| Poets among the Stones by Ken Pobo | ||
Perhaps the American poets most associated with graveyards are two Edgars: Edgar Allen Poe and Edgar Lee Masters. Many of Poe’s poems are informed by a direct confrontation with death—usually that of a beautiful woman. Poe felt that a beautiful woman’s death would inevitably move readers (as if there is more tragedy in a woman’s death if she is beautiful). The presence of death turns reality upside down; the real cannot be distinguished from the dream, or as Poe says in one of his lyrics, “Is all that we see or seem/ Is but a dream within a dream?” (23-24). One of Poe’s gorgeous dead ladies is Annabel Lee, who ends up in “her sepulchre there by the sea.” What remains for the bereaved lover is the grave and nature. For him, there is no other reality; nor will there ever be. Love resides in a tomb. As she is in the grave, he lies down beside it. Only the earth separates them. The lover can find no comfort by the tomb—but he has no other place to go, no other life to return to. Nearness to the grave is all he understands. Edgar Lee Masters let the dead finally have a chance to speak the truth of their lives in Spoon River Anthology. Unlike Poe’s more formal verse, Masters employs free verse, which makes the poems sound conversational, as if the dead are directly addressing us. The dead in this Illinois graveyard are itching for their own truths to come out. The often sugary epitaphs need the correction that only the dead themselves can provide. In Masters’ work, death isn’t the problem. The lives of his characters were marked by appearances; many of them still seethe, even in the grave, unable to rest until they can reclaim their identities. Mollie McGee feels “avenged” in death, and Amanda Barker in eight fierce lines implicates her husband as the one who led to her demise (11). Contemporary American poets often remain fascinated by death and by graveyards. Annabel Lee feels more like a representative beautiful woman though supposedly she is based on Poe’s wife, Virginia Clemm. Masters based many of his portraits on former residents of Lewiston and Petersburg, Illinois. Many contemporary poets are less interested in creating these types or representations than in sharing with readers an intimate and personal portrait of loss—we feel we are present in the speakers’ mourning, present at the grave. If we are not present at the grave, we may be present in the graveyard or on the journey to it. Annabel Lee was in a mythical and unnamed “kingdom by the sea” (19). More poets today create myths from their personal situations and observations, constructing kingdoms out of their daily lives. Three contemporaries who have written of the cemetery are Jean Valentine, Gary Soto, and Gregory Orr. While all three prefer free verse, their approaches to the subject of the cemetery often differ. The poet discloses his/her feelings without artifice. Jean Valentine writes movingly of her mother’s end days and her struggles with letting go in a series of poems in her 1992 collection The River at Wolf. Though she usually writes in free verse, most of these poems are sonnets in free verse. Form helps to provide meaning. Only after the speaker visits her mother’s grave is the free verse sonnet abandoned—and then just for one five-line poem about going through her mother’s things. “Death’s Asphodel” returns us to the form which returns and fades, returns and fades. Valentine’s subject may move us because most readers feel empathy for a daughter writing about the loss of a mother. However, her intention is not to evoke pity. Rather, she is writing to better understand herself in relation to her mother—and her mother’s death—and the proof of that death which is the grave. The events which surround her mother’s death come to us almost as photographed moments of the soul: the morning of the mother’s death, the mother’s body, the visit to the grave. “At My Mother’s Grave” begins with an unnamed voice: someone has told the speaker to “Go away” (2). Is this her mother’s voice? The groundskeeper at the cemetery? An internal voice which could be telling her not be in the cemetery to see her mother’s grave? The speaker does not go away. Instead, she ponders what remains now that much of her own experience is absence: the mother’s voice, the mother’s body. Gifts the mother had given the daughter replace a “dark space on the road” which the speaker figures was a deer. The memory of the mother’s “hazel eyes” comes to her by the grave, something to hold onto, something no grave can remove (4,6). In the third stanza the speaker asks, “What day did she go away?”. The “go away” phrase reappears from line two (7). Grief has broken down the speaker’s sense of time. She does not say, “What day did she die?.” “Go away” has a more liquid quality, less final. It is too soon to be able to let her go. In the graveyard, the living are unable to lift the speaker beyond the grief. The experience focuses on the grave and the speaker; it is as if no other graves exist or that others could be sorting through similar feelings elsewhere in the cemetery. Pain carves out such isolation. She turns to three poets, all dead, Whitman, Dickinson, and Neruda, to be present for her. Whitman is described as a visitor, as if he too is visiting the mother’s grave with the speaker. Dickinson offers transportation, “a canoe of light” (11). As Dickinson became light, she can now offer others a place in her canoe. Neruda, a “radio flier,” is a transporter as well (13). The speaker does not ask to be flown out of the graveyard. Instead, she tells Neruda to fly her in (14). Neruda, Dickinson, and Whitman all are in the light. That is where the speaker wants to be. These earlier poets can perhaps offer a comfort that the living cannot offer. Their clarity, their words, provide a way in darkness. The cemetery roots her to earth, to loss, but this triumverate of poets offers hope—which comes through movement. As Valentine’s speaker wants to be flown in, Gary Soto’s speakers in “Looking for a Cemetery” and “Who Will Know Us?” are on journeys to get to the cemetery, which, in the former poem, is tough to find. To get to the cemetery and then to find a specific grave is like a test. The speaker and someone he is with have to wander for a while; they can’t find the grave too easily. In the “looking” is the quest. The setting around the cemetery is hardly beautiful, marred by broken asphalt, barbed wire, and fence posts. It is not a comforting or comfortable landscape. The car can’t get them to it, so they have to walk on gravel. The sound of their steps on gravel comforts them, unlike the bottles, cellophane, and sheet metal around them. Gravel is of the Earth. The sound introduces other images from Nature: birds and a rabbit. They believe they are close to the cemetery and continue their journey. Still lost, they feel “cheated by” their “dollar map” (22). The map proved useless; to get to the cemetery required entering a new landscape. They would have to see the cemetery not as something mapped, but as something worth finding. The speaker takes comfort in the fact that even if it takes a long time to find the cemetery, “The dead can’t get up and just go” (20). We may be lost but the cemetery is a fixed point for the dead. Finally, the cemetery appears. Again, Nature gives them a strong sense of it. Suddenly they feel wind, see a sparkling leaf, and “guess” three oak trees (24). Manmade objects like cellophane and maps couldn’t help them. Nature provides any clarity. The last line, “The grass grew tall enough to whisper at our thighs.,” (26) echoes Dickinson’s image of Truth and Beauty, bothdeceased, but talking to each other. What they say cannot stop mossfrom covering up their names, the last hold they had on life. Soto’s grass keeps growing as they move through it—and into the graveyard. Its whisper reminds them that they too shall be here, that the journey they are on today will lead them here for keeps. However, this ending does not inspire fear or a desire for escape. As before, where the three oak trees provided location, now grass provides welcome—and a hint that death is always walking nearby. Soto’s “Who Will Know Us?,” written for Jaroslav Seifert, again presents a journey toward a cemetery. The speaker here is not on foot to get to the cemetery, but on a train. The dead are a living presence as they “Breathe through the grass”—and through the speaker (4). No clear dividing line between living and dead exists. Stone and breath mingle. The journey in “Looking for a Cemetery” required movement through the detritus of civilization. The half comical, half frightening images of the conductor In “Who Will Know Us?” emphasize the speaker’s isolation. He has “loose buttons” and a “mad puncher” (9-10). He is not someone who can provide comfort, which the speaker realizes. The outside world is winter-like with a “slate of old snow,” “icy coal” and a “shivering horse” (8, 11, 14). Death is everywhere. He describes his country as “white with no words” and imagines places such as Paris or Athens. Those cities are far away while the visit with the dead is here and now. As he fantasizes of other places and that someday he might “open like an umbrella,” (26) the train reminds him of his journey to the cemetery. In the final three lines it is a “Red coal of evil./ We are its passengers..” (37-38). We cannot get off of this train until we arrive at the destination: the cemetery. The other passengers are on the same journey, “old and young alike” (39). The shape of a train car suggests a coffin’s shape. Its movement toward the cemetery, then, suggests the body being carried to a grave. The last line provides both the speaker and reader with the reality of death being confirmed again. He wonders “Who will know us when we breathe through the grass?” (40). Soon he will be like those who, in the first stanza, breathe through the grass. The question is not comforting as one answer is that perhaps nobody will know us. The train will move along and we will be forgotten. Other winters will pile up and we cannot know who will come by to see us in the cemetery—or if they will have a sense of our own breathing as they visit. However, the question comes will an element of hope, too. We cannot know who will know us. Perhaps people we do not know or cannot know will know us. And, like us, they too one day will have to pose the same question. Everyone gets on board the same train. The destination is certain. The cemetery in Gregory Orr’s “An Abandoned, Overgrown Cemetery in the Pasture Near Our House” is more easily gotten to than the cemeteries in the Soto poems. Its presence is inescapable since it is so close to the house. Orr sets the poem in Virginia; the time is March when spring is beginning to sweep in though the seer of winter still remains. Two parts separate the poem, each with a single stanza. Cattle “trample” the cemetery which “a low stone wall” protects (2, 4). Cows are the closest things to visitors that this cemetery has. An abandoned cemetery immediately raises questions. What happened to it? Did the families and/or friends of those who were buried there care enough about it or had they long ago moved on to new lives, forgetting those buried there? In Orr’s poem, the image of a cemetery as a place of rest is hardly restful: “vines cover the five/ small cherry trees; brambles everywhere” (7-8). Many people think of cemeteries as orderly places with mowed lawns, trimmed trees, and cleanliness. The idea of an “abandoned” cemetery discomforts because of the fear that, in death, we shall one day be abandoned, too. The orderliness suggests respect for the dead—for the dead we shall one day be. Orr’s cemetery challenges that desire for order with “the abyss/ with its lips of weather” (9-10). Life abandons us and what survives is the abyss. This cemetery brings us to a startling confrontation with the abyss. He implies that years of harsh weather have made it impossible to read the names on the stones. With those names goes the dead one’s last hold on identity. He or she is now part of the abyss. The “lips of weather” have a sensuous quality but as they kiss, they also erase (10). The kiss is without feeling, just as sunlight or rain is without feeling even if poets often personify them and make them seem to feel. After the erased names, the first section, with no identifiable speaker, is complete. The loss of human names reflects the abandonment of the cemetery. Section two begins with an “I” who is at work clipping stalks by the stone wall. He will keep his wall neat even if others have let the cemetery become overrun by vines and brambles. As he works, he is coming more alive. The act of work rejuvenates him—and it is work connected with nature and ordering that which has overrun the cemetery. In winter, the speaker describes himself as a torpid snake, but now he is getting free of that state. A torpid snake almost looks dead but now that spring is almost here, life is returning. Skin must be shed. The warm day contrasts with the emptiness and abandonment of the cemetery. In work comes discovery: the speaker finds a wren’s nest. Like the dead in the cemetery, we have no idea what happened to the wrens. Did they too abandon the nest? Did wind steal it from them? This particular nest is one from which ghosts drink. The cemetery, therefore, remains alive. Ghosts abound. However, this awareness of present ghosts is no comfort. The ghosts live on human tears. The cup of the wren’s nest offers a paradox: it is both full and empty at the same time—just like the cemetery—which holds bodies of the dead but lacks visitors These ghosts only feast on tears. What is frightening about the end of Orr’s poem is the same sense that frightens at the end of Soto’s “Who Will Know Us?.” Both poems suggest that abandonment may be our ultimate end. Nothing can stop Soto’s train, and nothing can stop Orr’s ghosts from sipping human tears from a wren’s nest. Valentine asks in “At My Mother’s Grave,” “So what is left?” (3). In her poem a daughter remembers the mother. She is at the grave to remember and to answer her own question. Any difficulty in getting to the cemetery, if there was any, is not spoken. The dead in Orr’s poem could easily ask the same question. What is left for them is cattle watching them without any sense of who they were and a stranger nearby working on a warm March day. The question of “What is left?” informs all three poems as well as Poe’s poem of the lost Annabel Lee whose death becomes a definition for the rest of the speaker’s life. Masters’ graveyard teems with life. Only in death and joined together in the graveyard can the dead rout the lies told about them. Valentine swerves us painfully close to the loss of the mother, inviting us into a private moment. Soto puts the cemetery as part of a journey, a destination which demands work to find. Orr’s abandoned cemetery suggests that we, like the ghosts, come to a cemetery, even an abandoned one, because “it’s empty/ always it’s filled to the brim” (23-24).
KEN POBO's work appears in or is accepted by: COLORADO REVIEW,
NIMROD, MUDFISH, ORBIS, GRAIN, UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR REVIEW, INDIANA REVIEW, THE CIDER
PRESS REVIEW and elsewhere. His manuscript, CICADAS IN THE APPLE TREE was a winner of Palanquin Press's Annual Poetry
Chapbook Competition and was published last year. Ken Pobo teaches English at
Widener University in Chester, PA. |