| Spring
Mother tried to take her life. Still, the garden quickened, and sticks and browning fruit, it doesn’t stop, like moonlight, |
Dress Rehearsal
Branches etch the film of ice The ballet master says, you are its mother. cold-wet air, the crow seems molded. I am smoke in darkness, climbing away |
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Hello Friends, I love that these two poems by Chloë Honum appear side-by-side in the November 2009 issue of Poetry magazine. The first line, “Mother tried to take her life,” escapes with the suddeness of a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle, and “Unless” hangs with an awesome sense of vertigo over a stanza break, giving a reader that glimpse into the moment of a child’s terror, staring down a fill-in-the-blank, the abyss of what didn’t happen. It’s the line about daisy chains that perhaps give us the best sense of the age at which the narrator is confronting this terror — that make the narrator small. And yet it’s that same line that sneaks a bit of comforting into this poem with that tiny two-letter subject “we”; this is not an “I” alone. As for “Dress Rehearsal,” being side-by-side with “Spring” infuses the ballet master’s line “you are its mother” with that extra emphasis on the ignorance of adults who know not what they say — what “mother” might mean to this girl. The title “Dress Rehearsal” gets to take on shades of meaning a girl practicing to become a mother, a mother trying but not succeeding at the performance of an act. Falling, falling, practice, practice. It amazes me, in the face of a work as widespread and vividly iconic as Poe’s “The Raven,” another poet in English can come along and write an entirely different poem about a crow appearing to her at a window — that is the magic of poetry; I just love that. And don’t even get me started on the perfect rhyme of that final tableau… Ok, it’s late, and that’s all for now. Best, |
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