Poem of the Week, by Lisel Mueller
Long ago, only fifteen years after they were first discovered by farmers digging a well near Xian, I went to see the terracotta warriors. The memory haunts me. The place wasn’t well organized back then – you sort of stumbled around and then down into the ground, where the clay soldiers, thousands of them, stood at attention. Signs: “No spitting. No taking pictures. No taking artifacts.” The guy we had hired to drive us out to the site bent down at one point and scraped up some clay dust and dropped it right into my pocket. No taking artifacts, I whispered to him, and he shrugged and laughed and said, Now you’ve got some 10,000 year old dirt to take back to America. It was the soldiers that haunt me, though. Their faces, their bodies, their height and weight, the breadth of their shoulders: All different, like looking at an army of real men frozen in time. I stood looking at them, wondering about their lives. This poem by Lisel Mueller makes me remember them all over again.
Immortality
– Lisel Mueller
In Sleeping Beauty’s castle
the clock strikes one hundred years
and the girl in the tower returns to the
world.
So do the servants in the kitchen,
who don’t even rub their eyes.
The cook’s right hand, lifted
an exact century ago,
completes its downward arc
to the kitchen boy’s left ear;
the boy’s tensed vocal cords
finally let go
the trapped, enduring whimper,
and the fly, arrested mid-plunge
above the strawberry pie,
fulfills its abiding mission
and dives into the sweet, red glaze.
As a child I had a book
with a picture of that scene.
I was too young to notice
how fear persists, and how
the anger that causes fear persists,
that its trajectory can’t be changed
or broken, only interrupted.
My attention was on the fly;
that this slight body
with its transparent wings
and lifespan of one human day
still craved its particular share
of sweetness, a century later.
For more information on Lisel Mueller, please click here.
Walking Man was someone I first noticed many years ago because he walked as fast as me (apparently I walk with great purpose), and he seemed to walk all day long, every day of the year, tromping the lakes and streets of our southwest Minneapolis neighborhood. He was a strong, well-built, handsome man. In summer he wore shorts and a t-shirt, in winter jeans and a parka. One time only has Walking Man returned my hello; his eyes are usually fixed on a far horizon. Once, about fifteen years in, I passed a man sitting on a bench on Lake Calhoun and did a double-take. Was that Walking Man? Sitting? Yes. The first time I ever saw him not in motion. Two days ago an old man in jeans and a t-shirt came toward me on Lake Street: extreme bowlegs, a mane of flowing white hair, a rocking gait that hurt to witness, so painful did it look. I watched that old man lurch toward me, hoped he didn’t have far to walk, wondered if I could help. Then I realized who it was.
A few months ago I began reading poems by Ocean Vuong, at first because his name, Ocean, enchanted me and then because his poems enchanted me. I have read the one below many times now, and each time, that opening line —Ocean, don’t be afraid– brings a lump to my throat. (How many times I have told myself Be brave, Alison, don’t live a fearful life.) The title, Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong, hits me in the same gut-punch way. This is one of those poems which I can’t sum up in a “What’s it about” kind of way, but because my heart responds to it in a below-the-surface way, I don’t need to. Months after I first discovered his work, I learned that Ocean Vuong thinks and writes in intricate English while communicating with his family in elementary Vietnamese, that he saved every penny he could from awards and publications for a down payment on a house for his family, and that his mother found it unfathomable that words –spun out from her son’s head and sent around the world in print and on youtube– could result in something tangible: a key to a house they could call their own. A poem borne of so many threads, so many years, so many tides and currents.
I’m teaching a Creative Writing Boot Camp this week. Six days in a row, seven hours a day, nineteen of us gather in a windowed classroom halfway between Minneapolis and St. Paul to write and write and talk and talk about the art and craft and act of writing. Poems and tiny short stories, tiny memoirs. Beautiful, painful, funny, wistful fragments of life, captured on paper and released into the invisible air of the room. I could teach for another fifty years and never lose this astonishment, that nurses and truck drivers and musicians and stay at home parents and hair stylists and sex workers and clerks and commodities traders and group home workers, Muslim and Christian and atheist, come together in a single small room and transform themselves and me and the whole outside world by the power of sharing stories. If a teacher asked me to name a sacred place, the classroom would be mine.
Last month I was in the foothills of the Adirondacks, poking around my parents’ giant vegetable garden (the thing could supply a small farmer’s market) talking tomatoes and beans with my father. Every summer and fall growing up we had an assembly line in the kitchen, washing and chopping and blanching and bagging zucchini and corn and beans and all kinds of squash for the freezer. Like most of the men I grew up around, my father always wears a hat (cap for everyday, hat-hat for solemn occasions), goes to the diner every morning, knows how to drive a tractor and change its oil, and has spent his life working hard and helping his neighbors and voting in elections. Joyce Sutphen’s elegant, fierce poems bring me back to my childhood. Some of them, like this one below, bring me to tears.
I’ve sat in silent, exhausted rage around dinner tables listening to men and women argue about rape and which factors that lead up to it are under a woman’s control. Sometimes I leave the room and go into the kitchen to bang my head against a hot stove, because that feels better than listening to good men, many of whom I like and respect, explain with care and patience how women shouldn’t get so drunk, especially late at night, how they shouldn’t walk alone, shouldn’t wear certain outfits, that it just is not safe, how they wish so much the world wasn’t like that for women, but it is. What a revelation, I think, thanks for solving that whole rape thing.
here was anything beyond this world, and that my grandmother –his mother– had told me near the end of her life that she believed in a heaven where my grandfather, and her parents, and her sister and her friends would all be waiting for her when she got there. My father laughed and said he didn’t know about that, but that he did believe there was some kind of force in the universe, beyond his power to grasp. When I was a child my father was a force in my universe. He was a giant man with giant physical strength, the kind of man who would pour Clorox on a bleeding wound to disinfect it and avoid a doctor visit. This poem, by Robert Hayden, always comes to mind on Father’s Day. I first read it as a child and didn’t understand it. But I do now.
Alison McGhee 