|
RCBJ-Audible (Listen For Free)
 |
Editor’s Note: The arts are a significant thread in the fabric of Rockland County. They inspire, enrich, and chronicle our lives. They also play a role in our economic well-being; theater, writing, dance, crafts draw us to spaces. They invite strangers to share in our bounty. They are an indelible contribution. Welcome again, Christine Potter, a poet, to RCBJ.
Come September
By Christine Potter
Something happens to the air around here during the last week or so of August. It gets sort of… elegiac. There’s a newly golden cast to it, especially if the weather’s dry as it has been lately. Maybe it’s light through leaves that are just a tiny bit yellower than they were. Also, the days are noticeably shorter. That becomes apparent especially if you’re a practitioner of what my husband and I call “Glamorous Late Night Dinner.” Eating outside on the deck at 9 PM is suddenly dark—and a bit chilly, too! Time to get your act together and stop lazing around!
So yes, the approach of Autumn. School starts. Poets start writing about mortality even more than usual. Someone on social media’s already talking about Halloween decor. But it’s the perfect time to read poetry by Mary Lou Buschi. Fortunately, that’s easily done: her two full-length collections, Paddock, and the newer one, Blue Physics, are available at Nyack’s Big Red Books.
Mary Lou lives in the house once owned by the artist Thomas Wilfred in West Nyack, and has written about him and his art. But getting back to this season where the veil between the worlds of the living and dead starts to thin, I really need to show you an astonishing piece of hers, which ran in the good online poetry feed SWWIM. This poem blew me away.
Secrets
There was a year my mother couldn’t leave her bed.
Something about her nerves.
Then the story about almost being kidnapped.
She turned away from the details as one turns
from a needle sliding through skin to enter a vein.
My grandmother made her cry often, yet we’d return,
on The Canarsie Line, 14 stops into Bushwick,
crowded with people daydreaming as they swayed or lurched,
under the wobbling fans, fat art made from spray cans.
I’d crane my neck as far as I could feel the muggy breeze
against my face, inhaling lithium grease, timing the arrival
out of the darkness into flickering lights.
The last time, because there is always a last,
we rode that train, the doors to the exit were locked.
A group of us pushed through the turnstile into a trap.
My mother grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go.
When she was dying, she said, you know your father
apologized. Then she quickly went back under the wave
of the in-between confusing me with her sister,
forgetting my name, my face until the next time
she came up for air, she said, my mother told me
I deserved it—losing my son.
Tending to a body dying is a secret. An unspoken pact,
never disagree with the dying. Tell others it was peaceful,
without incident. No one wants to hear the body swells;
organs strain for oxygen. No one needs to know you placed
your cheek on her hot skin stretched to almost bursting,
while lamplight broke over her and drank her in.
I love this poem for a number of reasons: the emotional honesty, the way it sits in couplets, and its imagery. It is a deeply truthful work about something painful to be truthful about. Human beings are complex. You can love someone desperately and have all sorts of things rattling around inside that love. “Secrets” understands that.
I admire the subway’s “fat art made from spray cans” and its “muggy breeze.” These are exact, correct details—but every bit as correct is the “unspoken pact” about not contradicting someone who is dying. And the poem’s title, “Secrets” is perfect because of what isn’t spelled out in the poem but suggested, the way the narrative line jumps around like someone “under the wave,” caught in between the worlds of the living and the dead.
Then there’s the “trap” in the subway, the mother, clutching the narrator’s arm: no exit. But this is a poem about the ultimate exit. “Tell others it was peaceful,” Buschi writes. Yes. That’s what you do, what you have to do. This is an absolutely spectacular piece of work, brave and exacting.
Mary Lou is a teacher-poet. I was one of those too, so I have a special soft spot for what the classroom does to your poetry. She works in special ed in the Bronx, teaching science. Teaching science sounds like a great way to take in energy from the teaching process and the kids without frying yourself with too much language. Her MFA is in poetry. Mary Lou still workshops with The Grind, a writing group founded by friends she made while working on that degree at Warren Wilson College. “Grinding” according to members of that group, is writing or revising every single day, having a real practice. So, discipline!
Mary Lou says that it’s “important to push beyond your usual habits. Gregory Orr’s essay on the Four Temperaments of Poetry—story, structure, music, and imagination—offers a useful framework…Ultimately, writing is a practice, and like any practice, it requires exercising every muscle. Otherwise, over time, your work risks sounding the same.” She’s correct!
She’s a big fan of the revision process, too. Joan Didion used to put her rough drafts in the freezer, Buschi told me, and I agree that’s a great metaphor; you do need to stash things for a while and figure out what it is you and the poem were trying to say. She says, “When I return to a draft, I sometimes find myself wondering, Who the hell wrote this? That distance allows me to see it clearly, and that’s when the real work begins.”
Here’s a prose poem from Mary Lou’s book Blue Physics that melds her teaching and poetry. It’s a haibun called “Union of Heaven and Earth.” Haibuns are interesting things: half prose-poem, half haiku. The prose poems can be almost diary-like—and the haiku at the end crystalizes things.
Union of Heaven and Earth
It’s an afterschool program for the uniquely abled where I teach Mahi to make a card. It’s the month of grey snow and forcing bulbs, the shortest of months. He uses very little water, as he swirls his brush in the scarlet paint wanting the blazoned heart to shock with pulsating brightness. He adds pink lips, a sticker from a Family Dollar. “Who is this for?” I ask. He continues to work. “Nobody,” he says. His right knee moves back and forth, as he whispers addresses, train lines, connecting buses across town. “Mahi, who would you like to send your heart to?” I ask. “Nobody,” he repeats, and I remember what Odysseus said as he stabbed the cyclops in the eye, “I’m Nobody!” And the cyclops screamed, “Nobody has wounded me!” No one came to his rescue, as his one eye sizzled around a stake until it burst.
Dear Somebody,
Nobody is asking
for open arms, a heart,
or to be mine.
Speaking of hearts, this haibun simply breaks mine. I love the “month of grey snow and forcing bulbs” here. Nothing lacy about that! And the portrait of Mahi with his valentine for nobody! His deep, neurodivergent love of maps and places rings so true. I know this kid. The turn on the Odysseus story is brilliant. This poem makes me want to try writing a haibun, but it’s so good I also feel like I don’t need to!
When I get stuck in my own writing, there are a number of poets I read to try to get unstuck. Good Doctor William Carlos Williams is one of them, and I was pleased to see that Mary Lou also appreciates William’s sharp eye for the specific. Here’s another poem from Blue Physics that’s a nod to his famous poem “This Is Just To Say.”
My Husband Holds Up a Pair of Mismatched Socks
I tell him not to worry, eventually they will match,
one day finding one another again,
eventually the wind will stop and we will
once again hear silence and what’s more
the fox is back and she’s alone.
The rooster has survived the winter—
Just listen to that crowing.
Your keys? Haven’t touched them,
but if you look in the top drawer,
of your father’s old bar they might be there.
This morning is about surrender,
a morning that lets the weeds take over,
look at those white clouds the size of Bowhead whales,
supplying at least half the oxygen you breathe,
so that you can continue to look for what is lost,
or buried, or you can choose to sit with me
and enjoy the dew lacing itself
over the lawn allowing the Dandelions
to burst into flower, feeding the bees,
which is when, I hope, you will forgive me,
for mixing the hard-boiled eggs,
in the blue bowl, with the raw.
This poem is as sweetly domestic as Williams’ sorry-not-sorry about eating those delicious blue plums. And it’s as funny; I love the final two couplets! But I also like the collection of lost and found things: fox, keys, rooster. I adore the idea of a morning that is “about surrender, a morning that lets the weeds take over.” This poem makes a nice point about what gets lost and what can be recovered, too: go too far into that search and you will miss the chain of dew, dandelions, and bees. Then comes that good laugh at the end. It’s pretty great. Could I recommend a copy of Blue Physics to start your autumn?
And oh, alright. “Secrets” got me thinking of a poem of my own. “As If We Were Anything But” was in the Rappahanock Review.
As If We Were Anything But
Nobody gave me permission to write these words.
They are the opposite of the family credo: nothing
we say in this house gets told to anyone outside it.
As if we were anything but a bunch of intellectuals
losing their tempers. As if you didn’t have to have
sex to have children. As if no one’s secrets were
deeper than the silken, flesh-colored ottoman in
my mother’s bedroom, with its top that opened
revealing a dozen pairs of impractical shoes
unworn since before she was married. As if no one
else’s grandmother had to inject her own thigh
with medicine to stop migraines. As if no one else’s
father cheated—but I knew more about Nana’s
needles than that; I’d seen how she pinched her
own fullness before she used one. As if no one’s
mother chose not to get divorced, sharpened her
stenography skills and went back to work. As
if no one else’s father taught her to develop film
in the darkroom anyway. As if I never turned into
your father’s daughter after he did. As if any
of us knew how to do anything else, including me,
including now. As if I had never gazed into the
ghosts of my friends’faces in a sneaker-smelling
tray of processing fluid, under the orange safe light.
Here’s to the turning of the season! See you in October, when it will be really and truly fall!
