How It All Started

 
At fifteen, Leah and I tagged along with her older sister
to my first house party. No adults. A girl answered the door
in a bra. Kids mingled with fruity Bartles & Jaymes coolers
in their hands. Licensed to Ill blared from a stereo somewhere.
I found myself situated at a table in the kitchen playing
my first ever round of Quarters with some goodlooking guys.
The longer we played, the more a new warmth crept
through my body. I tossed my hair back, made sassy remarks,
laughed loudly – unlike me around boys. Curious to move
in this new body, I wandered into a room down the hall,
plopped in an easy chair, tilted my head back, and noticed
a ceiling fan. Its whir-whir-whir mesmerized me. Lit up
inside but calm, I felt gloriously apathetic. I didn’t care
about much of anything. I didn’t realize then this would be
the feeling I would chase for the rest of my life, reaching
and passing it over and over again until pieces of me
disintegrated, comforting whir a distant memory.

*

“Am I beaten or proud?”

~Steve Henn, from “The Deer”

 
With belts, switches from trees, school paddles,
children are beaten. In the news on the radio,
one child found locked in a closet in a wheelchair,
skin of arms and legs covered in cigarette burns.

Teaching Roethke’s poem “My Papa’s Waltz”
for decades demonstrated how beating has changed
in our time. Twenty years ago, students understood
the poem’s happy childhood memory of waltzing
recklessly on his father’s feet about the house,
annoying Mom in the wake. Now, students prove
more interested in the undertones of abuse
and alcoholism implied in the diction: whiskey
on breath, battered, scraped, beat, like death.

Freud discussed how “a child is being beaten”
percolates as a rampant fantasy in humans.
How troubling. And yet, it does strike at a crux
of things, no? Innocence and violence against it.

I knew I would do it all wrong, could not bear
to bring life into this society, all its weird pressures
to do ridiculous things. I might have waltzed
recklessly with my child, too, might have hung
like death on her words, scraped advice from
a battered corner of my mind. I did not want
to find out the ways I’d harm my child by chance.

*

A Toast to Dylan Thomas

 
I thought of you and your death so young, thirty-nine,
when they tore down St. Vincent’s Hospital. Everyone
thinks of you at Whitehorse Tavern, famously your
favorite watering hole. You fed the image of yourself
as a drunken, condemned poet, wearing that mantle
like a royal robe. Biographers squabble over whether
you drank yourself to death. Tiffs aside, it contributed.
I used to teach your villanelle, asking students if the son
addressing his dying father gives sound advice when
he urges “Do not go gentle into that good night /
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Some
found the advice exactly right, to go down fighting
the only way to go. Others suggested it was selfish,
more for grieving son than dying father. Berryman
was at your side as you were dying. If anyone could
understand your draw to alcohol, it was him.
So depressed and sick of his demons, he jumped
off a bridge in Minneapolis. My suicide attempt
would have worked had I lived alone, had my husband
not worked as a paramedic earlier in life. What is it
with us drunk poets who sometimes want to die?
Sylvia Plath gassed herself in the kitchen. Anne Sexton
with carbon monoxide in a car. Randall Jarrell stepped
in front of a car. Hart Crane jumped off a ship.
Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself. Sara Teasdale
took sleeping pills. Are we going gentle or raging against
when we take death in our hands? I had a professor
who claimed to admire the poets for their ambition.
I do, too. Perhaps you got it right in your other
famous poem: “Though lovers be lost love shall not /
And death shall have no dominion.” Perhaps our
realizations take root, and we must pluck them free.

***

(Featured image from Pexels)