She Walks in Beauty Read online

  Middle age is a time of transition. If we have raised a family, they are beginning to be independent. If we are going back to work, our skills may be outdated. If we have a career, we may be facing the limits of our advancement. If we are caring for our parents, it is becoming a more complicated undertaking. But we are also still young, we have the chance for a full life ahead, and we know ourselves much better than we did.

  In order to plan the future, it helps to look back at the decisions we have made so far—even the bad ones. We are reminded of other times when life seemed confusing, emotions overwhelming, and the pathway forward hard to find. In this section, I have combined poems that speak to us at midlife with those that address another time of transition—growing up and becoming an adult. At both points in our lives, we are faced with a lot of uncertainty and the realization that, although we share these challenges with our friends, we must navigate them on our own. That can be both liberating and terrifying.

  The choices we make during these transitions determine who we are and who we become. Poems can help us find clarity amid the confusion. They remind us that others have faced the same challenges. They celebrate the relationships that define and guide us, they can help us laugh at ourselves, and they provide wisdom and reassurance.

  Each stage of life is different than we imagine it will be. Edna St. Vincent Millay captures this feeling perfectly in “Grown-up” when she is confronted with the routine of adult life, after fantasizing it to be so much more glamorous. Ellen Hagan captures the contradictory feelings of growing up fast and too fast in “Puberty—With Capital Letters,” while Parneshia Jones brings to life the conflicts between mother and daughter that repeat from generation to generation, despite our vows to be different.

  In “Older, Younger, Both,” Joyce Sutphen conveys the mixed-up sensations of being young and old all at once, a feeling which is common to our teenage years and one that characterizes middle age. Other poems, like Barbara Ras’s “You Can’t Have It All” and Elizabeth Jennings’s “Old Woman,” celebrate the contentment that comes with appreciating what we have.

  Each of these poets can offer guidance, provide insight, and give us strength. But in these turbulent times each of us must answer the question posed by Mary Oliver in “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?”

  You Begin

  MARGARET ATWOOD

  You begin this way:

  this is your hand,

  this is your eye,

  that is a fish, blue and flat

  on the paper, almost

  the shape of an eye.

  This is your mouth, this is an O

  or a moon, whichever

  you like. This is yellow.

  Outside the window

  is the rain, green

  because it is summer, and beyond that

  the trees and then the world,

  which is round and has only

  the colors of these nine crayons.

  This is the world, which is fuller

  and more difficult to learn than I have said.

  You are right to smudge it that way

  with the red and then

  the orange: the world burns.

  Once you have learned these words

  you will learn that there are more

  words than you can ever learn.

  The word hand floats above your hand

  like a small cloud over a lake.

  The word hand anchors

  your hand to this table,

  your hand is a warm stone

  I hold between two words.

  This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,

  which is round but not flat and has more colors

  than we can see.

  It begins, it has an end,

  this is what you will

  come back to, this is your hand.

  Grown-up

  EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

  Was it for this I uttered prayers,

  And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,

  That now, domestic as a plate,

  I should retire at half-past eight?

  Puberty—With Capital Letters

  ELLEN HAGAN

  There went being a kid. There went

  Barbie dolls, baby dolls, kitchen sets, play-

  doh, crayons, make-believe (well, maybe not

  make-believe). But there went innocent, child-

  like, there went one-piece bathing suits. In came

  adolescence, even though I’d had my period

  since I was 10. In came self-consciousness,

  waiting for breasts. In came attitude, and “Why

  can’t I?” “You said!” “I hate you,” under my breath.

  In came diaries with hidden messages and dares

  I always took. In came kissing and not kissing,

  and doing it, and not doing it, and rounding bases,

  and not rounding bases, and rounding bases having

  nothing at all to do with baseball, and sometimes wishing

  you could just play baseball instead.

  In came. Rebellion. Clichés. Are you kidding? Drinking.

  Do-overs. Cheer-leading Uniforms. Regret. Pure Bliss.

  Uncovering. Feeling not good enough. Cockiness. Joy.

  In came wild cards. Short skirts. Cocktails. 15. Funnels.

  Mid-riff baring. Belly-button rings. Challenges. Being

  challenging. The ultimate change. The ultimate fast-forward.

  In came growing up.

  Bra Shopping

  PARNESHIA JONES

  Saturday afternoon, Marshall Fields, 2nd floor, women’s lingerie please.

  At sixteen I am a jeans and t-shirt wearing tomboy who can think of

  a few million more places to be instead of in the department store

  with my mother bra shopping.

  Still growing accustomed to these two new welts

  lashed on to me by puberty, getting bigger by the moment,

  mother looks at me and says:

  While we’re here, we’ll get some new (larger) shirts for you too.

  I resent her for taking me away from baseball fields,

  horse play, and riding my bike.

  We enter into no man’s, and I mean no man in sight land

  where women fuss and shop all day for undergarments;

  the lingerie department is a world of frilly lace, night gowns,

  grandma panties and support everything.

  Mama takes me over to a wall covered with hundreds of white bras,

  some with lace and little frills or doilies like party favors,

  as if undergarments are a cause for celebration.

  A few have these dainty ditsy bows in the middle.

  That’s a nice accent don’t you think? Mama would say. Isn’t that cute?

  Like this miniature bow in the middle will take

  some of the attention away from what is really going on.

  When mama and I go brassiere shopping it never fails:

  a short woman with an accent and glasses

  attached to a chain around her neck who cares

  way too much about undergarments comes up to us.

  May I help you, dearies?

  The bra woman assists my mother in finding the perfect bra

  to as my mother put it, hold me in the proper way. No bouncing please.

  Working as a team plotting to ruin my entire day

  with the bra fitting marathon, they conspire up about ten bras

  in each hand which equal forty. Who’s making all these bras I want to ask.

  What size is she? The bra woman asks.

  You want something that will support them honey, looking at me with a wink.

  My mother looks straight at my chest. Oh she’s good size. She’s out of that

  training bra phase. I want her to have something that will hold them up proper.

  Them, them, them they say
.

  Like they’re two midgets I keep strapped to my chest.

  The whole time I stand there while these two women one my own kin,

  discuss the maintenance and storage of my two dependents.

  The worst is yet to come, the dressing room.

  I hate the damn dressing room, the mirrors waiting to laugh at me,

  women running in and out half-naked with things showing

  that I didn’t even see on my own body.

  I stand there half-naked and pissed. Mama on one side,

  the bra woman on the other, I feel like a rag doll under interrogation

  as they begin fixing straps, poking me, raising me up, snapping the back,

  underwire digging my breasts a grave.

  The bras clamp down onto me, shaping my breasts out to pristine bullets,

  with no movement, no pulse, no life, just sitting fix up

  like my mother wanted real proper.

  I will never forgive my mother for this, I keep thinking to myself.

  Looking blank face at my reflection I started thinking about how my brothers

  never have to shop for undergarments, why couldn’t I have been born a boy?

  I hate undergarments.

  Mama looks at my face. Don’t you like any of them?

  No, I say. Mama I hate this, please can we go?

  Then she goes into her lecture on becoming a woman

  and being responsible for woman upkeep.

  After we are halfway through the inventory

  mama looks at me wasting away in a sea of bras and takes pity on me.

  All right, I think we have enough to last you for a while. Let’s check out.

  I don’t get happy too quick ’cause I know that bra woman

  still lurks about and if she senses my excitement that we are leaving

  she will come with more white bras.

  We make our way to the check out counter

  and the bra woman rings us up.

  Oh honey you picked out some beautiful bras, she says.

  Just remember hand wash. How about bury, I want to ask.

  She and my mother talk about how they are just right

  and will do the trick for me with no bouncing at all.

  The Summer Day

  MARY OLIVER

  Who made the world?

  Who made the swan, and the black bear?

  Who made the grasshopper?

  This grasshopper, I mean—

  the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

  the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

  who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

  who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

  Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

  Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

  I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

  I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

  into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

  how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

  which is what I have been doing all day.

  Tell me, what else should I have done?

  Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do

  with your one wild and precious life?

  Living

  DENISE LEVERTOV

  The fire in leaf and grass

  so green it seems

  each summer the last summer.

  The wind blowing, the leaves

  shivering in the sun,

  each day the last day.

  A red salamander

  so cold and so

  easy to catch, dreamily

  moves his delicate feet

  and long tail. I hold

  my hand open for him to go.

  Each minute the last minute.

  I stepped from plank to plank

  EMILY DICKINSON

  I stepped from plank to plank,

  A slow and cautious way;

  The stars about my head I felt,

  About my feet the sea.

  I knew not but the next

  Would be my final inch.

  This gave me that precarious gait

  Some call experience.

  to my last period

  LUCILLE CLIFTON

  well girl, goodbye,

  after thirty-eight years.

  thirty-eight years and you

  never arrived

  splendid in your red dress

  without trouble for me

  somewhere, somehow.

  now it is done,

  and i feel just like

  the grandmothers who,

  after the hussy has gone,

  sit holding her photograph

  and sighing, wasn’t she

  beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?

  lumpectomy eve

  LUCILLE CLIFTON

  all night i dream of lips

  that nursed and nursed

  and the lonely nipple

  lost in loss and the need

  to feed that turns at last

  on itself that will kill

  its body for its hunger’s sake

  all night i hear the whispering

  the soft

  love calls you to this knife

  for love for love

  all night it is the one breast

  comforting the other

  Older, Younger, Both

  JOYCE SUTPHEN

  I feel older, younger, both

  at once. Every time I win,

  I lose. Every time I count,

  I forget and must begin again.

  I must begin again, and again I

  must begin. Every time I lose,

  I win and must begin again.

  Everything I plan must wait, and

  having to wait has made me old, and

  the older I get, the more I wait, and everything

  I’m waiting for has already been planned.

  I feel sadder, wiser, neither

  together. Everything is almost

  true, and almost true is everywhere.

  I feel sadder, wiser, neither at once.

  I end in beginning, in ending I find

  that beginning is the first thing to do.

  I stop when I start, but my heart keeps on beating,

  so I must go on starting in spite of the stopping.

  I must stop my stopping and start to start—

  I can end at the beginning or begin at the end.

  I feel older, younger, both at once.

  Survivor

  ROGER McGOUGH

  Everyday

  I think about dying.

  About disease, starvation,

  violence, terrorism, war,

  the end of the world.

  It helps

  keep my mind off things.

  You Can’t Have It All

  BARBARA RAS

  But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

  gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger

  on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

  You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look

  of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite

  every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,

  you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,

  though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam

  that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys

  until you realize foam’s twin is blood.

  You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,

  so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,

  glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,

  never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you

/>   all roads narrow at the border.

  You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,

  and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave

  where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,

  but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands

  as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful

  for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful

  for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels

  sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,

  for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,

  the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.

  You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,

  at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping

  of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

  You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd

  but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,

  how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,

  until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,

  and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind

  as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,

  you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond

  of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas

  your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.