Poetics — Sandler Poetry

Occasionally I share here poems I admire by other poets, along with thoughts on the craft and technique they display.

THE BODY MUTINIES, by Lucia Perillo —outside Saint Pete’s

When the doctor runs out of words and still I I won't leave, he latches my shoulder and steers me out doors. Where I see his blurred hand, through the milk glass, flapping good-bye like a sail (& me not griefstruck yet but still amazed: how words and names—medicine's blunt instruments— undid me. And the seconds, the half seconds, it took for him to say those words). For now, I'll just stand in the courtyard watching bodies struggle in then out of one lean shadow a tall fir lays across the wet flagstones. Before the sun clears the valance of gray trees and finds the surgical-supply-shop window and makes the dusty bedpans glint like coins.

The poem’s speaker has received a devastating diagnosis (cf. Lucia Perillo (1958–2016) was told she had multiple sclerosis at age 30). In the first four lines, the speaker’s reaction is more paralysis than feeling. She can’t move, can’t leave the consultation room. The doctor has to steer her out by the shoulder, a gesture offering no comfort. The half-rhyme of “still” and “sail” eerily chime—the speaker is stilled, while the doctor’s sail-like hand is full of motion—but of no utility (like flapping canvas) and utterly distant (blurred through the office door’s milk glass).

The second four lines find the speaker trying to tap her undeveloped feelings—not yet “griefstruck” but amazed at the abruptness of what’s just happened. The “&” at the start of line 5 stands out against the six times the word “and” is spelled out elsewhere in this short poem—perhaps to flag how abbreviated the speaker’s feelings are at this point. A defective rhyme—“blunt instruments” of medical words with the “half seconds” it took to say them—seems to accord with the defective communication.

Like a traditional sonnet, the poem turns at the start of line 9. The speaker shifts from her inward feelings to look outward—at other bodies (!) as they struggle in and out of a thin “shadow” (of death?) across the courtyard’s wet flagstones, wet as one might find by the river Lethe?

The end words of the poem’s last three lines reverberate. At the end of line 12, attention has shifted from a tall fir to some “gray trees,” which half rhymes with the earlier “bodies.” Perhaps this harkens to the scene in Dante’s Inferno, Canto 13, describing trees of a dusky hue into which bodies of suicides have been transformed—and signals the speaker’s imminent despair?

At the end of line 13 we find another “window” (different from doctor’s milky glass) paired with the “shadow” at the end of line 10 (echoing the doctor’s shadowy hand flapping goodbye). But this second window (or the sun passing through it) transforms a darkened image into something shiny: “dusty” bedpans into glinting coins.

The final end word, “coins,” seems to clink against those “bedpans” and line 11’s “flagstones.” It is the speaker’s last reaction; she imagines it (“Before the sun clears”). A vision of profit for the purveyors of blunt words and dusty wares? Or is it a glint of hope, or resolve, to deal with this adversity?

Though the speaker’s body has mutinied, the poet’s technique effects some control over the shock and ferries us through it .

HAUNTS, by Michael Donaghy

Don’t be afraid, old son, it’s only me,
though not as I’ve appeared before,
on the battlements of your signature,
or margin of a book you can’t throw out,
or darkened shop front where your face
first shocks itself into a mask of mine,
but here, alive, one Christmas long ago
when you were three, upstairs, asleep,
and haunting me because I conjured you
the way that child you were would cry out
waking in the dark, and when you spoke
in no child’s voice but out of radio silence,
the hall clock ticking like a radar blip,
a bottle breaking faintly streets away,
you said, as I say now, Don’t be afraid.

This is a message in a bottle—at one level, it’s advice from a father to his three-year-old son that floats through time, meant to be opened when the child is grown and the father dead. The advice? To have courage: Don’t be afraid—words that bookend the poem. But toward the poem’s end, the roles are reversed: the advice is imagined—“conjured”—as flowing from child to a father contemplating the terrors of a night (radio silence, a ticking radar blip, shattering glass, his child crying out).

The speaker at first seems like a ghost, appearing in a succession of scenes: atop the letters of the son’s signature (with the same last name as the father’s); through a note in a margin of book; through the image, at night, in a shop window, of the son’s reflection freakily transformed into the father’s face; and lastly, “not as I’ve appeared before” but in this direct message to the son. Each has an eerie effect (and, for me, the wallop of imagining my own children envisioning me after I’m gone).

Michael Donaghy’s technique is subtle. Each line is either four or five beats—almost a chant, a prayer, a ticking of time. The entire poem is just one sentence, wending an elegant path over 15 lines. In a way it’s a sonnet, a poem of love for one’s child. Sonnets have a “turn” in meaning near their middles, and this one does with the words “and haunting me...” (Up to this point, it was the father imagining his haunting of the son; after, it is the son haunting the father.) Though traditional sonnets have 14 lines, here the fifteenth line is not an entirely new one, but a variation, a reprising of the first.

The hauntings include parallel scenes of unease or threat: the father appearing from battlements, margins, and darkened shop windows; the son speaking out of radio silence, radar blips, and breaking glass. The invocation of “old son” also works two ways. At the start, it seems directed to the future, intended to put the son at ease when, as a man, he will read this. By poem’s end, we find the father conjuring his “old son” from the future as speaking to him “in no child’s voice”—and in the past tense (“you said, as I say now...”). Time is fluid in a poem spoken one Christmas long ago, but heard now—or heard from the future but spoken now.

The advice itself defies time. It alludes to a literary antecedent: Don’t be afraid (or fear not) appears in the Bible (e.g., Deuteronomy 31:6, Isaiah 35:4, John 6:20). We also now know it has a future echo: noli timere (don’t be afraid) were the poet Seamus Heaney’s last words, thirteen years after “Haunts” was written. And, Don’t be afraid were the last words of the last poem in the last book of poetry Michael Donaghy published during his lifetime.

* * *

THE FURTIVE VISIT, by Maxine Kumin

We opened the foxed pages of our hearts
back, further back, and let them stand,
climbed through mild rain to the nippled pond,
clung in a wet embrace, then drew apart.

I watched the taillights judder as you took
the downhill elbows of the mudslicked lane
minutes shy of midnight. Not again,
I thought, whistling the dogs back in,

the rain now picking up its steady redirect.

Used with the permission of the Maxine W. Kumin Literary Trust

Word choice and image conveys much of the tone, and elegance, of this poem. “Foxed” means discolored by age or decay, often to a yellowish brown. The opening line introduces a “we” whose hearts and emotional lives have apparently languished as the couple has aged. On this climb in a cleansing rain to a pond, some musty pages of past emotion have been opened and let stand—a flicker of excitement has been renewed. “Nippled” is an electric word that flashes from the rain plunking the pond to this couple’s wet, frontal embrace. But the spark risks being extinguished as they draw apart.

By the second stanza, the embrace has unbalanced the narrator of the poem. Something more than the taillights judder. Something other than a car on a mudslicked lane feels out of control. This is no love-struck Cinderella racing home minutes shy of midnight, but an older adult anxious (or fearful) about how to handle the moment at the pond. On arrival, she thinks “Not again” and attempts to whistle her dogs, her passions, back in.

The concise form of the poem gives a polish to these nuggets of emotion. Most of the lines are pentameter (five beats). The two four-beat lines highlight a nice contrast. Line 2 returns the couple to bygone thrills and “lets them stand” for a while. Line 8 has the narrator trying to whistle those emotions back from their brief run.

The last line of the poem, a separate stanza, has six beats. It seems to echo the steady “redirect” of the rain. Is the rain “picking up” like the speeding up of a clock, a phenomenon many older people feel? Is the rain’s “redirect” a refocus away from the narrator’s moment of arousal and back to the quotidian? Or a “redirect” like a lawyer’s asking a witness to consider again what really happened? Giving this sentence fragment its own stanza seems to put it in a different dimension: it leaves me (and presumably the narrator) trying to reconcile the significance of one human being’s emotions with the forces of nature and time.

The poem’s quiet rhymes (mostly half rhymes) may add another layer of meaning, as well as a musical sense of cohesion. In the first stanza, the rhyme makes the two lovers’ “hearts” (end of line 1) seem “apart” by the end of line 4. The “took” at the end of line 5 has the shadow of a rhyme with “redirect”; it may suggest that the experience of loss, of something taken, has led to a redirection of an attitude toward the partner. To leave? Or to try to renew the flame, which would chime with the opening of old emotions at the start of the poem.

Much is conveyed, and withheld, in just nine lines.