Poet Linda Pastan Doesn't Get Old

Studies confirm that poets generally don't live long. We're fortunate that Linda Pastan, who died at 91 this past January, sent updates in verse from the frontier of aging for more than 50 years. In her last two collections of new poems, it's good news, or bad news with her customary wry delivery.

Age has nothing to do with me, she writes for Traveling Light (2011). Alone, she tells us,

...I am any woman
fresh from the shower,
covering the newly rained upon
continent of her body -- hills and valleys --
modestly with a towel.

She's surprised when a gentleman offers her his seat. ("Any Woman" TL 45) An undergraduate during "Q & A" asks, had she known Emily Dickinson personally? Laughter erupts while Pastan weighs different degrees of sarcasm, but Surprise, like love, can catch / our better selves unawares (TL 47), and Pastan gives the blushing young woman a compassionate response that brought me to tears.

In her 80s, Lust still raises its purple flag ("Any Woman"). A bouquet from her husband inspires an erotic fantasia on vegetables ("A Dozen Roses" TL 41). She falls in love with him afresh when she finds an unfamiliar photo from his twenties (TL 9), reflecting on youth's inherent beauty, even an adolescent boy, awkwardness / shadowed by grace, in his own / invisible force field of desire. A lovely poem takes us to "Times Square, 1944" when she was that awkward adolescent, where sailors facing deployment wore their caps / at a cocky angle, like white seabirds / about to take flight as they moved in a roiling surf / through the traffic. They looked at women, but not at the girl who longed to reach out / and embrace them (TL 53).

Still, her body is no longer her friend as in the days when sleep like a good dog / came when summoned (TL 37). She wonders why old and gnarled trees are beautiful while I am merely / old and gnarled ("The Orchard" in Insomnia 2015). For "Anatomy," Pastan sets up an extended metaphor that she follows to its punchline:

In the tenement
of the body
generations have left
their mark

On the stairwell
of bones and the
walls of flesh.

While the genes do their scheduled work, she says, Clutch the bannister / hold on tight. (TL 7).

Favorite subjects for her never grew old. One of her last books A Dog Runs Through It selects poems across five decades brightened by the presence of the dogs she loved. Her many fears show up often: we know from an early poem how she learned from her Jewish grandparents to hear "the Cossacks" coming for her, a generalized dread that never left her: she writes of panic on a plane ("Flight" TL 65) and imagines in "The Ordinary" how it may happen while she's sipping tea or feeding the dog. But she's amused by her own fears. Her uncertain walk down the aisle of the plane brings to mind her walk down the aisle in marriage with only the vague idea of love to keep us aloft.

The Garden of Eden remains another inexhaustible subject for her. Eden poems fill a section of Traveling Light called "Years After the Garden." Every garden dreams of being Eden she writes in "Pastoral," (TL 12), adding slyly to expect apples in the fall. On her patio, a discarded Christmas tree becomes an Eden for wildlife that she refuses to drag to the dump, asking, Must one of us impersonate the serpent? (34). "Eve on her Deathbed" reflects with mild pique on what little is written of her in The Book, how no one noticed in the midst of all those begettings that she had taken a lover, and how, in the end we are no more than our stories (16).

Considering similarities between artists centuries apart who could not have known each others' work, Pastan also writes a good description of her entire career:

So artists dip into a deep but circumscribed pool,
fishing for something new
but sometimes finding
(still dripping with beauty)
the indelible, unknowable familiar. ("Flora" I 50)

But the best news is that she never grew too old to write. For her last collection Insomnia, she wrote

I string words together
wherever I am
in planes, in waiting rooms,

forcing the actual to sink
and disappear
beneath the bright
and shimmering surface
of the half-imagined.

[See links to my other reflections on Linda Pastan's work at my my poetry page.]