I haven't even sent a picture of a rabbit to her...


Last autumn (2006), I went through an awkward phase of intense longing, and I sought partial fulfillment in a return to my collegiate appreciation of poetry. I searched for new (to me) poets whose work reminded me of a younger self, one who had encountered and survived similar phases in the past. One evening, in particular, after Sören and I had wandered through the aisles of BookPeople picking up anything that interested us, we found ourselves eating a convivial dinner at Habana on South Congress, eating tostones and reading our own individual books of poetry. I believe Sören's choice was Shel Silverstein, and one of mine was Anne Sexton.



I have been selectively rereading her poems while I am in Cork (don't ask me why I'm not reading any of the great Irish poets -- I promise I will work my way around to them, plus finally get through Ulysses, before I leave this island for good next summer...). One poem ("The Double Image") has piqued my interest and has been hard for me to stop thinking about. Click Read More for the stanzas that are calling out to me...

7.

I could not get you back
except for weekends. You came
each time, clutching the picture of a rabbit
that I had sent you. For the last time I unpack
your things. We touch from habit.
The first visit you asked my name.

Now you stay for good. I will forget
how we bumped away from each other like marionettes
on strings. It wasn't the same
as love, letting weekends contain
us. You scrape your knee. You learn my name,
wobbling up the sidewalk, calling and crying.
You call me mother and I remember my mother again,
somewhere in greater Boston, dying.

I remember we named you Joyce
so we could call you Joy.
You came like an awkward guest
that first time, all wrapped and moist
and strange at my heavy breast.
I needed you. I didn't want a boy,
only a girl, a small milky mouse
of a girl, already loved, already loud in the house
of herself. We named you Joy.
I, who was never quite sure
about being a girl, needed another
life, another image to remind me.
And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure
nor soothe it. I made you to find me.

The entire poem is breathtakingly beautiful and sorrowful, but it is the elements of absence and reconnection that seem particularly personal to me today. I think about the picture of a rabbit she had sent to her daughter while she was still recuperating at her mother's house after a failed suicide ("Once I mailed you a picture of a rabbit/and a postcard of Motif number one,/as if it were normal/to be a mother and be gone.") and I wonder if this falls into the theme of a double image, and how it corresponds to the portrait the poet posed for during the same time frame. Is one an image of her daughter and one an image of the poet (or even her mother)?

Posted: Sun - November 4, 2007 at 12:26 PM        

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