Hi all! I am missing out on Easter with my family due to an aching back. So while I am lying here, I thought it might be a good time to post my April poem. Looking forward to reading yours!
KNOT GARDEN
Was
this her habit before Dad’s diagnosis:
Trailing
me down the backporch steps, initiating
conversation
even as I close the car door? I beg her
to
Go inside, you’ll catch a chill, triggering
her final litany:
Don’t forget to lock your
doors. Watch out for black ice.
Once,
in a Scottish castle garden, I hid from her—crouched
like
Eve in boxwood shade. My shame? A simple thirst
for
my own mind after eight days of shared hotel rooms,
train
cars. In peace, I focused my lens on the knot garden
and
she was there: knee-deep in interlocking circles
of
germander and lavender, silver-gray santolina
shimmering
in noon heat, stock-still as if the life-force
within
her had departed, something bereft in her profile,
the
curve of her belly where I first resided. I called out Mom!
and
in my lens she came alive again, raising her arm into air
thick
with summer as she stands now under golden porchlight
and
a waning November moon, waving, waving.
Sorry about your back, and that you had to miss Easter! Hope you're better. This poem is so moving to me, Claire. It holds so much that feels complicated and true and real about the relationship between the mother and daughter - and it feels bigger than that relationship, it feels like it is about Mothers and Daughters in a large, encompassing way. I admire how gracefully the poem moves between places, and places in time, the way it holds so much complexity in the poem's relatively small space. That phrase: "A simple thirst/for my own mind" - !! Just perfect, and true. I have two smallish suggestions/questions (and again, lots of admiration and love for this poem). I wonder about the reference to "Dad's diagnosis" in the first line - I recognize that it might be important in terms of explaining the mother's behavior, but also expected the poem to move into this more deeply - to become more about the father than it ultimately does. Others may feel differently and think the reference is necessary, but I am curious about shifting the first line to something like, "Was this always her habit" - a bit more general, but without the reference to a large event that the poem doesn't pursue. Though this is reminding me of Vasiliki's question about individual poems vs. poems in an m.s. - if part of an m.s. that *is* partly about the father's diagnosis, this reference would make more sense to me. My other question is about the "lens" in stanza five... I'm sorry if I am being slow, which I definitely am sometimes! - but I had a hard time understanding this on a literal level. Is the speaker looking through binoculars or a camera? Or is it an imaginative way of saying the speaker is looking (with her eyes and not a device) at her mother? If others also struggled with this, I'd suggest just spelling it out. The poem isn't mysterious on a literal level - it's clear what is happening in the rest of it - the mystery is in the complex, layered, long and ongoing relationship between the speaker and mother. And the language is beautiful and also straightforward, not elliptical, and this feels like an important thing for the reader to be able to understand. Let me know if this doesn't make sense! And thank you for sharing this loveliness.
ReplyDeleteHi Claire,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the poem! I agree with Kasey that this poem does a lovely job of exploring the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship in a small space. It feels really rich, but I also enjoyed its readability and companionability. I too had some trouble with "lens." I think especially because the word appears twice, it seems important to the speaker, but I wasn't sure if it was a camera or binoculars or just glasses, and how to picture what was happening with whichever one it was. I also had a little trouble understanding where in the garden the mother was on the first couple readings. Now I think she is in a knot garden, which is in another part of a large garden from the boxwoods where the speaker hides. But on my first few reads I was trying to picture how the speaker could hide from the mother but also still be in the garden, I guess thinking of smaller-scale suburban gardens I am more used to. A little more direction in terms of how the geography here plays out would help me nail down what is happening between the two women and would drive the poem forward with a little more force. To weigh in on the diagnosis issue that Kasey raises, I think the poem could stand on its own without that intensifying backdrop, but I was not bothered by the issue of the dad's diagnosis not being developed explicitly in this poem. That opening gave the poem a heightened sense of anxiety both within the speaker (i.e. the speaker herself is generally worried) and also directed at the mother specifically (the speaker is worried about the effects dad's diagnosis has on her mother). I guess as I'm writing, I'm becoming more convinced that I like the opening. It also serves to make the travel memory more resonant; it seems to reflect the reality that grappling with mortality can make remembering one's own actions from before (eg hiding from one's mother in a European garden) seem impossibly innocent or ridiculous or just of a completely different time. Hope this helps!
Hi all! I just learned that this poem has been accepted by the Comstock Review for its spring/summer issue! Now I want to make edits to it, based on your great suggestions!
ReplyDeleteOH, congrats! This is so exciting! And well-deserved!!
DeleteYes many congrats. This is wonderful!
DeleteHi Claire- sorry for my tardy comments. I want to share my impressions without first checking in with the others above, though I did glance just now at your great news about the Comstock Review. Yay! Well-deserved-- this is a fantastic poem full of wonderfully resonant details. I love the image of the 'knot garden' of 'crouching like Eve in boxwood shade'- (wow! this is just so great). Upon rereading, a few little grammatical questions came up for me-- in the first stanza, whether the verbs 'close' and 'beg' should be in the past tense? One way to skirt this for 'close' is to substitute the verb 'shut' which is the same for past/present. And the sounds work. In stanza 5, I wonder whether 'there she was' isn't more pointed than 'she was there'. My sense is the phrase 'as if the life-force within her had departed' is too explanatory, and the word 'bereft' is so lovely, and the next phrase ending with 'where I first resided,' is so powerful, that it makes the life-force section almost redundant. Do you think there needs to be a comma after 'summer' in penultimate stanza. And 'the' waning Nov. moon or 'a' waning?... That last part makes me think of a favorite, very poignant Wallace Stevens poem "Waving Adieu,Adieu, Adieu' Congratulations, Claire!!
ReplyDeleteShut! Yes! It even sounds like a car door closing! I have also deleted the life-force part -- you are so right. When I'd read it aloud, I'd get bogged down there, but never thought of simply removing it!
DeleteHi Claire, I'm also sorry to be chiming in late here. But first off: congrats on the publication. I look forward to seeing it in print. You do such a beautiful job of capturing the mother-speaker relationship as Kasey mentioned. The poem also plays with tone in very complex ways--the ending seems much more immediate to me than the opening. This tonal progression works really well, I think, since it traces the speaker's multilayered relationship with her mother. If you ever wanted to revise, I do wonder to what extent you need the father in the poem at all but I think you do an excellent job with this rendering. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThank you, all, for your thorough and great comments/suggestions. I have just revised the poem a second time and hope the Comstock editors will accommodate another version!! You all are the best!
ReplyDelete