BOMBUS IMPATIENS, OR THE EASTERN BUMBLE BEE
Dear L: I keep trying to make my poems easier.
In ways I feel you'd have to disapprove.
Sometimes the writing goes too fast for me,
and I love chasing along behind it,
pushing myself faster, faster!
But my guess is that's when I need to slow down,
let things sink in. Let water,
as Marianne Moore might say,
find its own level.
Whether it connects
to what I've just said or not--
I'm re-reading Edward Said, on "Late Style,"
which caught my attention thirteen years ago
as I tried to sift through my own feelings
on "aging," on "getting older." It was pretty simple,
wasn't it? I kept rebuking myself
for getting tired, for not being able to stick to a task
in the ways I used to, not being able to stay up late into the night
following a poem, puzzling it out.
And then in the morning,
the poem wasn't there anymore.
Robert used to say the Muse is jealous,
the Muse will come when you have too many other things to do,
and then say "prove it! prove how much you love me."
My body, aging, had too many other things to do. Has.
But I thought of this again when Robert said, recently,
he'd gone to his doctor with a worry: "Doctor!
I seem to need to take a nap every day! What --
[you can tell where this is going] What should I do?"
Years ago, one February, in deepest darkest
Ohio, after we'd almost lost her off the road in a snow drift,
Brenda came to me in a dream, offering
this advice: "each place in your poems
where you have these staples, like this and this,
you need to put in a graham cracker instead."
Setting aside some not so buried allusion
to Jorie's ellipses, setting aside a memory I loved
of the "honeyed, spectra, light" from Brenda's
own recycling poem, and probably setting aside
her earlier actual observation at my kitchen table
that I "needed to have an affair" (I hadn't told her
my marriage was coming apart and I was trying
to hold it together -- or myself, together --
with staples? when of course it was time
to say that's how the graham cracker crumbles...)
there’s something to those little sticky crumbs of sweetness.
In moments of difficulty. I wonder whether
it isn't a kind of offering to the powers
greater than we are and utterly unknowable,
simply to savor those crumbs. I don't want to be
the girl who wanted to be god; I'd like to put toothpaste
in a poem. (Wrong moment to remember my
horrifically cheerful orthodontist, tightening
the screws.) Ruskin says, how can I be fifty years old
and not yet have learned about moss! But
not to castigate himself, instead to signal that he's
about to bring in a moss-covered brick
from his back garden and look at it, closely,
draw it carefully, read whatever
botanists and Alexander Pope had to say
about moss. Pope says: "Grant but as many
sorts of mind as moss," to which Ruskin responds
that he couldn't have known
the hundredth part of the number. Said suggests
that there is a "relationship between bodily condition
and aesthetic style," because we "belong
to the order of nature," but "what we understand
of that nature" belongs "to the order of history."
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Or not. And the first time I read it,
I thought "beat not the poor desk."
If I was so busy thinking I could will myself
not to age (technically speaking,
that's possible, although unhelpfully abrupt)--
I wouldn't have any access to that moment,
to the successive moments of being
whatever I was being in relation to
whatever was going on. And on and on
(like this letter, my dear). That I needed
to cultivate a little negative capability,
and abjure this irritating reaching after conclusions.
But now, as the rain outside the window
rains down on my shoulder-high tomato plants,
(or what is left of them after the wind blew them over
yesterday--and what should I do with a bowlful
of marble-hard pale green cherry-tomatoes?)
I wonder whether Said's "Timeliness
and Lateness" has something to say about
this body earth as we hurtle towards the end
of the Anthropocene. What have we done!
What are we doing? What should we do?
Do you remember back in Berkeley when we began
to learn about fractals, about chaos theory,
how there were patterns we hadn't learned yet
to understand as patterns? How beautiful,
that noise could turn out to be not noise,
but music, meaning, in a system we had failed
to imagine but could now appear to us if only
we listened, attended, didn't censor
what seemed like anomalies, outliers.
What do they think is happening,
the old fools, Larkin asks. And he's just
being savage about ordinary aging. What
do we think is happening. Each new extreme
will be more extreme than the next,
as if new vowels would shatter
the shape of the mouth to pronounce them:
OTOTOTO! OTOTOTO!
So what? Be kind, kind to yourself and to
each other. Eat a graham cracker.
Anyway. Something about the personal
late style, and the planetary late style
now seem to coincide. And so I rage
against the tiny white worm that has eaten
all the purple petals from the otherwise
flourishing bee balm I hoped
would have nourished
a rapidly declining population of bees.
But who am I to prefer the bee to the worm.
Maybe it's the worm's turn, now. Maybe.
SEVERITY AND INVENTION
What A finds so admirable about S
is his severity as well as his invention
of a technique that provides music
with an alternative to tonal harmony
and to classical inflection, color, rhythm.
Severity and invention—
how the v’s in the middle of those words yoke together
opposing impulses
how the yoked wings levitate and hover
over inflection, color, rhythm
like the revenant crows
over the late v-ridden wheatfield of van Gogh’s:
V after dark V darkly arriving, revving –
making everything veer and waver:
the vibrating grain, the brush, the path, the wind—
making the visible reverberate
and the buried invisible—
the vanishing point—
infused in the very canvas.
Also, unhinged, set free:
available if one is able
to flutter over the void
at eventide
and find in the vanishing light
some wavelength of necessity and delight.
Note: The epigraph is taken from Edward Said’s On Late Style:Music and Literature Against the Grain. “A” here is Adorno; “S” is Schoenberg.
A CERTAIN AGE
Books of a certain age begin to break open
along their spines. Wrinkles deepen, creases crack,
glue desiccates and flakes to dust. The pages
soften, gradually detaching themselves,
like conversations or sentences trailing off:
“The Outer – from the Inner”
“I roll myself upon you as on a bed, I resign myself to the dusk.”
As if Emily lets the magnitude of space
keep opening out from inside the broken book;
as if Walt lets the pages float down into darkness.
“Click. Click. Goes the dredge.”
“And he feels afraid.”
(I couldn’t make it up – those breaks are real.)
It’s not until the next page Elizabeth lets
the “untidy activity” continue,
and on the next page that Wallace lets himself,
in the midst of summer, “imagine winter”—
I haven’t lost any page I can’t get back;
after the break I can still keep on reading.
But in the books I love most there is hardly a page
that doesn’t at least obliquely begin to imagine
a blankness after--
no line that doesn’t imagine there could be nothing
but blank space after.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (cheap glue
no one nowadays expects to last)
the disconnects are more extreme, the distance
between extremes more wild, whole sections fallen
out, tucked back in upside-down and backwards:
“Would heaven break out in fire
And flames pour over earth from pole to pole?”
jumps without syntax or logic into – what?
“Till she grew white as terror in her bones.”
FROSTING (A FANTASIA)
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove
the poem must ride on its own marzipan,
mazurka, Mazeppa, Mozartkugeln--
as the Beata Ludovica Albertoni
(marshmallowy marble Bernini)
her billowy veils and her vitals--
like a piece of ice on a hot stove
rides on her own marzipan
(or is it fondant,
like her bouffant,
wonders the pedant?)
Blue, blue, formidable Cardizem:
like a lease on life in a heart-seize,
(hoofbeats, from afar, like a caravan).
Bring her some Ativan.
Green, green, pistachio marzipan
at the heart of the Saltzburger Mozartkugeln:
In the mountains, there you feel free.
The house is quiet. The worldtree is calm and
bears a silver nutmeg, a golden almond.
On a hot stove, oh my dear correspondent,
something is melting (icing, I sing fondant).
I'll write to you if I can when I can in caftan of tan.
Absence makes the heart grow marzipan.
Jennifer Clarvoe is the author of Invisible Tender and Counter-Amores. She is the recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Rome Prize, and a James Merrill House residency. Recent work appears in Literary Matters. Retired after nearly thirty years teaching at Kenyon College, she lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.