She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems (15 page)

CONSTANTINE P. CAVAFY

And if you can't shape your life the way you want,

at least try as much as you can

not to degrade it

by too much contact with the world,

by too much activity and talk.

Try not to degrade it by dragging it along,

taking it around and exposing it so often

to the daily silliness

of social events and parties,

until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

I am like a flag in the center of open space.

I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live it through,

While the creatures of the world beneath still do not move in their sleep:

The doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full of silence,

The windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.

I already know the storm, and I am as troubled as the sea,

And spread myself out, and fall into myself,

And throw myself out and am absolutely alone

In the great storm.

MAXINE KUMIN

I have lived my whole life with death
, said William Maxwell,

aetat
ninety-one, and haven't we all. Amen to that.

It's all right to gutter out like a candle but the odds are better

for succumbing to a stroke or pancreatic cancer.

I'm not being gloomy, this bright September

when everything around me shines with being:

hummingbirds still raptured in the jewelweed,

puffballs humping up out of the forest duff

and the whole voluptuous garden still putting forth

bright yellow pole beans, deep-pleated purple cauliflowers,

to say nothing of regal white corn that feeds us

night after gluttonous night, with a slobber of butter.

Still, Maxwell's pronouncement speaks to my body's core,

this old body I trouble to keep up the way

I keep up my two old horses, wiping insect deterrent

on their ears, cleaning the corners of their eyes,

spraying their legs to defeat the gnats, currying burrs

out of their thickening coats. They go on grazing thoughtlessly

while winter is gathering in the wings. But it is not given

to us to travel blindly, all the pasture bars down,

to seek out the juiciest grasses, nor to predict

which of these two will predecease the other or to anticipate

the desperate whinnies for the missing that will ensue.

Which of us will go down first is also not given,

a subject that hangs unspoken between us

as with Jocasta, who begs Oedipus not to inquire further.

Meanwhile, it is pleasant to share opinions and mealtimes,

to swim together daily, I with my long slow back and forths,

he with his hundred freestyle strokes that wind him alarmingly.

A sinker, he would drown if he did not flail like this.

We have put behind us the State Department tour

of Egypt, Israel, Thailand, Japan that ended badly

as we leapt down the yellow chutes to safety after a botched takeoff.

We have been made at home in Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland,

narrow, xenophobic Switzerland of clean bathrooms and much butter.

We have traveled by Tube and Métro
in the realms of gold

paid obeisance to the Winged Victory and the dreaded Tower,

but now it is time to settle as the earth itself settles

in season, exhaling, dozing a little before the fall rains come.

Every August when the family gathers, we pose

under the ancient willow for a series of snapshots,

the same willow, its lumpish trunk sheathed in winking aluminum

that so perplexed us forty years ago, before we understood

the voracity of porcupines. Now hollowed by age and marauders,

its aluminum girdle painted dull brown, it is still leafing

out at the top, still housing a tumult of goldfinches. We try to hold still

and smile, squinting into the brilliance, the middle-aged children,

the grown grandsons, the dogs of each era, always a pair

of grinning shelter dogs whose long lives are but as grasshoppers

compared to our own. We try to live gracefully

and at peace with our imagined deaths but in truth we go forward

stumbling, afraid of the dark,

of the cold, and of the great overwhelming

loneliness of being last.

GALWAY KINNELL

7

When one has lived a long time alone,

one likes alike the pig, who brooks no deferment

of gratification, and the porcupine, or thorned pig,

who enters the cellar but not the house itself

because of eating down the cellar stairs on the way up,

and one likes the worm, who by bunching herself together

and expanding works her way through the ground,

no less than the butterfly, who totters full of worry

among the day lilies, as they darken,

and more and more one finds one likes

any other species better than one's own,

which has gone amok, making one self-estranged,

when one has lived a long time alone.

9

When one has lived a long time alone,

and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,

and the bullfrog head half out of water utters

the cantillations he sang in his first spring,

and the snake lowers himself over the threshold

and creeps away among the stones, one sees

they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,

after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken

away from one's kind, toward these other kingdoms,

the hard prayer inside one's own singing

is to come back, if one can, to one's own,

a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,

when one has lived a long time alone.

10

When one has lived a long time alone,

one wants to live again among men and women,

to return to that place where one's ties with the human

broke, where the disquiet of death and now also

of history glimmers its firelight on faces,

where the gaze of the new baby meets the gaze

of the great granny, and where lovers speak,

on lips blowsy from kissing, that language

the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak

blether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,

until the sun rises, and they stand

in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,

when one has lived a long time alone.

LI PO

The birds have vanished down the sky,

Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,

until only the mountain remains.

WALLACE STEVENS

I

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,

Pink and white carnations. The light

In the room more like a snowy air,

Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow

At the end of winter when afternoons return.

Pink and white carnations–one desires

So much more than that. The day itself

Is simplified: a bowl of white,

Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,

With nothing more than the carnations here.

II

Say even that this complete simplicity

Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed

The evilly compounded, vital I

And made it fresh in a world of white,

A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,

Still one would want more, one would need more,

More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III

There would still remain the never-resting mind,

So that one would want to escape, come back

To what had been so long composed.

The imperfect is our paradise.

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,

Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

T
HIS BOOK BEGAN
as a collection of poems for middle-aged women—something no one wants to be. When I turned fifty, it seemed that looking old was the only topic of conversation, everyone was bursting into tears at a moment's notice, and proclaiming the importance of taking “time for yourself.” On a more serious level, midlife can be a time of reflection and self-reflection, when some of the chaos of raising a family subsides, we have become aware that time is precious, and we have learned what matters. Poems speak directly to those emotions.

Middle age is a time of transition. If we have raised a family, they are beginning to be independent. If we are going back to work, our skills may be outdated. If we have a career, we may be facing the limits of our advancement. If we are caring for our parents, it is becoming a more complicated undertaking. But we are also still young, we have the chance for a full life ahead, and we know ourselves much better than we did.

In order to plan the future, it helps to look back at the decisions we have made so far—even the bad ones. We are reminded of other times when life seemed confusing, emotions overwhelming, and the pathway forward hard to find. In this section, I have combined poems that speak to us at midlife with those that address another time of transition—growing up and becoming an adult. At both points in our lives, we are faced with a lot of uncertainty and the realization that, although we share these challenges with our friends, we must navigate them on our own. That can be both liberating and terrifying.

The choices we make during these transitions determine who we are and who we become. Poems can help us find clarity amid the confusion. They remind us that others have faced the same challenges. They celebrate the relationships that define and guide us, they can help us laugh at ourselves, and they provide wisdom and reassurance.

Each stage of life is different than we imagine it will be. Edna St. Vincent Millay captures this feeling perfectly in “Grown-up” when she is confronted with the routine of adult life, after fantasizing it to be so much more glamorous. Ellen Hagan captures the contradictory feelings of growing up fast and too fast in “Puberty—With Capital Letters,” while Parneshia Jones brings to life the conflicts between mother and daughter that repeat from generation to generation, despite our vows to be different.

In “Older, Younger, Both,” Joyce Sutphen conveys the mixed-up sensations of being young and old all at once, a feeling which is common to our teenage years and one that characterizes middle age. Other poems, like Barbara Ras's “You Can't Have It All” and Elizabeth Jennings's “Old Woman,” celebrate the contentment that comes with appreciating what we have.

Each of these poets can offer guidance, provide insight, and give us strength. But in these turbulent times each of us must answer the question posed by Mary Oliver in “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?”

MARGARET ATWOOD

You begin this way:

this is your hand,

this is your eye,

that is a fish, blue and flat

on the paper, almost

the shape of an eye.

This is your mouth, this is an O

or a moon, whichever

you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window

is the rain, green

because it is summer, and beyond that

the trees and then the world,

which is round and has only

the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller

and more difficult to learn than I have said.

You are right to smudge it that way

with the red and then

the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words

you will learn that there are more

words than you can ever learn.

The word
hand
floats above your hand

like a small cloud over a lake.

The word
hand
anchors

your hand to this table,

your hand is a warm stone

I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,

which is round but not flat and has more colors

than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,

this is what you will

come back to, this is your hand.

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Was it for this I uttered prayers,

And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,

That now, domestic as a plate,

I should retire at half-past eight?

ELLEN HAGAN

There went being a kid. There went

Barbie dolls, baby dolls, kitchen sets, play-

doh, crayons, make-believe (well, maybe not

make-believe). But there went innocent, child-

like, there went one-piece bathing suits. In came

adolescence, even though I'd had my period

since I was 10. In came self-consciousness,

waiting for breasts. In came attitude, and “Why

can't I?” “You said!” “I hate you,” under my breath.

In came diaries with hidden messages and dares

I always took. In came kissing and not kissing,

and doing it, and not doing it, and rounding bases,

and not rounding bases, and rounding bases having

nothing at all to do with baseball, and sometimes wishing

you could just play baseball instead.

In came. Rebellion. Clichés. Are you kidding? Drinking.

Do-overs. Cheer-leading Uniforms. Regret. Pure Bliss.

Uncovering. Feeling not good enough. Cockiness. Joy.

In came wild cards. Short skirts. Cocktails. 15. Funnels.

Mid-riff baring. Belly-button rings. Challenges. Being

challenging. The ultimate change. The ultimate fast-forward.

In came growing up.