For this Thanksgiving, I met my parents, their younger friends the Curzons, and their older friend Mary for dinner at "Antica Posta" (the old Post Office, transformed to an Italian restaurant). I had pasta and truffles; they all had fish, except for an osso bucco. Sometime before the entrees arrived, the conversation turned to macabre deaths of young people, and I was reminded of Billy Collins's meditation on a line from Nabokov's novel Lolita (quoted from memory): "My photogenic mother died in a freak accident when I was three (picnic, lightning)." Collins has some fun imagining all the serio-comic ways a person can die (meteorite, safe fallen from window, stroke ).
But this brought to mind another poet whose work often touches and surprises me, Linda Pastan. I often return to her collection Carnival Evening. I took her slim volume The Last Uncle with me to re-re-read before the Thanksgiving service this morning, and had it in my car as I drove to the restaurant this evening.
She, too, has a meditation on sudden death, with a Russian Jewish twist. Hers is called "The Cossacks," as she explains: "For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming. / Therefore, I think the sun spot on my arm / is melanoma." I can identify, being a hypochondriac who feels the symptoms of whatever fatal disease has recently made the news. Our conversation tonight hovered briefly around how frightened I once was of death-- of "catching a heart attack" from my grandparents, I remember.
While the title poem and many others in this collection find fresh ways to express the sudden recognition that one's life can't last, there's an intriguing idea here that's new to me.
In "The Vanity of Names," she muses on how the house of her body will crumble long before the house in which she lives, and she imagines how future inhabitants will appreciate the same beautiful fall of the sunlight on the same wall (something I can identify with in my gift of a home), and how her house -- stripped of all her belongings -- will enter the dreams of future generations (as my Grandmother's home is so much a part of my dreams). But to acquiesce in this, she says, is to love the unwritten future / almost as well as the fading past. This, she implies, is impossible. Another poem, "After a Long Absence, I Return to a Site of Former Happiness," touches on the same subject. It seems that the years haven't changed the old home at all, and this bugs her:
And as I see how easily I'll be replaced on earth,
I think if there's a poem of affirmation here,
a poem without bitterness or a shadow
of self-pity, then someone else must write it.
We want to cling to the past, and we like to think the world is going to hell as we near our end. I feel this impulse in me already, at 47. Mary feels it even more: "Remember that Broadway musical Stop the World, I Want to Get Off? That's me." I like this strange notion of holding the past and future to be equally lovable. That's a bit of Hinduism, isn't it? "Hold pleasure and pain as equal," says Krishna in the Gita.
With this theme is a related one, how past and future are continuous, as when her napping grandsons are disturbed by the noise of her old piano downstairs because. . .
Another poem conjures the ancient Greek "Fates" brought to mind by images of women in her family who sewed together from 1900 to 2000 - and she connects the "thread" of fate or time, and sneaks in a reference to those scissors, too, with which the Fates snip a life. A sweeter poem remembers the day she realized that her mother Bess had a life before motherhood, brought to mind when her newborn granddaughter is named Bess.
my son is playing the kind of music
it took him all these years,
and sons of his own, to want to make.
- "Practicing"
Linda Pastan is good at pleasure, too, just appreciating weather, her husband, leaves, dogs, literature. I love her "Travelogue" in which she confesses that, like me, she often has a printed page between her and the places where she travels, looking up from a mystery to see mountains of Greece, for example.
She is a poet of gratitude, sharing this in common with John Updike and less well-known poet Lawrence Raab, about whom I hope to write soon.
[See links to my other reflections on Linda Pastan's work at my my poetry page.]
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