action are equal: that control, discipline, and

  Liberation are bywords when spoken by an appraiser, that the

  Accidental sometimes achieves perfection, loath though we may be to admit it:

  And that the realm of art is the realm in

  Which to look for “
fishbones in the throat of the gang.” Pin-

  Pricks and the unstereotyped embarrassment being the contin-

  Ual diet of artists. And in spite of it all, poets ask us just what it

  Is in them that we cannot subscribe to:

  People overbear till told to stop: no matter through

  What sobering process they have gone, some inquire if emotion, true

  And stimulated are not the same thing: promoters request us to take our oath

  That appearances are not cosmic: mis-

  Fits in the world of achievement want to know what bus-

  Iness people have to reserve judgment about undertakings. It is

  A strange idea that one must say what one thinks in order to be understood.

  As Much As You Can

  CONSTANTINE P. CAVAFY

  And if you can’t shape your life the way you want,

  at least try as much as you can

  not to degrade it

  by too much contact with the world,

  by too much activity and talk.

  Try not to degrade it by dragging it along,

  taking it around and exposing it so often

  to the daily silliness

  of social events and parties,

  until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

  Sense of Something Coming

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  I am like a flag in the center of open space.

  I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live it through,

  While the creatures of the world beneath still do not move in their sleep:

  The doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full of silence,

  The windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.

  I already know the storm, and I am as troubled as the sea,

  And spread myself out, and fall into myself,

  And throw myself out and am absolutely alone

  In the great storm.

  Death, Etc.

  MAXINE KUMIN

  I have lived my whole life with death, said William Maxwell,

  aetat ninety-one, and haven’t we all. Amen to that.

  It’s all right to gutter out like a candle but the odds are better

  for succumbing to a stroke or pancreatic cancer.

  I’m not being gloomy, this bright September

  when everything around me shines with being:

  hummingbirds still raptured in the jewelweed,

  puffballs humping up out of the forest duff

  and the whole voluptuous garden still putting forth

  bright yellow pole beans, deep-pleated purple cauliflowers,

  to say nothing of regal white corn that feeds us

  night after gluttonous night, with a slobber of butter.

  Still, Maxwell’s pronouncement speaks to my body’s core,

  this old body I trouble to keep up the way

  I keep up my two old horses, wiping insect deterrent

  on their ears, cleaning the corners of their eyes,

  spraying their legs to defeat the gnats, currying burrs

  out of their thickening coats. They go on grazing thoughtlessly

  while winter is gathering in the wings. But it is not given

  to us to travel blindly, all the pasture bars down,

  to seek out the juiciest grasses, nor to predict

  which of these two will predecease the other or to anticipate

  the desperate whinnies for the missing that will ensue.

  Which of us will go down first is also not given,

  a subject that hangs unspoken between us

  as with Jocasta, who begs Oedipus not to inquire further.

  Meanwhile, it is pleasant to share opinions and mealtimes,

  to swim together daily, I with my long slow back and forths,

  he with his hundred freestyle strokes that wind him alarmingly.

  A sinker, he would drown if he did not flail like this.

  We have put behind us the State Department tour

  of Egypt, Israel, Thailand, Japan that ended badly

  as we leapt down the yellow chutes to safety after a botched takeoff.

  We have been made at home in Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland,

  narrow, xenophobic Switzerland of clean bathrooms and much butter.

  We have traveled by Tube and Métro in the realms of gold

  paid obeisance to the Winged Victory and the dreaded Tower,

  but now it is time to settle as the earth itself settles

  in season, exhaling, dozing a little before the fall rains come.

  Every August when the family gathers, we pose

  under the ancient willow for a series of snapshots,

  the same willow, its lumpish trunk sheathed in winking aluminum

  that so perplexed us forty years ago, before we understood

  the voracity of porcupines. Now hollowed by age and marauders,

  its aluminum girdle painted dull brown, it is still leafing

  out at the top, still housing a tumult of goldfinches. We try to hold still

  and smile, squinting into the brilliance, the middle-aged children,

  the grown grandsons, the dogs of each era, always a pair

  of grinning shelter dogs whose long lives are but as grasshoppers

  compared to our own. We try to live gracefully

  and at peace with our imagined deaths but in truth we go forward

  stumbling, afraid of the dark,

  of the cold, and of the great overwhelming

  loneliness of being last.

  From When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

  GALWAY KINNELL

  7

  When one has lived a long time alone,

  one likes alike the pig, who brooks no deferment

  of gratification, and the porcupine, or thorned pig,

  who enters the cellar but not the house itself

  because of eating down the cellar stairs on the way up,

  and one likes the worm, who by bunching herself together

  and expanding works her way through the ground,

  no less than the butterfly, who totters full of worry

  among the day lilies, as they darken,

  and more and more one finds one likes

  any other species better than one’s own,

  which has gone amok, making one self-estranged,

  when one has lived a long time alone.

  9

  When one has lived a long time alone,

  and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,

  and the bullfrog head half out of water utters

  the cantillations he sang in his first spring,

  and the snake lowers himself over the threshold

  and creeps away among the stones, one sees

  they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,

  after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken

  away from one’s kind, toward these other kingdoms,

  the hard prayer inside one’s own singing

  is to come back, if one can, to one’s own,

  a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,

  when one has lived a long time alone.

  10

  When one has lived a long time alone,

  one wants to live again among men and women,

  to return to that place where one’s ties with the human

  broke, where the disquiet of death and now also

  of history glimmers its firelight on faces,

  where the gaze of the new baby meets the gaze

  of the great granny, and where lovers speak,

  on lips blowsy from kissing, that language

  the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak

  blether the song that is both earth’s and heaven’s,

  until the sun rises, and they stand

  in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,

  when one has lived a long time alone.
>
  Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain

  LI PO

  The birds have vanished down the sky,

  Now the last cloud drains away.

  We sit together, the mountain and me,

  until only the mountain remains.

  The Poems of Our Climate

  WALLACE STEVENS

  I

  Clear water in a brilliant bowl,

  Pink and white carnations. The light

  In the room more like a snowy air,

  Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow

  At the end of winter when afternoons return.

  Pink and white carnations–one desires

  So much more than that. The day itself

  Is simplified: a bowl of white,

  Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,

  With nothing more than the carnations here.

  II

  Say even that this complete simplicity

  Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed

  The evilly compounded, vital I

  And made it fresh in a world of white,

  A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,

  Still one would want more, one would need more,

  More than a world of white and snowy scents.

  III

  There would still remain the never-resting mind,

  So that one would want to escape, come back

  To what had been so long composed.

  The imperfect is our paradise.

  Note that, in this bitterness, delight,

  Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

  Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

  GROWING UP AND GROWING OLD

  THIS BOOK BEGAN as a collection of poems for middle-aged women—something no one wants to be. When I turned fifty, it seemed that looking old was the only topic of conversation, everyone was bursting into tears at a moment’s notice, and proclaiming the importance of taking “time for yourself.” On a more serious level, midlife can be a time of reflection and self-reflection, when some of the chaos of raising a family subsides, we have become aware that time is precious, and we have learned what matters. Poems speak directly to those emotions.