Now & Then, page 23
themes: the brokenness of the world, its violence and injustice, and her
longing for wholeness, the longing that sent her back to her Christian
roots at the end of her life. It has no title:
Scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water
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but sky-moon
complete, transcending
all violation.
Here she seems to be talking to herself about the shape of a life:
Once Only
All which, because it was
flame and song and granted us
joy, we thought we’d do, be, revisit,
turns out to have been what it was
that once, only; every initiation
did not begin
a series, a build-up: the marvelous
did happen in our lives, our stories
are not drab with its absence: but don’t
expect now to return for more. Whatever more
there will be will be
unique as those were unique. Try
to acknowledge the next
song in its body-halo of flames as utterly
present, as now or never.
And here is the final poem in the book. It must be the last one she
wrote:
Aware
When I opened the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
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acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures. I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I’ll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.
Eavesdrop peacefully: it’s what she’s given us to do.
august 8
Summer Shakespeare
Outdoor Shakespeare, that unlikely ritual of the American summer, can
be very magical. I saw a cheerful, knockabout production of Two Gentle-
men from Verona the other night. It was one of Shakespeare’s first plays.
It was wonderful to watch it in that leisurely way, the air just cooling
after a day of simmering heat. The lights went out, the audience subsided
into attention, and then the lights went up again, and two actors, dressed
in those peculiar Elizabethan garments, came sauntering onto the stage,
the little world of the stage, which the young Shakespeare was, over the
course of the next twenty years, going to own utterly.
A little flourish of music and we came to the opening speech: he’s
already learned the trick of beginning in the middle of things. One
gentleman, Valentine, is telling the other, Proteus, that he can’t talk him
into staying home. And the spectator has nothing to do but sink into the
rhythms of the language:
Cease to persuade, my loving Proteus;
Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits.
Were’t not affection chains thy tender days
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To the sweet glances of thy honoured love,
I rather would entreat thy company
To see the wonders of the world abroad
Than, living dully sluggardized at home,
Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.
But since thou lov’st, love still, and thrive therein,
Even as I would when I to love begin.
We are to gather from this that the two are friends, that one is about to
embark on travels to see the world, that the other is in love with someone
and is staying home. I got it all, more or less. But I mainly felt that familiar,
and always surprising, intense happiness at the seemingly effortless verbal
brilliance and playfulness of his language: “Home-keeping youth have
ever homely wits”; “affection chains thy tender days”; the completely
wonderful, casually over-the-top “living dully sluggardized at home”; and
the dead-on accuracy of “wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.”
We had been talking before the lights went down about the restlessness
of college kids at home for the summer and remembering our own sum-
mers during college, not knowing quite what to do with ourselves, liv-
ing in the family house, bored with our summer jobs, wildly restive. And
there it was, in his language, described with perfect accuracy: “wear out
thy youth with shapeless idleness.” The play was probably written around
1592, which would have made him twenty-eight years old. It could very
well have called to his mind his own experience of leaving Stratford for
London. The self-possession in the writing seems breathtaking.
I somehow escaped ever taking a Shakespeare course in college. I’m
sure there are studies of how he learned his craft—of the conventions
of wit and verbal play that were already out there, the shtick that he had
already learned, that he must have sucked up like a sponge from plays he
had seen and that he could already depend on. But I haven’t read those
studies, and part of the pleasure of the play for me was guessing at how
he proceeded. The next bit of the opening scene, verbal patter between
Valentine and Proteus on the subject of love, also supremely skillful and
effortless, is probably pure shtick:
Valentine: Love is your master, for he masters you;
And he that is so yoked by a fool
Methinks should not be chronicled for wise.
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Proteus: Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud
The eating canker dwells, so doting love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all.
Valentine: And writers say, as the most forward bud
Is eaten by the canker ere it blow,
Even so by love the young and tender wit
Is turned to folly, blasting in the bud,
Losing his verdure, even in the prime,
And all the fair effects of future hope.
But wherefore waste I time to counsel thee
That art a votary to fond desire?
In the next bit, Valentine leaves, and Proteus, alone on the stage, makes a
little speech to the audience right out of Elizabethan love sonnets (which
Shakespeare was probably also writing at this time):
He after honour hunts, I after love:
He leaves his friends to dignify them more;
I leave myself, my friends and all for love.
Thou, Julia, thou hast metamorphosed me:
Made me neglect my studies, lose my time,
War with good counsel, set the world at naught;
Made wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought.
Another set piece, fluent—and with that delicious word “metamor-
phosed” in it—that the available writing style had probably told him how
to do. Then Valentine’s servant Speed comes in, looking for him. Proteus
tells him that Valentine has already “shipped.” The servant—you know
that the actor who plays the servant will be a featured comic actor—puns
on “shipped” and “sheep”:
Twenty to one, then, he is shipped already,
And I have played the sheep in losing him.
Sheep jokes are in the offing. And where there are sheep jokes, there
will be jokes about horns. Adultery—especially men whose women slept
around on them—seems to have been a source of reliable hilarity to the
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late sixteenth-century English. Such men were “cuckolds” and—why I
don’t know—cuckolds had “horns.”
Proteus:
Indeed, a sheep doth very often stray,
And if the shepherd be awhile away.
Speed:
You conclude that my master is a shepherd then, and
I a sheep?
Proteus:
I do.
Speed:
Why then, my horns are his horns, whether I wake or
sleep.
More shtick. I was thinking about being in love in college in the summer-
time. Also making mental notes to myself about the brilliant and easy way
the play was unfolding. We had blankets for the later acts if it cooled off, a
bottle of white wine. And the last of the sunset sent up a little flush above
the outdoor stage.
august 15
Louise Glück
For the lucky, born into a geography not visited by war or political ter-
ror, the events in life that leave the soul scoured and disoriented are death
and divorce. Divorce is a kind of death. Even for people glad to get out of
relationships, the props of a life have to be remade, families, habits, houses,
even towns. And it can leave a life stripped bare.
Not surprising that it is a subject for poetry, but it is surprising how
little serious and sustained examination of the subject there has been
in our poetry, given how common and how devastating the experience
can be.
For the last ten years Louise Glück, one of the purest and most accom-
plished lyric poets now writing, has turned from the form of her early
books, traditional collections of poems written over a period of time, to
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a series of book-length sequences. They are written in her characteristi-
cally spare and elegant style. They are books of individual poems, but they
make a narrative sequence, and so they are able to explore a subject in
many moods and from many points of view in a way that is reminiscent
of the old sonnet sequences that explored all the phases of a love affair.
The first one, Ararat, dealt with a family of three women in the after-
math of the death of a husband and father. The second one, the Pulitzer
Prize–winning The Wild Iris, was a meditation on the turning of the year
in a northern New England garden. The third, Meadowlands, based on
the story of Ulysses and Penelope and Telemachus, was about a marriage
coming apart. The newest one, published this year, is Vita Nova (Ecco
Press). Its subject is that life after divorce. It begins from something like
the place Emily Dickinson described so accurately:
After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
Here are a couple of the poems:
The Garment
My soul dried up.
Like a soul cast into a fire, but not completely,
not to annihilation. Parched,
it continued. Brittle,
not from solitude but from mistrust,
the aftermath of violence.
Spirit, invited to leave the body,
to stand exposed a moment,
trembling, as before
your presentation to the divine—
spirit lured out of solitude
by the promise of grace,
how will you ever again believe
the love of another being?
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My soul withered and shrank.
The body became for it too large a garment.
And when hope was returned to me
it was another hope entirely.
Earthly Love
Conventions of the time
held them together.
It was a period
(very long) in which
the heart once given freely
was required, a formal gesture,
to forfeit liberty: a consecration
at once moving and hopelessly doomed.
As to ourselves:
fortunately we diverged
from these requirements,
as I reminded myself
when my life shattered.
So that what we had for so long
was, more or less,
voluntary, alive.
And only long afterward
did I begin to think otherwise.
We are all human—
we protect ourselves
as well as we can
even to the point of denying
clarity, the point
of self-deception. As in
the consecration to which I alluded.
And yet, within this deception,
true happiness occurred.
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So that I believe I would
repeat these errors exactly.
Nor does it seem to me
crucial to know
whether or not such happiness
is built on illusion:
it has its own reality.
And in either case, it will end.
august 22
In Memoriam: Sherley Anne Williams
The novelist and poet Sherley Anne Williams died last month, of cancer
at the age of fifty-four. She is probably best known for her 1986 novel,
Dessa Rose. She also wrote children’s books and a one-actor play, Letters
from a New England Negro. She began her writing life as a poet. She was
born in Bakersfield, California, the child of migrant farm workers; she
was orphaned at sixteen and survived, as her parents had done, picking
crops in the field. I was struck by something she was quoted as saying
in the New York Times obituary. She was talking about finding herself,
a young woman who had seemed to have no prospects, with the seem-
ingly limitless opportunities that she felt as a student at the state college
right in the middle of the Central Valley of California where she and her
parents had done back-breaking stoop labor in the fields. She discovered
in Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes the poetry of African Americans.
“I was just captivated by their language, their speech and their character
because I always liked the way black people talk. So I wanted to work in
that writing.” There couldn’t be a much better description of the enabling
power of a tradition.
Here’s an example:
Straight Talk from Plain Women
Evangeline made her
own self over in
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’65, say she
looked in the mirror
at her face saw it
was pretty (her legs
was always fine and
she’d interrupt a
dude’s rap to say how
it was a common
characteristic
amongst our women
Did
the same thang with her
neck pointin to
its length, its class. And
we dug where she
was comin from specially
that pretty part, how
she carried herself
with style, said go’n girl
so be it
Evangeline made her
self over and who
eva else didn’t see
We is her witness.
And here’s another. It’s about learning manners and another kind of tradi-
tion, the one that comes to children from listening:
You Were Never Miss Brown to Me
I.
We were not raised to look in
a grown person’s mouth when they
spoke or to say ma’am or sir—
only the last was sometimes
thought fast even rude but daddy
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dismissed this: it was yea and
nay in the Bible and this
was a New Day. He liked even
less honorary forms—Uncle,
Aunt, Big Mama—mama to
who? he would ask. Grown
people were Mr. and Miss
admitting one child in many
to the privilege of their
given names. We were raised to
make “Miss Daisy” an emblem
of kinship and of love; you
were never Miss Brown to me.
II.
I call you Miss in tribute
to the women of that time,
the mothers of friends, the friends
of my mother, mamma
herself, women of mystery
and wonder who traveled some
to get to that Project. In the
places of their childhoods, the
troubles they had getting grown,
the tales of men they told among
themselves as we sat unnoted
at their feet we saw some image
