Slouching Towards Senescence

Carrie

“There’s never an end to dust
and dusting,” my aunt would say
as her rag, like a thunderhead,
scudded across the yellow oak
of her little house. There she lived
seventy years with a ball
of compulsion closed in her fist,
and an elbow that creaked and popped
like a branch in a storm. Now dust
is her hands and dust her heart.
There’s never an end to it.

from Sure Signs, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980

I’ve been enjoying some poems that are “simple” but nicely wrought.  They typically have  central metaphors:  “a ball of compulsion” a rag which is a “thunderhead”.  The old woman’s elbow creaking and popping.  And all to become dust.

I’ve been indulging in an old woman’s mimsy whimsy.  I’ve always tried to be inconspicuous, wearing black and navy garb and never daring beyond “neutral” colors.  Recently I developed a “compulsion” to find purple and red handbags; yellow and green shoes.   Rebelling against my innate frugality, I wanted to show pops of color in my outfits.

I’ve also turned to Wendall Berry.  I mourn Donald Hall more than I might have a decade ago.  In these times I want my poet’s to be “well-versed in country things” and I want them to be the opposite of Donald Trump and that terrorist group, The Republicans.

My mind can no longer handle the baroque or the intricate.  I need to escape–whether it’s via a word from Donald Justice or a phrase from Ted Kooser.  Whether it’s a red shoe or a purple one—anything that is not prosaic in today’s sense.

How I wish Aunt Carrie were a round to dust the detritus out of the White House!  Look at the beautiful image of Mr. Kooser and the deep and warm browns.  Then look at my gaudy shoes.  How can I live with such conflicting ideals?

 

 

 

1.  Edna Ferber:  American Beauty
2.  Anne Perry:  A Dangerous Mourning
3. Toni Morrison:  Jazz
4. Pym:  The Sweet Dove Died
5. Mann:  Death in Venice
6. R.C. Hutchinson:  March the Ninth
7.  Yates:  Cold Spring Harbor
8. Yates:  Young Hearts Crying
9. Ibsen:  An Enemy of the People
10. Ibsen:  The Wild Duck
11. DuMaurier:  The Scapegoat
12. Marquand:  H.M. Pulham, Esquire
13. Plumly:  Against Sunset
14. Logan;  Night Battles
15. Hardy:  A Pair of Blue Eyes
16.  Wharton:  Bunner Sisters
17. Butler:  The Way of All Flesh
18. James:  What Maisie Knew
19. James:  The Beast in the Jungle
20. Hawthorne:  The Scarlet Letter

SING FOR ME

For several years in middle age I fell in love

With celebrated women, Maria Callas and

Miss Monkey Business (from a local band),

Then Dolly Parton. O Dolly, in the spirit of the flesh,

Dolly any woman met any place I’d ever been.

And later in the evening of that night

I asked if she would shed

That blond Aldebaran wig and the make-up, please,

Spike heels and that tightest

Cowgirl sequined dress she wore,

Then the reins that held her breasts.

There in the mirror we beheld

The girl she’d lost along the way –

She was so tiny I was taller

Than I’d ever been.

Sing for me, I begged.

I’m any man met anywhere

Who does not matter, and will not, ever.

She sang that song about lost love and bad men,

And there was me, a bad, lost loveable man again,

Full of too much whiskey, tired

Of ogling the ladies in the mirrors

Of the roadhouse bars. I’d lost my job,

I’d lost our tickets out of here, become that man

Who stuttered, howled, wept,

Fell down in the gravel parking lot, cursed,

Swallowed my tobacco, and said I’m sorry, Ma’am,

And she said, to the bunch grass,

To the cows, He’s just a bad man

Gone good. Or maybe he’s just mine.

She took my arm and off we walked

To charm the hollows of the glens

Where every rock and tree could be

A member of the wedding of the rocks and trees.
Steve Orlen

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I love this poem! It opens up the deep-held, sometimes mortifying, obsessive feelings that some may dismiss as “crushes”. Do you have crushes? I am a specialist on the post-humous crush (safer than focusing on the living human!). I’ve done it with John Keats (could I have shown him long lingering pleasures of love?) and Wallace Stevens (might I have been a perfect dinner and concert companion, admiring his wines and his chocolate covered prunes). And Jane Austen was a huge crush, although I was a little bit afraid of the acidulous judgements she would deliver about me.

Orlen’s “Sing for Me” celebrates falling in love with voices first The poem reads quickly at first, with the breathlessness of love. We don’t have a full stop until the end of line 10. Notice the repeated words and the focus on “M”, “D”, and “L” sounds which add music to the poem. Both lust and love have deep transformative powers here and the “bad, lost, loveable man” will go “good” because of the powerful charms of love and song.

I also like Orlen’s use of nature here. The final lines personify the “rocks” and “trees” as being charmed by Dolly and the speaker, as members of the wedding. Orlen is probably alluding to Wordsworth’s famous “rocks and stones and trees”. Does Dolly have the mythic, unscrutable power of Wordsworth’s Lucy? I think so. She is both tiny and enormous at the same time. We don’t know if Wordsworth’s Lucy is compost, a heavenly being, a subterranean figure, as enduring as a rock, stone, or tree, or as eternal as rock, stone, tree. The same is true with Dolly in this wonderful poem.

I am printing this poem by special permission of the author, Steve Orlen, who has written several books. He has published six poetry books (available at amazon.com among other places) including “The Elephant’s Child: New & Selected Poems 1978-2005” “A Thousand Threads,” , “Kisses”, and “This Particular Eternity.”