My mother is in the hospital today recovering from knee surgery. However, she suffers from some mild dementia and is having a very hard time understanding why she has to be in the hospital and why she can't come home. When I first read this poem, I thought it was about Flossie, WCW's long suffering wife, but, of course, on re-reading I understand now that he is talking about a conversation with his mother and she is confined to home or hospital. The poem is in the form of those conversations about nothing . . . . and everything . . . that characterize hospital discussions. We try to act like there is nothing unusual about one person being in a bed and surrounded by family, catered to by strangers. And it is unusual to actually talk to someone without them doing something else - watching TV or preparing a meal. . . just to talk. About what? I think those hospital conversations share something with poetry as well. While consciously mundane and ordinary, they have hidden in them the kernels of much more profound and serious matters . . . matters of life and death.
The Horse Show
Constantly near you, I never in my entire sixty-four years knew you so well as yesterday or half so well. We talked. You were never so lucid, so disengaged from all exigencies of place and time. We talked of ourselves, intimately, a thing never heard of between us. How long have we waited? almost a hundred years.
You said, Unless there is some spark, some spirit we keep within ourselves, life, a continuing life's impossible-and it is all we have. There is no other life, only the one. The world of the spirits that comes afterward is the same as our own, just like you sitting there they come and talk to me, just the same.
They come to bother us. Why? I said. I don't know. Perhaps to find out what we are doing. Jealous, do you think? I don't know. I don't know why they should want to come back. I was reading about some men who had been buried under a mountain, I said to her, and one of them come back after two months,
digging himself out. It was in Switzerland, you remember? Of course I remember. The villagers tho't it was a ghost coming down to complain. They were frightened. They do come, she said, what you call my "visions." I talk to them just as I am talking to you. I see them plainly.
Oh if I could only read! You don't know what adjustments I have made. All I can do is to try to live over again what I knew when your brother and you were children- but I can't always succeed. Tell me about the horse show. I have been waiting all week to hear about it.
Mother darling, I wasn't able to get away. Oh that's too bad. It was just a show; they make the horses walk up and down to judge them by their form. Oh is that all? I tho't it was something else. Oh they jump and run too. I wish you had been there, I was so interested to hear about it.
This poem was written in April, 1996 when the girls were little. I wanted to relate their joy and exuberance on the trampoline with the journey they were about to take. It is also a reflection of differences between them. Recently, I was touched by something Breanne told me about how magical her childhood had been; how she imagined a world of secret places around our backyard. I always imagined our home to be too small and dull, but I should have trusted in the powers of a child's imagination to transmute the ordinary into the extraordinary.
The New Trampoline
Early Spring, between snows, we set up. Stretched black skin between silver springs Round eye to heaven, door and navel. The elders hold the blanket corners.
The youngest daughter and her friend are first. Tentative steps around the edges, then a timid bounce. Giggling they gambol like newborn kids, hand in hand. Each leaps higher, nearly airborne.
But the eldest daughter will lie spread eagle, alone, Counting clouds in a cloudless sky. Expanding upward to the edge of the earth And beyond that blue bowl to the stars above.
I might give her a compass for that airy journey I think, but remember, alas, She must find her own way Beyond this gripping earth. My silent task, at last, to break her falls Again and again.
Family lore is that one of our great aunts was married to John McCrae, the author of In Flanders Fields. In fact, McCrae was never married, but was in love as a young man with an unnamed woman who died and left him heartbroken. My grandfather did serve in US Expeditionary Forces and we still have the dented helmet to prove it. Since the last veteran of the Great War died recently, I have been thinking and reading about the "War to End Wars". I have always been fascinated by it. We cannot image the futility and carnage of that conflict and it is now slipping beneath the tides of history with the Civil War and the 19th Century generally. But I knew someone who actually stood in those trenches and suffered in those battles. How amazing! To begin then, McCrae's In Flanders Fields. (Poem Source) Image Source
In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae, May 1915
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
A few weeks ago, I watched the Canadian file Passendale The graphic above depicts the actual site in 1917. The battle was a turning point in the war and a high (or low, depending on your point of view) watermark for Canadian participation. Dr. McCrae treated his fellow Canadians during and after the battle, so there is a link there. What got me started with this wonderful (if somewhat improbable) movie was a search for trench warfare on YouTube. (With respect to the film, the end is just too coincidental to be believed, I am sorry. But otherwise a great and romantic film, with graphic portrayals of the casual violence of war and of the hatred that German-Canadians as well as German-Americans experienced.) Here is part of the penultimate battle scene from the movie. This has to rank very close to the "ambush scene" in Last of the Mohegans for exciting hand to hand combat.
Here is Siegfried Sassoon in 1918. Close you eyes and imagine you have been fighting over the same ground for four years. Hundreds of thousands of casualties and hardly a mile of ground has been gained. What was a lark that was supposed to "end by Christmas" has become a bitter, unending way of life.
And some have maintained that this was a war that did not end, finally, until a pistol shot in a bunker in Berlin in 1945.
THE REAR-GUARD
Groping along the tunnel, step by step,
He winked his prying torch with patching glare
From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.
Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know,
A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;
And he, exploring fifty feet below
the rosy gloom of battle overhead.
Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie
Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,
And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug.
"I'm looking for headquarters." No reply.
"God blast your neck!" (For days he'd had no sleep.)
"Get up and guide me through this stinking place."
Savage, he kicked the soft, unanswering heap,
And flashed his beam across the livid face
Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore
Agony dying hard ten days before;
And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.
Alone he staggered on until he found
Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair
To the dazed, muttering creatures underground
Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.
At last, with sweat of horror in his hair,
He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,
Unloading hell behind him step by step.
Today is Dawn's birthday. How lucky I am to be married to such a wonderful person! This bit of poem is from The Ivy Crown, by William Carlos Williams.
The whole process is a lie, unless, crowned by excess, it breaks forcefully, one way or another, from its confinement- or find a deeper well. Anthony and Cleopatra were right, They have shown the way. I love you or I do not live at all.
