Death Comes to Me Again a Girl
[quote]
And oh, the oh my nape of the neck. The up-swept oh my nape of the neck. I could walk behind anyone and fall in beloved. Don't stop. Don't plough around."
~Dorianne Laux, from "The Secret of Backs"
[/quote]
Expiry Comes to Me Again, a Girl
Death comes to me again, a girl
in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.
Information technology's not so terrible she tells me,
non like you lot call up, all darkness
and silence. In that location are windchimes
and the olfactory property of lemons, some days
it rains, but more often the air is dry
and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase
built from pilus and os and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.
Moon in the Window
I wish I could say I was the kind of kid
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward information technology and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled towards the border of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from newspaper and mucilage. All I had
was a flashlight, vivid as the moon,
a white pigsty blazing beneath the sheets.
– Dorianne Laux
Deanna Phoenix Selene: There is an artful truth to your work, Dorianne, a storyteller's gift for pulling the reader in with details gritty and yet of the spirit. Like many groovy artists (I am reminded particularly of painters Georgia O'Keefe and Frida Kahlo) you bring the eye close to what is correct in front of united states, allowing us to see the beauty within the pain. Is writing for you so an optimistic act? Or an act of courage?
(Listen to Dorianne Laux reading, "Life is Cute")
Dorianne Laux: Writing as an act of optimism? Maybe that's truthful. I mean, why bother if y'all have no hope, even a very small hope, for our species. Maybe, equally artists, we recollect that if we finish and look closely, or if we await closely enough, something good could come of that gaze, something apprehended. O'Keefe seemed actually to practice the reverse, bring us close to run across the pain in the beauty, or as Rilke would say, the terror of beauty. Kahlo took her physical hurting and yep, fabricated it oddly beautiful. Did it have backbone for them to practise that? I don't think they had a pick. Artists seem to be compelled to exercise what they practice, obsessed, preternaturally alert to the world, not just to pain and beauty, but as you say, the being of each within the other. And for some reason, they feel compelled to make something of that, write it downward, brand a painting of information technology, a sculpture, a song.
Deanna Phoenix Selene: What is the role of poet in times of crunch?
Dorianne Laux: I don't believe that a poet has much of a function in times of crisis, only poetry certainly does. Nosotros know people turn to verse, fifty-fifty not-readers of poetry, in times of crisis–death, war, devastation, loss of any kind, too as in times of joy–weddings, births, anniversaries. Auden wrote his poem September 1, 1939, and it was resurrected on 9/11/. People needed verse to help them through the crisis. The poet was of no importance, but the poem. Auden'due south "Funeral Dejection" has been read at funerals since it was published in 1938:
Stop all the clocks, cutting off the telephone.
Forbid the dog from barking with a juicy os,
Silence the pianos and with deadened drum
Bring out the bury, let the mourners come up.
And his poem, "Tell Me The Truth near Love," is recited at weddings:
Volition it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the double-decker on my
toes?
Will it come up similar a alter in the weather?
Will its greeting
be courteous or crude?
Volition information technology alter my life altogether?
O tell me
the truth most love.
Few people know who Auden was, or care much. It's the verse they want.
Grit
Someone spoke to me last night
told me the truth. Just a few words, but I recognized information technology.
I knew I should brand myself go upward,
write it downward, but it was tardily,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember simply the flavor —
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like fine pulverization, like dust.
And I wasn't elated or frightened,
but elementary rapt, aware.
That'south how information technology is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all brilliant and black wings,
and yous're simply too tired to open it.
Look at me. I'm continuing on a deck
in the middle of Oregon. There are
friends inside the house. Information technology's non my
house, you don't know them.
They're drinking and singing
and playing guitars. You love
this song, call back, "Ophelia,"
Boards on the windows, mail service
by the door. I'm whispering
so they won't remember I'm crazy.
They don't know me that well.
Where are yous at present? I feel stupid.
I'thousand talking to copse, to leaves
swarming on the black air, stars
blinking in and out of heart-
shaped shadows, to the moon, half-
lit and barren, stuck like an axe
between the branches. What are you
now? Air? Mist? Dust? Lite?
What? Give me something. I have
to know where to send my vox.
A direction. An object. My love, it needs
a place to rest. Say anything. I'one thousand listening.
I'm prepare to believe. Even lies, I don't care.
Say burning bush-league. Say stone. They've
stopped singing now and I really should become.
So tell me, rapidly. Information technology'south April. I'one thousand
on Spring Street. That'due south my gray automobile
in the driveway. They're laughing
and dancing. Someone's spring
to show up soon. I'm waving.
Give me a sign if you lot can run across me.
I'one thousand the only one hither on my knees.
~ by Dorianne Laux
Deanna Phoenix Selene: Practise you notice that writing about a traumatic event in an artistic way, bringing in metaphor and play of audio, for instance, allows you to access an experience more deeply by assuasive yous perhaps a different entry? Or does it afford you distance, allowing you lot to accept a wider perspective?
Dorianne Laux
Dorianne Laux: Yeah, both things sound true to me. Nosotros need some distance in order to write nearly anything, and especially if a traumatic issue is involved. Post-obit a sound, an epitome, a formal construction, repetition, or any poetic device, can help to keep the heed occupied so that the emotions are held at bay, or so that the emotion tin exist subsumed in the device, the image, the metaphor, and so as to not bleed out onto the folio every bit cliche or sentimentality. You desire the rawness of the experience, only not the actual gaping wound. It'due south a delicate thing to write about trauma, every bit poetry is already such an intense class of communication. Understatement helps. We all know that if yous scream something, you may go someone's attending, just they aren't actually listening to what you're saying as much every bit how you're expressing information technology– anger, grief, fearfulness. But if it's whispered, it actually intensifies not only the experience, but the words being said. We strain to hear what's whispered. We turn off what's shouted.
Savages
They buy poetry like gang members
buy guns — for discontinuity, caliber,
heft and defense. They sit on the floor
in the stacks, thumbing through Keats
and Plath, Levine and Olds, four boys
in a bookstore, black glasses, brackish hair,
rumpled shirts from the bin at St. Vincent de Paul.
I slides a warped hardback
from the bottom shelf, the others
scoot over to check the dates,
the yellowed sheaves ride smooth
nether their fingers.
Ane reads a stanza in a whisper,
another turns the page, and their heads
almost touch, temple to temple — toughs
in a huddle, barbarians before a hunt, kids
hiding in an alley while sirens spiral past.
When they finish reading one closes
the musty encompass like the door
on Tutankhamen's tomb. They are savage
for knowledge, for dazzler and truth.
They clamber on their knees to find information technology.
~from "Savages," by Dorianne Laux
Deanna Phoenix Selene: Has there ever been an experience too strong for you to write about?
Dorianne Laux: Aye, though that doesn't hateful I won't break through and write about it at some point. Of course, information technology's those very experiences we want most to approach, if not direct, at least in spirit, in depth and shadow and sorrow. I've written virtually the expiry of those close to me, most recently my mother'southward death. That loss was so vast and heartless, so desolate and lonely, I couldn't imagine writing near information technology. One affair that happened which enabled me to endeavour, was reading John Donne'southward Holy Sonnets. I was so immersed in grief I don't even remember why or how or where I was reading them. I had always loved his poems, "Death Be Not Proud" and "Batter My Heart," but somehow I came across his sonnet 7:
At the circular earths imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, ascend
From decease, y'all numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom warre, dearth, sage, agues, tyrannies,
Despaire, police hazard, hath slaine, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never tast deaths woe.
Simply permit them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a infinite,
For, if above all these, my sinnes abound,
'Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,
When wee are at that place; hither on this lowly ground,
Teach mee how to repent; for that's equally proficient
As if thou'hadst seal'd my pardon, with thy blood.
We spoke earlier of employing some poetic device or structure to assist united states through hard material. I made a listing of Donne's end rhymes, and decided to effort to write toward each give-and-take in the line equally I went along. I'm not fifty-fifty sure I knew I was going to write about my mother, but when the poem was finished, I found I'd been able to attain something, to say something I didn't think I was yet capable of saying.
Death Of The Mother
At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, ascend…
At mean solar day'southward finish: terminal sight, audio, smell and touch, blow
your terminal breath into the infirmary's disinfected air, rise
from your bed, mother of eight, the bluish scars of infinity
lacing your belly, your fractious hair and bony knees, and go
where we tin can never find y'all, where we can never overthrow
your lust for social club, your love of chaos, your tyrannies
of despair, your tin can of beer. Cast downwardly your nightshade eyes
and float through the repose, your nightgown wrapped like woe
effectually your shredded soul, your cavernous centre, that infinite
yous left u.s.a. like a gift, breakable staircase of ifs we are bound
to climb too often and too late. Unleash us, let your grace
breathe over usa in silence, when we can deport it, ground
every bit nosotros are into our loss. You taught us how to glean the good
from anything, pardon anyone, even you lot, awash as nosotros are in your blood.
Donne'south poems helped me through my female parent'due south decease, as they as well helped me to write about her death. And as we spoke of before, it wasn't the poet, who himself died in 1631, in London, while I lived through my mother's death well-nigh 400 years later in Raleigh, simply the poems he left u.s., me, to read in the hours of despair.
How It Volition Happen, When
There you are, exhausted from another night of crying,
curled up on the couch, the flooring, at the foot of the bed,
anywhere you fall you lot autumn down crying, half amazed
at what the torso is capable of, non believing you lot tin can weep
anymore. And at that place they are: his socks, his shirt, your
underwear, and your winter gloves, all in a loose pile
side by side to the bathroom door, and you fall downwardly once more.
Someday, years from now, things will be dissimilar:
the house make clean for once, everything in its identify, windows
shining, sunday coming in easily now, skimming across
the thin glaze of wax on the wood floor. You'll be peeling
an orange or watching a bird leap from the border of the rooftop
adjacent door, noticing how, for example, her trunk is trapped
in the air, only a moment before gathering the will to fly
into the ruff at her wings, and so doing information technology: flight.
You'll exist reading, and for a moment you'll see a give-and-take
you don't recognize, a elementary words like cup or gate or wisp
and y'all'll ponder similar a child discovering language.
Loving cup, you'll say over and over until it begins to make sense,
and that's when you'll say it, for the first fourth dimension, out loud: He's dead.
He's not coming back, and it will be the showtime time you believe information technology.
~Dorianne Laux
Deanna Phoenix Selene: In modernistic society we are and so removed from the dying process and so unprepared when we lose someone we love, particularly when the process is stretched out so painfully and disrespectfully, every bit it is with cancer. Despite what we learn from Hollywood, "expiry is not romantic," as you lot state in your poem, but rather, "a black note on an empty staff." What and then can we do differently to better prepare ourselves?
Dorianne Laux: I think all poetry is a grooming for death. A colleague of Tu Fu once said to him, "It is similar being alive twice." I love this little verse form by Brazilian poet, Manuel Banderia:
Life is a miracle.
Each flower,
with its form, colour, aroma
each flower is a phenomenon.
Each bird,
with its plume, its flight, its song
each bird is a miracle.
The space, infinite,
the infinite is a miracle.
The time, infinite,
the fourth dimension is a phenomenon.
The memory is a miracle.
The censor is a miracle.
Everything is a miracle.
Everything but the death.
Poetry allows us access to the quotidian mysteries. It allows us to revere the phenomenon of our lives as we alive them, then that when expiry comes, we'll be grateful. Another verse form, in the form of five sentences, is by Gary Young:
Two girls were struck by lightning at the harbor mouth. An orangish
flame lifted them upwardly and laid them downward again. Their thin suits had
been melted abroad. It'south a phenomenon they survived. It'southward a miracle they
were always built-in at all.
Dorianne Laux
Abschieds Symphony
Someone I beloved is dying, which is why,
when I turn the key in the ignition
and back the car out of the parking infinite
in the clandestine garage, and the radio
comes on, sudden and loud, something
past Haydn, a diminishing fugue, and maneuver
the car through the dimly lit tunnels
with their low ceilings, post-obit the yellowish arrows
stenciled at intervals on the gray cement walls,
I retrieve of him, moving slowly through the concluding
difficult days of his life and I tin can't stop crying.
When I arrive at the toll gate I have to make myself
stop thinking as I dig in my pockets for the concluding
of my coins, plow to the attendant, indifferent
in his bluish smock, his white hair crimper like smoke
around his weathered neck, and say Cheers,
similar an idiot, and bulldoze into the blinding midday calorie-free.
Everything is hideously symbolic,
and everything reminds me of cancer:
the Chevron truck, its rounded underbelly
spattered with route grit and the sweat
of final night's pelting, the dumpster
backside the flower store, its sprung lid
pressing downwards on dead wedding bouquets—
fifty-fifty the smell of something simple, java drifting
from the open door of a cafe and my eyes
coat over, ache in their sockets.
For months now all I've wanted is the blessing
of inattention, to move carefully from room to room
in my small house, numb with forgetfulness.
To eat a bowl of cereal and non imagine him,
scrubbed thin and pale, unable to swallow.
How non to imagine the tumors
ripening beneath his skin, flesh
I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips,
pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights
so difficult I idea I could enter him, open up
his dorsum at the spine like a door or a drapery
and slip in similar a small fish betwixt his ribs,
nudge the coral of his brain with my lips,
brushing over the blue coils of his bowels
with the fluted silk of my tail.
Death is non romantic. He is dying,
no matter how I come across it, no matter
what I believe, that fact is stark
and one dimensional, atonal,
a blackness annotation on an empty staff.
My feet are cold, but not as cold as his,
and I hate this music that floods
the cramped insides of my car, my head,
slowing the earth down with its
lurid majesty, transforming everything I run across
into some sort of memorial to life,
no matter how ugly or senseless—
even the onetime Ford in forepart of me,
its battered rear end thinning to scallops of rust,
pumping black classical clouds of exhaust
into the shimmering air— even the tenacious
nasturtiums clinging to a debate, vine and flower
of the insignificant, music spilling
from their open up faces, spooling upwardly, past
the last rim of blue and into the withal puddle
of some other galaxy, equally if all that emptiness
were a place of benevolence, a destination,
a peace we could ascent to.
~ Dorianne Laux
Deanna Phoenix Selene: You lot have worked as a sanatorium melt, a gas station manager, a maid. Do you believe that any job can be made sacred? Is there any exception?
Dorianne Laux
Dorianne Laux: I'm not sure. As death is non romantic, neither is work. It's difficult, complex try, even if you beloved the piece of work you do, and there are jobs I would never want to do. There's a wonderful poem in a book called, Night Shift at the Crucifix Manufactory, past Philip Dacey, called "The Feet Homo." It ends with these lines:
It wasn't easy:
imagine Jesus after Jesus coming down
at you along
that line, and yous with
your hammer poised, y'all knowing
what you lot have
to do to make a living.
Or B.H Fairchild'southward poem, Song:
A small thing done well, my male parent said
so often that I tired of
hearing it and lost
myself in the shop's north end, an underworld
of
welders who wore black masks and stared
through smoked drinking glass where
all was midnight
except the purest spark, the bluish-white arc
of the
clamp and rod. Hammers made tiresome tunes
hacking slag, and acetylene
flames bandage shadows
of men against the tin roof like great birds
trapped in diminishing circles of light.
But yes, I think there is a dignity to work. In that location's a story nearly Tom Waits stopping and going into an old church to look at the stained glass. Someone came in and mistook him for the new janitor and brought out a broom and mop and put him to piece of work. Tom, rather than explaining who he was, took up the broom and began sweeping. I love that story. Why not? Is one job more "sacred" than another? Is being a musician and songwriter "better" than being a janitor? Each has a job to do and should do information technology as well as they can. What does the character "Ask" say in Robert Boswell's Crooked Hearts? "Make clean, even where it doesn't show." Then over again, I remember being told by Carolyn Forche, every bit 1 woman poet to another, "You don't have to accept a clean house." It was great communication! That'due south the problem with poets, ii opposing thoughts tin can exist true at the same time.
Dorianne Laux
Deanna Phoenix Selene: Practice you lot experience that the process of writing verse makes i more than empathetic?
Dorianne Laux: Again, I'm not sure, only I do call back the chances are better for anyone who spends time trying to figure out their place in the world through art. Art is introspective past nature, and introspection often leads to self-examination, to understanding and compassion, both for the self and for others. And so again, there take been plenty of artists who were existent jerks. So I tin't say for sure. I do know information technology'southward helped me to become more aware. And to fifty-fifty take some empathy for the jerk in myself.
Communist china
From behind he looks like a man
I once loved, that hangdog slouch
to his jeans, a sweater vest, his cervix
thick-veined as a horse cock, a halo
of chopped curls.
He orders coffee and searches
his pockets, kickoff in front, then
from backside, a long finger sliding
into the slitted denim the manner that homo
slipped his thumb into me ane summer
equally we lay after love, our freckled
bodies ii pale starfish on the sheets.
Semen leaked and pooled in his palm
as he moved his thumb slowly, non
to excite me, just to affirm
he'd been there.
I take loved other men since, taken
them into my mouth similar a warm vowel,
lain beneath them and watched their irises
bladder similar pocket-sized worlds in their optics.
Merely this human being pressed his thumb
toward the tail of my spine
every bit if he were entering
Mainland china, or a ripe papaya
so that now
when I recall of dear
I think of this.
~Dorianne Laux
Deanna Phoenix Selene: Who have been your greatest influences in learning how to experience the world deeply and express what y'all witness poetically?
Dorianne Laux & Mom
Dorianne Laux: My mother was a nifty teacher. She taught me to listen, to run into, to think, to imagine. She played piano, and the music that surrounded me equally a child allowed me to go down inside myself, into a wordless identify of feeling and imagination. So breaking that silence with words seemed a momentous deed. She also had a huge vocabulary and I think that attention to linguistic communication inspired me. She also had a mode of saying things that was outrageous, "Oh Jesus Christ on a crutch," she might say, and I saw how language could be fun, imagistic, elastic, used to wild purpose. Nature was a great teacher of subtlety and silence and vastness. I grew up in the canyons of San Diego, virtually the keen Pacific Ocean. As a kid, those muted desert colors set against the wilderness of the sea taught me how truly small I was, and that I was only ane fauna amid the many animals.
"But I know information technology's only luck
that delivered him here, luck and a love
that had nothing to do with me. Except
that this is what nosotros sometimes get
if we live long enough. If nosotros are patient
with our lives."
~Dorianne Laux, "Music in the Morning"
Deanna Phoenix Selene: How can nosotros learn to be more attentive, patient? Every bit poets and artists and as human being beings?
Dorianne Laux: The human activity of reading a poem is an act of attentiveness. Certainly the act of writing and revising a poem, working toward a sense of remainder, perfection, takes great patience. Only considerateness takes time and quietude, a sense of leisure in a world that's constantly clamoring for another kind of attention. We have to create what Wordsworth chosen "spots of time" in our lives.
There are in our beingness spots of fourth dimension,
That with distinct
pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
Past faux
opinion and contentious thought,
Or nil of heavier or more mortiferous
weight,
In niggling occupations, and the round
Of ordinary
intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue,
by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables the states to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts usa upwardly when fallen.
We demand to take the fourth dimension to retrieve ourselves, break from the oversupply and find a identify where we can drowse and muse, adore the world, be grateful. This seems ridiculous in a time when we are at war, people are out of jobs, children are beingness bought and sold. It'southward a horror show out there. And it always has been. There was never a halcyon time in the history of our species. But we can make our own personal halcyon, even if only for moments, "spots of time" from which we tin can rise refreshed and take upwards the plow over again. And wield, with precision, the pen.
This Close
In the room where we lie,
calorie-free stains the fatigued shades yellow.
We sweat and pull at each other, climb
with our fingers the slippery ladders of rib.
Wherever our bodies touch, the mankind
comes alive. Head and need, like invisible
animals, champ at my breast, the soft
insides of your thighs. What I want
I simply accomplish out and take, no delicacy now,
the night human being breadstuff I eat handful
by greedy scattering. Optics fingers, mouths,
sweet leeches of desire. Crazy woman,
her encephalon full of bees, encounter how her palms curl
into fists and beat the pillow senseless.
And when my trunk finally gives in to it
then pulls itself away, salt-laced
and arched with its final ache, I am
so grateful I would give y'all annihilation, anything.
If I loved y'all, being this close would kill me.
~Dorianne Laux
Deanna Phoenix Selene: What is it about the moon?
Dorianne Laux: It'southward mayhap a part of our world flung out into the void, the expressionless, cold, silent, lifeless part of our cacophonous, calamitous selves. It'south constant and constantly changing. It's and so big and round and full, or so thin and curved and abrupt. Information technology disappears. It reappears. Information technology follows us. Information technology keeps us visitor. It's a lantern confronting the darkness. It seems to suffer. Information technology seems to glow. Information technology's the showtime cliche. And similar the rose, we will never tire of writing about it.
Farther Notes:
Dorianne Laux's fifth collection, The Book of Men, is currently available from W.W. Norton. Her 4th book of poems, Facts about the Moon, is the recipient of the Oregon Volume Award and was curt-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Conduct, finalist for the National Volume Critic's Circumvolve Award, and Smoke, likewise as two fine pocket-size printing editions, Superman: The Chapbook and Dark Charms, both from Carmine Dragonfly Press. Co-author of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
Laux has been teaching poesy in private and public venues since 1990 and since 2004 at Pacific University'south Low-Residency MFA Programme. In the summers she teaches at the Esalen Institute in Large Sur, California and Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Loma. Her poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Romanaian, Dutch, Afrikaans and Brazilian Portuguese, and her selected works, In a Room with a Rag in my Manus, have been translated into Arabic by Camel/Kalima Printing. Recent poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Cerise Press, Margie, The Seattle Review, Tin Firm and The Valparaiso Review. She and her hubby, poet Joseph Millar, moved to Raleigh in 2008 where she teaches poetry in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
Visit Dorianne Laux's author website
Deanna Selene
My dream: to create a unique vehicle for artists and visionaries from all genres and all over the globe to inspire and learn from i another.
Source: https://combustus.com/dorianne-laux-all-poetry-is-preparation-for-death/
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