The Hide-and-Seek Muse Read online

  Colors. In the desert, in the cities of armaments—

  You tell me leaves die without turning—

  Without color, they die. Without a sign

  Of how it ended, the season, how it was lost to us.

  To ask what is the role of the poet in a time of war might be to ask what is the place of the poet in the world at all. Armed strife and violent conflict between and among people are as old as human experience itself, older perhaps than singing, and certainly predating the writing of verse. Awareness of wars near and far, inner and outer, must always be a subtext of the examined life, even of the most private and interior sensibility, and can be a source of empowerment, despair, and anxiety for those wielding pens instead of swords.

  W. H. Auden stated that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but poets have always made wars—their heroes, victims, consequences—the subject of a myriad of poems. “Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles” begins the Iliad, attributed to Homer at about the 8th century BC, and in a translation by Sam Hamill, the Chinese poet Tu Fu (712 – 770 AD) writes, “Sleepless, memories of war betray me: / I am powerless against the world.” One thinks, too, of Thomas Hardy’s “The Man He Killed” or Sappho’s bold statement that what one loves is worth more poetry than any legion of horsemen or warriors.

  Carol Muske-Dukes’s “To a Soldier” is an epistle of sorts, an imperative, a call to a soldier in “a world away” to imagine autumn happening back home, in subdued “red/gold sentinels,” while in the desert, where the soldier lives, “in the cities of armaments – // … the leaves die without turning – / Without color, they die.” So much happens in these four tercets! A far cry from a “wish you were here” postcard, the poem indicts any poetic act that fails in such a context to push beyond consoling tropes and the familiar poetic recourses to myths such as the fall, “the one we love about / The season’s redemptive powers, its / Dazzling imitation of death.”

  In a surprising and powerful volta at the poem’s conclusion, the poet turns the missive on herself, on the reader, on “us.” It is we who are being called to imagine that other world, where soldiers, like leaves, die: “without a sign / Of how it ended, the season, how it was lost to us”—and where a lost season—lost time, lost life—is as crucial and significant as a lost battle.

  We must waken, Muske-Dukes admonishes, to our need to empathize, to overcome our great human tendency to forget, to distance, to protect ourselves from the conditions of others, to things happening elsewhere, something that is perhaps most dangerously possible in language. This poem is an act of passionate imagination—of the ability to empathize—without which, William Blake and others have challenged, social and cultural and political transformations are impossible. Wallace Stevens, who lived and wrote through two world wars, said that “the role of the writer in war remains the fundamental role of the writer intensified and concentrated.” Disarmingly simple and clear, Muske-Dukes’s lapidary, ardent poem recalls us to our losses, our selves, a responsibility that extends “to a soldier”—to a man, to a woman.

  LAURA KASISCHKE

  March

  It’s the murderer

  who got away with it

  sitting on a park bench

  thinking about snow

  and how it’s over. Little

  flower-faces peeking

  out of dirt

  to shriek hello. While

  the babies wheel

  by, absurdly bright. The old

  men in amber. The light

  on the steeples served up

  in cones of white.

  But something here

  is not quite right:

  Old lady

  in a little girl’s bonnet.

  Ugly dog

  with a child’s wide smile.

  Always, in spring

  you’ll find

  someone with regrets

  she’s allowed herself

  to forget:

  Eye at the keyhole.

  Milk in the saucepan.

  Strange wet kiss that went

  on and on and on.

  In the northern hemisphere, the month of March, marking as it does the pivotal vernal equinox, is often a period of flux, belonging both to established but waning winter and incipient spring. It is an interlude of muddy ruts, birds, stalwart shoots, late snows. It is also a month whose name, in English, like “May,” is rife with several meanings. No wonder poets are captivated by its messy thrall. To Linda Pastan (“March Snow”) it is “no more / than another promise, soon to be broken.” For Ted Hughes it is the month when “the earth, invalid, dropsied, bruised [is] wheeled / Out into the sun.” Dickinson refers 21 times to the word in her oeuvre, calling March “the Month of Expectation.”

  From the pronominal ambiguity of its opening quatrain, Laura Kasischke’s “March” signals a sense of a season awry. “It,” March, the speaker says, is “the murderer” who got away with “it” (the murder)—the month is both criminal and crime, perpetrator and victim. The poem, with its fairly tidy initial three-stressed lines that are quickly undercut by tipsy breakings out of meter, exaggerated and unpredictably situated, ambushing rhymes, and eerie, David Lynch-like imagery (“flower-faces peeking / out of dirt / to shriek hello”), indicates an uneasiness and unpredictable volatility. The murderer must know that he’s not scot-free. Winter is not over. “Something here,” as the poet puts it, “is not quite right.” What?

  “Riddle” and definition poems like this suggest a movement from a stated or implied question to an answer, a revelation. Kasischke is an adept at manipulating rhetoric in a way that uses peripheral details (as Donald Hall suggests, “Peripheral vision is where the symbols are”) to create those unteachable states of “internal difference —,” as Dickinson puts it, “Where the Meanings, are —.” And so, after presenting us with several cinematic shots of a weirdly warped “cheery” spectacle of spring in a park (“absurdly bright” babies wheeling by, old men cast in “amber,” “the light / on the steeples served up / in cones of white”), which reaches a particularly distorted moment in stanza five:

  Old lady

  in a little girl’s bonnet.

  Ugly dog

  with a child’s wide smile,

  Kasischke makes a shift in the penultimate stanza from an outwardly viewed scene of description, and into another, closer-to-the-bone point of view. Although bearing the sweep of a general, imperative address (“Always, in spring / you’ll find”), the pronoun shifts (you, she) here suggest a far more personal, particular culpability and extremity than the guilt of murdering March thinking it’s gotten away with something, the crime of winter erased by snow that’s now safely a thing of the past. The vicissitudes, the ambivalent uncertainties of March awaken in a certain kind of mind or temperament (the speaker’s?) “regrets / she’s allowed herself / to forget”:

  Eye at the keyhole.

  Milk in the saucepan.

  Strange wet kiss that went

  on and on and on.

  These last lines, in particular, reveal Kasischke’s lyric gift. A whole spectrum of guilt and repining, reinforced by insistent rhythmic stresses (eye and key, milk and sauce, the protracted, spondaic “Strange wet kiss” and relentless “on and on and on”) are suggested by this catalog—spying, voyeurism, secrets, forgetfulness, carelessness, lust. Perhaps this is the answer to what’s “not quite right” about March; it is we who are never completely quite right. Rather, we, like this month, must belong both to our winter and our spring weathers. Our transgressions, from the minor—accidentally scalded milk—to the more strangely erotic (that covert kiss), are never something that can be completely put away. “It” is never over, and the flux of awakening to a renewed spring brings it psychological stirrings as well, including those “regrets” we might choose to bury or forget.

  L. S. KLATT

  Hearsay

  The mailman sent piecemeal a rare donkey

  to the city of waters; to the city of waters

&
nbsp; a rare donkey was sent, swaddled

  in blueprint.

  And it came to pass that the waters

  were troubled. Woe

  in the great city.

  Nothing is more beautiful than to admit

  the truth, or more difficult.

  The head & tail & all that is in between.

  When piecemeal the beast was sent,

  the engineers knew their place.

  For if disassembled like a boat

  the rare donkey could be

  put together.

  But to separate the members of a living

  thing, to cast dispersions on it,

  this is to create a question

  unanswerable.

  First Frost on Windshield

  Perfect stitches suture the glass, & if patient enough

  watch them disappear.

  Like the dead dog in the middle of the road, the invisible

  dog that an ice cream truck hit & the rest of us

  skirted. Was the last thing tasted

  the last thing?

  It whimpers, the muzzle of the dog head; the hackles

  become rimed with diamante. I say:

  here are lucent things.

  When frost arrives, it has the soul of famine,

  but also catatonic the headlights as the crow flies.

  What Helen Vendler called, in relation to John Keats and Wallace Stevens, “the taming of mind to the season,” is something poets often do, and November—the tail end of autumn, the harbinger of winter—has a particular way of taking ahold of and a hold in poets. Merwin called November a “debt.” Plath considered it her “property” (“Two times a day / I pace it, sniffing / The barbarous holly with its viridian / Scallops, pure iron, // And the wall of old corpses”). Stevens named it a region (“It is like a critic of God, the world // And human nature, pensively seated / On the waste throne of his own wilderness” from “The Region November”), Williams a design:

  Let confusion be the design

  and all my thoughts go,

  swallowed by desire: recess

  from promises in

  the November of your arms.

  (from “Design for November”)

  Though not specifically about November, two recent poems by L.S. Klatt, in their different ways, seem to grow out of what Stevens has elsewhere called the “exhilaration of changes.” “Hearsay” (which in its fabular imaginings, disturbed logic, and philosophical figuration reminds me very much of Stevens and his notion of “the malady of the quotidian”) possesses what poet and critic Ron Slate has called Klatt’s “domesticated wildness.” It relays a tale that feels like a parable, mixing ordinary details (the mailman, the engineers) with Biblical syntax (“And it came to pass”) and a cryptic, aphoristic, philosophically charged sense of mastery/mystery (“Nothing is more beautiful than to admit / the truth, or more difficult”). It’s clear that Klatt means us to read his poem as more than just “hearsay.” Everything about the poem is charged with symbolic resonance. Perhaps we’re meant to read the poem as a definition of “Hearsay” or rumor, and to feel the consequences of what happens when something rare is taken apart and disseminated and then partially or inaccurately reassembled in a way that is dissembling and “unanswerable.”

  It is hard for me not to read “Hearsay” as a political poem, a comment on what can happen to something, say, like the democratic party (with its donkey mascot) if, “piecemeal,” it is sent in shards (“The head & tail & all that is in between”) to “the great city.” The poem gives us much to contemplate in any season, but especially in a presidential election year. When the donkey was in pieces, the speaker tells us, “the engineers knew their place. // For if disassembled like a boat / the rare donkey could be / put together.” There are clear echoes here of another provocatively riddling poem, Humpty Dumpty, which can be read, on the one hand, nonsensically, but which also suggests political interpretations, as well. What happens, Klatt’s poem warns, when “the members of a living / thing” are separated and cast with dispersions? Can such a broken body ever be reassembled? Restored to meaning? Is there an answer to such a riddle?

  If “Hearsay” seems a nod to the “region November” of the body politic, “First Frost on Windshield” is more forthright in its engagement with the changing season. But there is nothing immediately transparent about this poem, which, like “Hearsay,” is concerned with things (like a country, a body, a year) that are broken and must be “sutured,” reassembled in the mind of the reader. With characteristic word-play (the way “patient,” for example, works with a kind of implied imperative—“If you are patient enough you can watch the stitches of frost disappear”—as well as evoking the body of a patient requiring repair), rhetorical elision, and disjunction, Klatt moves with an undiscursive, figurative forcefulness from his initial image of a frosted window glass to what Harold Bloom, again in relation to Stevens (and Dickinson), calls an antithetical image “that disrupt[s] the realm of bodily eye”:

  Like the dead dog in the middle of the road, the invisible

  dog that an ice cream truck hit & the rest of us

  skirted. Was the last thing tasted

  the last thing?

  A “dead dog”? What? And not one most likely struck, say, yesterday, but a while back, in the season of ice cream trucks. And an invisible dog, a dog no one saw. And a dog which, perhaps because “skirted,” continues to haunt, whimpering still (not the whole dog, mind you, but just its muzzle, part of its head)? Through the lenses of memory, guilt, and remorse, the hackles of the dog, the speaker says, “become rimed with diamante,” with the first frost of conscience, the consciousness of cowardice, of avoidance, of avoidance of death. Klatt concludes his lyric, again, with a vatic, aphoristic statement that, with its elided, unstable syntax, is not entirely decipherable, at least not through dialectic or ordinary logic or syllogism:

  I say:

  here are lucent things.

  When frost arrives, it has the soul of famine,

  but also catatonic the headlights as the crow flies.

  This kind of language has an almost nonsensical feel on first reading, but if we allow its juxtaposed figures (“[frost] has the soul of famine”) and idiomatic phrases (“as the crow flies”) to conflate (the experience of doing so is akin to looking at Magic Eye® images), we emerge from the poem with a new sense of the interconnectedness of the fierce, implacable motions of the natural world, the seasons, and the human capacity either to be numb or alive to these truths. “Surprise,” Bloom writes, “is the American poetic stance.” Just as November takes us aback, with its inklings, frosts, shearings, and beheaded blooms, Klatt’s poems startle us with their imaginative negative capabilities, their choice of lucent vision over any form of personal, political, or artistic numbness.

  JENNIFER ATKINSON

  Lemon Tree

  after Agnes Martin

  Tilled snow

  Plucked arpeggios

  Of revery rungs

  Laddered for zero

  The inverse of music

  Undelirious lines

  Correggio’s

  Unchecked hand

  Minus the background

  Noise of content

  The aftereffect of citrus

  Scent and the curious

  Dryness left

  On your hands

  When you pare

  The fruit opens

  The eidetic lyricism of Jennifer Atkinson’s poetry owes in no small part to her limned verbal restraint and passionate sparseness. An almost sacred silence blooms among the lenten boughs of her elegant phrases, allowing the perfumed mystery of what can never be fully known to palpably ghost the natural world that is often the occasion for her spiritual, political, aesthetic, and erotic meditations.

  Wonderful, then, and not surprising to find that Atkinson’s poem “Lemon Tree,” the epigraph tells us, is in part modeled upon and inspired by the work of painter Agnes Martin, and perhaps specifically by M
artin’s painting also entitled “Lemon Tree.” Martin (1912 – 2004) is best known for the austere, exquisite text/ile-haunted screens of her six-foot-square canvases, described by art historian Anna C. Chave as covered with hand-rendered, “thinly lined grids (composed purposely, unlike graph paper, of rectangles and not squares).” Martin’s work, Chave tells us, concerns states of “innocence, happiness, beauty, and exaltation. Those states [Martin] saw as inextricably linked with experiences of nature, and her titles often feature natural images, such as in The Islands, or Night Sea, Leaves, and Lemon Tree. As to how Martin found her ‘vision,’ she explained: ‘When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do.’” Martin’s moving canvases are so faintly etched and opaquely luminous that Nicolas Calas referred to her project as an “art of invisibility.”

  Floating over and into Atkinson’s hibernal pagescape of “tilled snow” and “rungs / laddered for zero / The inverse of music,” the “lemon tree” of the title insinuates its attar, its inkling of warmer climes, of hope itself. In a poetic essay on Jean Valentine, writing a word / changing it, published by Albion Books, 2011 (Valentine being another deft poet of “strange and irreducible lines like an antenna broken off of a radio, like a caduceus”), the poet C. D. Wright says that Agnes Martin (like Atkinson, I would add) was interested not so much in painting grey geese descending as “the emotions we feel when we see grey geese descending.” The sensibility here is of

  Undelirious lines

  Coreggio’s

  Unchecked hand

  Minus the background

  Noise of content.

  This poem offers not, then, an aesthetic of tropical, lavish embellishment or of Keatsian fine excess (or of Correggio’s lavish, fully fleshed opulence, for instance), but rather a pure, spare lyric, with its “story” conveyed not by the dramatic static of content but by the suggestion of emotional movement, an implication of a whole life sketched in the residue of its “aftereffect … / Scent and the curious / Dryness left / On your hands.”