I have been feeling prickly and raw and small over the last week or so, like a little hedgehog with — I don’t know — a skinned knee whose fellow hedgehogs have been making fun of her hair so she’s holed up in her hedgehole listening to REM and eating croutons straight out of the bag and then cursing the little scratches they make on the roof of her mouth. Something like that. The world news and the national news are cutting me to the core, and also little things that wouldn’t normally bother me are bothering me rather a lot this week. My teeth are clenched and my shoulders are tight, and it seems like other people are feeling the same way.
So I’ve been reading some poetry, looking for that reminder that We’re All The Same and all that. Here are a couple that have hit home and made me feel if not less brittle at least less singular.
The Yellow House, 1978
by Maggie Dietz
The kitchen in the house had a nook for eating, a groove
for the broom behind the door and the woman moved through
it like bathing, reaching ladles from drawers, turning to lift
the milk from the refrigerator while still stirring the pudding,
as if the room and everything in it were as intimate to her as her
body, as beautiful and worthy of her attention as the elbows
which each day she soothed with rose lotion or the white legs
she lifted, again and again, in turn, while watching television.
To be in that room must be what it was like to be the man
next to her at night, or the child who, at six o’clock had stood
close enough to smell the wool of her sweater through the steam,
and later, at the goodnight kiss, could breathe the flavor of her hair —
codfish and broccoli — and taste the coffee, which was darkness
on her lips, and listen then from upstairs to the water running
down, the mattress drifting down the river, a pale moonmark
on the floor, and hear the clink of silverware — the stars, their distant
speaking — and picture the ceiling — the back of a woman kneeling,
covering the heart and holding up the bed and roof and cooling sky.
Maggie Dietz, “The Yellow House, 1978,” from Perennial Fall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
I love the images of the stirring and the distant voices. The domesticity reminds me of Rachel Contreni Flynn’s “The Yellow Bowl,” a copy of which hangs on my wall. What is it with poets and yellow and households?
Quite Frankly
by Mark Halliday
They got old, they got old and died. But first —
okay but first they composed plangent depictions
of how much they lost and how much cared about losing.
Meantime their hair got thin and more thin
as their shoulders went slumpy. Okay but
not before the photo albums got arranged by them,
arranged with a niftiness, not just two or three
but eighteen photo albums, yes eighteen eventually,
eighteen albums proving the beauty of them (and not someone else),
them and their relations and friends, incontrovertible
playing croquet in that Bloomington yard,
floating on those comic inflatables at Dow Lake,
giggling at the Dairy Queen, waltzing at the wedding,
building a Lego palace on the porch,
holding the baby beside the rental truck,
leaning on the Hemingway statue at Pamplona,
discussing the eternity of art in that Sardinian restaurant.
Yes! And so, quite frankly — at the end of the day —
they got old and died okay sure but quite frankly
how much does that matter in view of
the eighteen photo albums, big ones
thirteen inches by twelve inches each
full of such undeniable beauty?
Mark Halliday, “Quite Frankly,” from Thresherphobe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
I’d categorize this as a “Gather Ye Rosebuds” poem, although that’s maybe not what Halliday meant it to be. I don’t think I’d read any of his work before, but now that I have I really, really connect with it. I also really enjoyed “Wide Receiver” and “Bad People” and “1946,” which made me think of my grandmother.
How have you been lately? Well, I hope, and not at all like a verklempt hedgie.
