Marie Ponsot

I don’t know what to say to you, neighbor, as you shovel snow from your part of our street neat in your Greek black. I’ve waited for chance to find words; now, by chance, we meet. We took our boys to the same kindergarten, thirteen years ago when our husbands went. Both boys hated school, dropped out feral, dropped in to separate troubles. You shift snow fast, back bent, but your boy killed himself, six days dead. My boy washed your wall when the police were done. He says, “We weren’t friends?” and shakes his head, “I told him it was great he had that gun,” and shakes. I shake, close to you, close to you. You have a path to clear, and so you do.

“Fine bitches all, and Molly Dance...” —Djuna Barnes Come for duty’s sake (as girls do) we watch The sly very old woman wile away from her pious And stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin. She pours big drinks. We think of what Has crumpled, folded, slumped her flesh in And muddied her once tumbling blood that, young, Sped her, threaded with brave power: a Tower, Now Babel, then of ivory, of the Shulamite, Collapsed to this keen dame moving among Herself. She hums, she plays with used bright Ghosts, makes real dolls, and drinking sings Come here My child, and feeling it, dear. A crooking finger Shows how hot the oven is. (Also she is alive with hate. Also she is afraid of hell. Also, we wish We might, illiberal, uncompassionate, Run from her smell, her teeth in the dish.) Even dying, her life riots in her. We stand stock still Though aswarm with itches under her disreputable smiles. We manage to mean well. We endure, and more. We learn time’s pleasure, catch our future and its cure. We’re dear blood daughters to this every hag, and near kin To any after this of those our mirrors tell us foolishly envy us, Presuming us, who are young, to be beautiful, kind, and sure. March 1958

Fine bitches all, and Molly Dance   ... — Djuna Barnes Come for duty’s sake (as girls do) we watch The sly very old woman wile away from her pious And stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin. She pours big drinks. We think of what Has crumpled, folded, slumped her flesh in And muddied her once tumbling blood that, young, Sped her, threaded with brave power: a Tower, Now Babel, then of  ivory, of  the Shulamite, Collapsed to this keen dame moving among Herself. She hums, she plays with used bright Ghosts, makes real dolls, and drinking sings Come here My child, and feel it, dear. A crooking finger Shows how hot the oven is. (Also she is alive with hate. Also she is afraid of  hell. Also, we wish We might, illiberal, uncompassionate, Run from her smell, her teeth in the dish.) Even dying, her life riots in her. We stand stock still Though aswarm with itches under her disreputable smiles. We manage to mean well. We endure, and more. We learn time’s pleasure, catch our future and its cure. We’re dear blood daughters to this every hag, and near kin To any after this of  those our mirrors tell us foolishly envy us, Presuming us, who are young, to be beautiful, kind, and sure. Originally appeared in the March 1958 issue of Poetry magazine.

Two sisters of ancient Greece both laid claim To the finest, fairest rear of their time. Which tail forged ahead? Which bottom’s true fame Topped? Which back was in front, which terce most prime? A judge chose the elder girl’s back matter; Her finish was more fine and far matter. She got the prize, and his heart; soon they wed. “But the younger’s sitter’s not a smatter Less meet; I’ll marry her,” his brother said. It went so well, their joys were so perfected, That after them a temple was erected In honor of  Venus Callipygus. No other church — though I don’t know its rite — Could so, from head to epididymis, Move me with deep devotion to its site. Translated from the French of  Jean de La Fontaine, Contes , Part I, 6.

She always writes poems. This summer she’s starting a novel. It’s in trouble already. The characters are easy—a girl and her friend who is a girl and the boy down the block with his first car, an older boy, sixteen, who sometimes these warm evenings leaves his house to go dancing in dressy clothes though it’s still light out. The girl has a brother who has lots of friends, is good in math, and just plain good which doesn’t help the story. The story should have rescues & escapes in it which means who’s the bad guy; he couldn’t be the brother or the grandpa or the father either, or even the boy down the block with his first car. People in novels have to need something, she thinks, that it takes about two hundred pages to get. She can’t imagine that. Nothing she needs can be got; if it could she’d go get it: the answer to nightmares; a mother who’d be proud of her; doing things a mother could be proud of; having hips & knowing how to squeal at the beach laughing when the boy down the block picked her up & carried her & threw her in the water. If she’d laughed squealing he might still take her swimming & his mother wouldn’t say she’s crazy, she would not have got her teeth into his shoulder till well yes she bit him, and the marks lasted & lasted, his mother said so, but that couldn’t be in a novel. She’ll never squeal laughing, she’d never not bite him, she hates cute girls, she hates boys who like them. Biting is embarrassing and wrong & she has no intention of doing it again but she would if he did if he dared, and there’s no story if there’s no hope of change.

From loss of  the old and lack of  the new From failure to make the right thing do Save us, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. From words not the word, from a feckless voice From poetic distress and from careless choice Exclude our intellects,  James Joyce. From genteel angels and apostles unappalled From Hollywood visions as virgins shawled Guard our seeing, Grünewald. From calling a kettle an existential pot, From bodying the ghost of  whatever is not, John save us, O most subtle Scot. From pace without cadence, from pleasures slip-shod From eating the pease and rejecting the pod Wolfgang keep us, lover of God. Couperin come with your duple measure Alter our minds against banal pleasure. Dürer direct with strictness our vision; Steady this flesh toward your made precision. Mistress of accurate minor pain, Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane. From pretending to own what we secretly seek, From (untimely, discourteous) the turned other cheek, Protect our honor, Demetrius the Greek. From ignorance of structural line and bone From passion not pointed on truth alone Attract us, painters on Egyptian stone. From despair keep us, Aquin’s dumb son; From despair keep us, Saint Welcome One; From lack of despair keep us, Djuna and John Donne. That zeal for free will get us in deep, That the chance to choose be the one we keep That free will steel self  in us against self-defense That free will repeal in us our last pretense That free will heal us Jeanne d’Arc, Job,  Johnnie Skelton, Jehan de Beauce, composer  Johann, Dark  John Milton, Charter Oak  John, Strike deep, divide us from cheap-got doubt; Leap, leap between us and the easy out; Teach us to seize, to use, to sleep well, to let go; Let our loves, freed in us, gaudy and graceful, grow. Originally appeared in the June 1957 issue of Poetry magazine.

(for Douglas, at one) Archaic, his gestures hieratic, just like Caesar or Sappho or Mary’s Jesus or Ann’s Mary or Jane Austen once, or me or your mother’s you the sudden baby surges to his feet and sways, head forward, chin high, arms akimbo, hands dangling idle, elbows up, as if winged. The features of his face stand out amazed, all eyes as his aped posture sustains him aloft a step a step a rush and he walks, Young Anyone, his lifted point of view far beyond the calendar. What time is it? Firm in time he is out of date— like a cellarer for altar wines tasting many summers in one glass, or like a grandmother in whose womb her granddaughter once slept in egg inside grandma’s unborn daughter’s folded ovaries.

A moral tale, for Sauternes, the fungus cenaria , and the wild old Never prophesy. You can’t. So don’t try. Lust, pride, and lethargy may cause us misery or bliss. The meanest mistake has a point to make. Hear this — what his vintner d’Eyquem said once the lord d’Eyquem was dead: “The wine that year promised bad or none. He’d let it go too late. Rot had crawled through all the vines, greasy scum on every cluster dangling at the crotches of the leaves. Should have been long picked but he’d said, ‘No. Wait for me,’ off to wait on a new woman, grapes on the verge of ripe when he left. Coupling kept him till rot wrapped the grapes like lace & by the time she’d kicked him out the sun had got them, they hung shriveled in the blast. Well, he rode home cocky & bullied the grapes into the vats rot & all, spoiled grapes, too old, too soon squeezed dry. The wine makes. The wine makes thick, gold-colored, & pours like honey. We try it. Fantastic! not like honey, punchy, you’ve never drunk anything like it — refreshing, in a rush over a heat that slows your throat — wanting to keep that flavor stuck to the edge of your tongue where your taste is, keep it like the best bouquet you can remember of sundown summer & someone coming to you smiling. The taste has odor like a new country, so fine at first you can’t take it in it’s so strange. It’s beautiful & believe me you love to go slow.” moral: Age is not all dry rot. It’s never too late. Sweet is your real estate.

On reading Susanne K. Langer’s Mind If  leaf-trash chokes the stream-bed, reach for rock-bottom as you rake the muck out. Let it slump dank, and dry fading, flat above the bank. Stand back. Watch the water vault ahead. Its thrust sweeps the surface clean, shores the debris, as it debrides its stone path to the lake, clarity carrying clarity. To see clear, resist the drag of  images. Take nature as it is, not Dame nor Kind. Act in events; touch what you name. Abhor easy obverts of natural metaphor. Let human speech breathe out its best poor bridges from mind to world, mind to self, mind to mind. Yet, I admit the event of the wood thrush: In a footnote Langer (her book rapids-clean like the spring-water aired over sleeked rock) says she witnessed an August bird in shock when a hawk snatched its mate. It perched, rushed notes fluting two life-quotas in one flood, its lungs pushing its voice, flushing the keen calls, pumped out as the heart pumps blood, not in twilight or warning but noon & wrong, its old notes whistled too fast but accurate. I read this drenched in bird-panic, its spine- fusing loss all song, all loss; that loss mine awash in unanswered unanswered song. And I cannot claim we are not desolate.

A new embroidery of flowers, canary color, dots the grass already dotty with aster-white and clover. I warn, “They won’t last, out of water.” The children pick some anyway. In or out of  water children don’t last either. I watch them as they pick. Still free of  what’s next and what was yesterday they pick today.