She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems (9 page)

AMY CLAMPITT

Love is a climate

small things find safe

to grow in—not

(though I once supposed so)

the demanding cattleya

du côté de chez Swann
,

glamor among the faubourgs,

hothouse overpowerings, blisses

and cruelties at teatime, but this

next-to-unidentifiable wildling,

hardly more than a

sprout, I've found

flourishing in the hollows

of a granite seashore—

a cheerful tousle, little,

white, down-to-earth orchid

declaring its authenticity,

if you hug the ground

close enough, in a powerful

outdoorsy-domestic

whiff of vanilla.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

Oh no, it is an ever fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

RUMI

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase
each other

doesn't make any sense.

MATTHEW ROHRER

She sends me a text

she's coming home

the train emerges

from underground

I light the fire under

the pot, I pour her

a glass of wine

I fold a napkin under

a little fork

the wind blows the rain

into the windows

the emperor himself

is not this happy

RAYMOND CARVER

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

. . . Quickly then and certainly it was the river of summer, blue as the
infinite curving blueness above us,

Little boats at anchor lolled or were lapped, and a yacht slowly
glided.

It was wholly holiday, holiday absolute, a silk and saraband day,
warm and gay and

Blue and white and vibrant as the pennants buoyant on the stadium
near us,

White, a milk whiteness, and also all the colors flaring, melting, or
flowing.

There hope was, and the hopes, and the years past,

The beings I had known and forgotten and half-remembered or
remembered too often,

Some in rowboats sunned, as on a picnic, or waiting, as before
a play,

        
the
picnic and
the
play of eternity as summer, siesta, and summit

—How could I have known that the years and the hopes were
human beings hated or loved,

Or known that I knew less and more than I supposed I supposed?

(So I questioned myself, in a voice familiar and strange.)

There they were, all of them, and I was with them,

They were with me, and they were me, I was them, forever united

As we all moved forward in a consonance silent and moving

    Seated and gazing,

        Upon the beautiful river forever.

2

So we were as children on the painted wooden horses, rising and
falling, of the carnival's carousel

Singing or smiling, at times, as the lyric of a small music tinkled
above us

Saying: “The task is the round, the round is the task, the task and
the round are a dance, and

There is nothing to think but drink of love and knowledge, and
love's knowledge

When after and before are no more, and no more masks or un-
masking,

    but only basking

(As the shining sea basks under the shining sun

In a radiance of swords and chandeliers dancing)

In the last love of knowledge, the first, when thought's abdication quickens thought's exaltation,

In the last blessing and sunlight of love's knowledge.”

I hardly knew when my lips parted. Started to move slowly

As in the rehearsal of half-remembered memorized

    anthem, prayer, or spell

    of heartwelling gratitude and recognition.

My lips trembled, fumbled, and in the depths and death of thought

A murmur rose like the hidden humming of summer, when June
sleeps

In the radiant entrancings of warm light and green security.

Fumbling, feeling for what I had long supposed I had grasped and

cast aside as worthless,

the sparks or glitters of pleasure, trivial and transient.

—The phrases like faces came, lucid and vivid, separate, united,
sincere as pain

With the unity of meaning and emotion long lost, disbelieved or
denied,

As I sought with the words I had known a candid translation.

So I said then, in a language intimate and half-understood:

“I did not know . . . and I knew . . . surely I once knew . . .

I must have known . . .

Surely sometimes guessed at or suspected,

Knew and did not know what love is,

The measure of pleasure, heart of joy, the light and the heart of
the light

Which makes all pleasure, joy and love come to be

As light alone gives all colors being, the measure and the treasure

Of the light which unites and distinguishes the bondage and
freedom in unity and distinction

Which is love . . . Love? . . . Is love? What is love?”

Suddenly and certainly I saw how surely the measure and
treasure of pleasure is being as being with, belonging

Figured and touched in the experience of voices in chorus.

    Withness is ripeness,

    Ripeness is withness,

    To be is to be in love,

        Love is the fullness of being.

. . .

 

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

I
GREW UP IN A TIME
when mothers, including my own, went back to work after they had raised their children. My mother had a job before she was married, but not a career. That was for my generation. In the past thirty years, women have become defined by what we do, as well as by whom we love. Now, for the first time, women constitute half the American workforce. At the higher end of the socioeconomic scale, the debate tends to focus on choices and the hidden truth that women without children can advance farther and more easily in the professional world, while for families in the lower half of the income ladder, women are the primary breadwinners in a majority of households and often struggle to support a family alone. For all of us, the challenge is how to balance work and family and do a decent job at both. It's not easy in our society, which gives little support to mothers, still pays women 25 percent less than men for the same job, only grudgingly acknowledges that women still do the majority of housework, parenting, and caregiving, and does a woefully inadequate job of educating our children.

In traditional societies, women were responsible for farming, cooking, weaving, and sewing. Later they became domestic servants, teachers, nurses, and waitresses. In modern times, women are also scientists, lawyers, professors, and poets. So it makes sense that the world of work has become a subject for women's poetry.

Women poets are often crusaders for social justice and equality. Tillie Olsen went to jail for trying to organize workers in the meat-packing house where she was employed. In the poem “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” she writes about the terrible conditions of Texas garment workers. In “PS Education,” Ellen Hagan, who teaches poetry in some of New York City's most challenging schools, writes with moral indignation about the ways in which today's educational system is failing our children.

Some kinds of work connect women of many generations. In “Lineage,” Margaret Walker writes about her grandmothers who struggled to survive in the harsh and unforgiving world of subsistence farming, but whose strength and joy inspired their granddaughter. Poems about the modern professional workplace are surprisingly hard to find. We can only hope that more poets will shine a light on its benefits and shortcomings, and help us to integrate work more easily into other parts of our lives.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Well, life has been a baffled vehicle

And baffling. But she fights, and

Has fought, according to her lights and

The lenience of her whirling-place.

She fights with semi-folded arms,

Her strong bag, and the stiff

Frost of her face (that challenges “When” and “If.”)

And altogether she does Rather Well.

LYNDA HULL

Reflected in the plate glass, the pies

look like clouds drifting off my shoulder.

I'm telling myself my face has character,

not beauty. It's my mother's Slavic face.

She washed the floor on hands and knees

below the Black Madonna, praying

to her god of sorrows and visions

who's not here tonight when I lay out the plates,

small planets, the cups and moons of saucers.

At this hour the men all look

as if they'd never had mothers.

They do not see me. I bring the cups.

I bring the silver. There's the man

who leans over the jukebox nightly

pressing the combinations

of numbers. I would not stop him

if he touched me, but it's only songs

of risky love he leans into. The cook sings

with the jukebox, a moan and sizzle

into the grill. On his forehead

a tattooed cross furrows,

diminished when he frowns. He sings words

dragged up from the bottom of his lungs.

I want a song that rolls

through the night like a big Cadillac

past factories to the refineries

squatting on the bay, round and shiny

as the coffee urn warming my palm.

Sometimes when coffee cruises my mind

visiting the most remote way stations,

I think of my room as a calm arrival

each book and lamp in its place. The calendar

on my wall predicts no disaster

only another white square waiting

to be filled like the desire that fills

jail cells, the old arrest

that makes me stare out the window or want

to try every bar down the street.

When I walk out of here in the morning

my mouth is bitter with sleeplessness.

Men surge to the factories and I'm too tired

to look. Fingers grip lunch box handles,

belt buckles gleam, wind riffles my uniform

and it's not romantic when the sun unlids

the end of the avenue. I'm fading

in the morning's insinuations

collecting in the crevices of buildings,

in wrinkles, in every fault

of this frail machinery.

RUTH STONE

My mother, when young, scrubbed laundry in a tub,

She and her sisters on an old brick walk

Under the apple trees, sweet rub-a-dub.

The bees came round their heads, the wrens made talk.

Four young ladies each with a rainbow board

Honed their knuckles, wrung their wrists to red,

Tossed back their braids and wiped their aprons wet.

The Jersey calf beyond the back fence roared;

And all the soft day, swarms about their pet

Buzzed at his big brown eyes and bullish head.

Four times they rinsed, they said. Some things they starched,

Then shook them from the baskets two by two,

And pinned the fluttering intimacies of life

Between the lilac bushes and the yew:

Brown gingham, pink, and skirts of Alice blue.