Verse and Vicissitude: What Sticks with Me, and What Sticks in My Craw

"Morning Swim," Maxine Kumin

Into my empty head there come
a cotton beach, a dock wherefrom

I set out, oily and nude
through mist, in chilly solitude.

There was no line, no roof or floor
to tell the water from the air.

Night fog thick as terry cloth
closed me in its fuzzy growth.

I hung my bathrobe on two pegs.
I took the lake between my legs.

Invaded and invader, I
went overhand on that flat sky.

Fish twitched beneath me, quick and tame.
In their green zone they sang my name

and in the rhythm of the swim
I hummed a two-four-time slow hymn.

I hummed "Abide With Me." The beat
rose in the fine thrash of my feet,

rose in the bubbles I put out
slantwise, trailing through my mouth.

My bones drank water; water fell
through all my doors. I was the well

that fed the lake that met my sea
in which I sang "Abide With Me."

____
Maxine Kumin is a favorite of mine. She's taught me much about rhyme and meter and shapeliness of stanza, and perhaps even more about persistence. One of her poetry instructors in college wrote on a poem she'd handed in: "Say it with flowers, but for God's sake don't try to write poems." And Kumin didn't, not till she was in her thirties, a mother of three, when "the grit of discontent, the acute misery of early and uninformed motherhood worked under my skin to force out the writer." Kumin is also known for her friendship with Anne Sexton, who also was a stay-at-home mother.

I didn't write a real poem for years and years and years after a poetry instructor told me, "Go to literature. Go directly to literature. Do not write poems. Do not collect $200." I followed her advice, although I still kept reading poetry, I still kept auditing workshops, I still kept thinking about how the sounds of words caromed off one another. I still think about the intentional unkindness of that writer and how the scalpel of her words sliced me (and not just me--there were other vivisected students in that workshop) from something I loved.

I used to confuse the word vicissitude with both vicious and viscous. Go figure.

You can talk about self-esteem, about persistence, about having to write. I don't see the world that way. I had no self-esteem until I met Harvey, which was nearly a decade after that chilling comment. I didn't know anything about persistence until I saw the steady patient way he brought art into the world. I still don't have to write. I'm happy not writing--just not as happy as when I am writing or reading or talking about poetry.

(Well, I used to be happy not writing--I am less miserable now when I write, because happiness evades me most of the time. Remember Wordsworth's "Surprised by Joy," which I have by heart and perhaps by fingers:

Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss?

According to the time line that Harvey not-quite-joking drew out for me, I was supposed to mourn him, memorialize him, cremate him, and scatter his ashes at the end of the calendar year in which he died. I did all that. He also wanted me to start dating after 6 months. You'll be a right witch without sex, he laughed. I don't want sex. I want a man--one particular man. Repeatedly.

I have a poem about repeated longing--which is, of course, a poem about Harvey, up at Blue Fifth Review. The current issue is linked above. Go read it. Sam has crafted a lovely issue, and my poem is pretty good, too).