Occasional Poems

About the only time anyone asks me to recommend a poem, it’s on the occasion of a death, birth, or a wedding. Poetry is a ceremonial language, so this makes sense to me. Poems are better equipped to address life’s more consequential events, if only because they do not resist them. Logic spars and platitudes plead with the bouncer, while music and the associative leap slip through a subject’s back door.

Even so, I suspect I’m the worst possible person to ask for an occasional poem. It’s my feeling that good writing, regardless of genre, exceeds and complicates its purported subject. An honest wedding poem, for example, would not only exalt unification, it would imagine the grief of parting. A poem about death might include the appetites and misbehaviors of the once animate flesh. Where labor performs the miracle of birth we’d find the torn perineum, or else a mother’s selfless care casts the shadow of infanticide. These shades are no more morbid than the melancholic edge of honey, the lachrymose swoon tempering an otherwise unpalatable sweetness.

I’d like a book of Mother’s Day poems that makes room inside the mother’s love (as D.W. Winnicott advised) for an inoculating dash of hatred. As I write this, I am seven months pregnant, and have been reading through “motherhood” poems, hoping to luck upon a few lines that distil the particular discomfort of a fetus punching one’s cervix from the inside, or maybe a description of the hormonal surging that riles this Humpty Dumpty with the libidinal fervor of a teenage boy.

Poems in this vein do exist, of course; in the Keatsian ideal of light-and-shade. I think of Dorthea Lasky’s nipple Clog, or Brenda Shaughnessy’s simple but fraught admission: he hurt me, this new /babe, then and now. /Perhaps he always will. In “Self-Portrait as C-Section Scar,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil invites us to put an ear to the dark slash between her hipbones and pretend the hum we hear is a skit of bees in spring. In “Holding On,” Brenda Hillman compares her clingy love to the lice she combs from the child’s hair. Sylvia Plath drapes her maternal cave with roses and soft rugs, but has the good sense to admit the dead boredom that exudes the earthen womb.

These are apt images for the complex exchange of life and death that childbearing performs, but they’re nothing you’d want to transcribe into a greeting card.

*

Death poems rarely comfort, except insofar as they affirm the complicated experience of mourning. Anyone who’s spent time with a loved-one’s dead body knows that in addition to grief and loss there is the uncanny valley of the as-yet intact corpse; the corpse which so resembles the living-beloved it inspires waves of ardor, curiosity, revulsion, and (like it or not) laughter. The living human body is grace, vulgar, source, and slapstick—and this is also true of the dead.

An occasional regret: After my friend S. died, his loved ones gathered in the concrete basement of a funeral home to watch his cremation. Unlike some, this particular mortuary did not host public viewings of cremations, but we lacked funds for a proper funeral, and so they did us a kindness. There was our friend, son, brother, boyfriend—laid out on a cold metal gurney, naked beneath a white sheet, looking exactly like himself; looking like he was feigning sleep and might, at any moment, reach out from under the sheet and flip us the bird.

And there was the cremation tech, furtively tucking his T-shirt into his pleated chinos, straightening his combover.

We stood awhile in silence. When the time came, the tech opened the oven door and pushed him in. He turned to our dead friend’s mother, “Do you want to do the honors?”

The woman was in shock. She’d flown all night across the country to be there with her boy. The cremation tech directed her to push a button on the oven, then he took a step back and folded his hands in front of his groin in a gesture of solemnity.

 She pushed the button, and all of a sudden the room rocked with a sound like a jet engine. We all startled. His mother fell back, momentarily fainting.

In a poem, I described the rush of fire in the chambered cochlea, and his mother slowly falling back into my arms, as if through water, but didn’t have the nerve to tell the whole truth. The moment was both tragic and slapstick, and yet my poem makes no mention of the combover, the clumsy attempt to improvise a ceremony, the earnest delivery of the crass phrase, “You wanna do the honors?” Or the fact that “the button” was a cartoonishly large red circle.

To describe profanities such as these invites shame, and yet this is the poet’s sacred duty. Not to parrot the hygienic speech of the public sphere, not to provide expected takes on triumph, and loss, and trauma, and love—but to give voice to those aspects of experience that fail to conform to our ideal, those inconvenient aspects otherwise deemed unutterable; to take one for the human team, and to risk looking bad in the process. What shames me more than my radar for gallows humor, is the fact that I was too chickenshit to include it in my poem.

*

In my mid-twenties I trained as an EMT. One night, on rotation in an Emergency Department in Fresno, “a code” was announced on the intercom and I was invited to assist. The nurses were excited; they clumped up inside the little room where “the code” was to be delivered. The paramedics seemed to sprint alongside the gurney as they wheeled him in, and then the staff descended in an orgy of activity. They’d already cut open his white T-shirt, and up both legs of his trousers, and now they were inserting the tubes and wires.

Every person in that room knew the man was gone with no hope of return, having died sometime in the last hour from cardiac arrest. But once care has been initiated there are laws about when and how it can be discontinued.

What followed was a bizarre combination of frantic intervention and resigned boredom. Every 60 seconds, a woman’s voice called out the time. Some of the people in the room were residents, and they were busy fulfilling core requirements, injecting the dead man with all manner of potions. We’ve been in this room for 4 minutes.

The nurse next to me was spacing out on a wall, using a manual respirator to rhythmically inflate the dead man’s lungs. He looked at me. “You wanna bag him?” he asked, already handing me the device. You wanna do the honors?

The dead man’s eyes were wide and empty. I looked into them and counted, squeezed the bag, counted, squeezed. To my left, another bored-seeming nurse was performing chest compressions. We’ve been in this room for six minutes. The meter for chest compressions is faster than you might think, same as the downbeat for Stayin’ Alive, or so they told us in EMT school. Same rhythm, a fellow student quipped, as Another one Bites the Dust.

We had been in that room for 10 minutes. The woman’s voice announced the time of death, and the flock began to yank the IVs and wires. The dead man’s expression did not change.

I have yet to find a poem for this occasion. Such stark fluorescence permits no good night to enter, whether gently or in rage. What arrogance must the poet summon to condemn the workaday indifference of medical professionals? Or to exalt the life of the stranger, who may have been a saintly soul, or for all I know, an unrepentant child-abuser?

In any case, I think we can agree, the indignities of the flesh do not annul the miracle of having it. Wrote the poet, Li-Young Lee of his splinter: I did not lift up my wound and cry, / Death visited here! Or as Sharon Olds tells Satan: Oh no, I loved them, too.

It’s that too that does it for me, communicates a truth far graver than any monster caricature ever could. One-dimensional monsters can be excised from a life with relative ease. But when the people who hurt us most also showed us care—when we loved them, too—we have to find a way to acknowledge both truths or risk excising aspects of ourselves from our own lives.

Since I was a kid, it was poetry that showed me how to make room for these irreconcilable contradictions. I haven’t conducted a survey or anything, but anecdotally I know this is what magnetized many of us to poetry. I wish I could say it gets easier, but year after year the doing takes courage, and they don’t exactly throw a parade when you succeed. I’d like to read a poem for that occasion, an ode to those who said yes to their human mess.

*

And so I don’t know what to say at the wedding when the silver taps the champagne flute. I want an epithalamium that acknowledges the specter of infidelity. I want to say that / forgiveness keeps on / dividing, that hope / gives issue to hope but once Denis Johnson’s surreptitious couple collides in the dark hallway, the image he lands on is of a couple/ of cadavers cut lately / from the scaffold. (Happy Valentine’s Day!) Taboo animates the extra-marital affair—we-shouldn’t is one of the great romantic tropes—but I’ve always suspected it is less the taboo of transgressing convention than of a crossroads attempt to cheat death. Which is also the premise of til death do us part.

Every threshold is membranous before it is breached; penetrable, but tough to see through. In ancient Greece, groups of children sang the epithalamium at the threshold of the nuptial bed—the chorus praising the minor God, Hymen. And no more, the seer Sappho sang, Proud young virginity's vaunt, allowing her maiden to meditate as she processes to their chamber, hymen yet intact, upon fate, an evil thing, / That the years fast-fleeting to fair maids bring. / When the roses are faded, the gold turns grey. /And the smoothness is furrowed.

Marriage, consummation, conception, birth, and decay: all beats in the lifecycle coexist. The occasions bleed together.

Come to think of it, one of my favorite death poems is an even better epithalamium: an early audio draft of Anne Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know.” The published version doesn’t do much for me (the line and where we touch we enter touch entirely, seems sort of throw away). But the earlier draft provides some of the most romantic lines I know:

and where we touch we are twice marked
and twice alone. Men kill for this
or for as much.

That’s what I call light-and-shade, what only a poem can do. Never mind the chasm between the dead and the living: the chasm between the living and the living will never be closed. We take the mic in hand, tipsy at the reception, and knowing there’s a decent chance the promise will be broken, bestow our blessing anyway. And why shouldn’t we? In the middle garden is the secret wedding, /that hides always under the other one, writes Matthew Rohrer in his “Epithalamion.” Someday, the promise might be broken, but one hand reaches through the grainy dusk toward another all the same. So what if the ring is a weed that will surely die? Today the flower is bright; the hands are reaching.

Our otherness is honey’s melancholy. To reach in spite of the space between us is the singular gesture of a good marriage. It will never result in an Edenic merger, but we can still make contact; in the death that is labor, borne in the caul, in the busted hymen, the petite mort, how in dying we give birth to ourselves if we’re lucky (and who is the midwife on the other side?) We reach, and sometimes we even touch, and that fleeting contact is sweet enough to kill for. When the poem says yes to our human mess, love is not profaned but sanctified.