In Which I Genuflect at the Feet of Poets

I have found another poem to love:

Two Months After

A clutch of rain against the windows.
All day this beaten house has been bearing up
under the March wind, a wind that aches
down the thick beams the carpenter cut

to take its weight. A mud-covered truck
drones up the hill, under a stone sky.
Spring will come only after the hard work
of the water is done, after the high

green leaves have shouldered their sparks
through the winter's ancient test.
Perhaps then the hard ice of your death

will have rotted away. In Schubert's songs
I listen for your listening, for the arch
of smoking notes your night-heart sang.

Jay Leeming

This is a play on the structure of Shakespearean sonnets. It starts out traditionally, with quatrains with an alternating rhyme scheme. But then it diverges. There are two three-line stanzas that start to lift the despair expressed in the two quatrains. But the really interesting thing about this poem is the pattern of the types of rhymes. There are six pairs of half-rhymes--rhymes that sound similar but are not traditional perfect rhymes--and one pair that rhymes perfectly: "sky" and "high". If we look at the types of half-rhymes that make up the other pairs, a pattern emerges. The first half-rhyme is an example of consonance. The next is assonance, and then consonance, again. The perfect rhyme is in the middle, then the rhymes after the perfect rhyme mirror those before: consonance, assonance, consonance. This give the poem a feeling of hope--it may start out in the depths of despair, but this is mirrored by loving remembrance.
I am continually amazed by the complexity of poems--especially sonnets. There always seem to be greater depths to explore, and there are so many elements to fit together. I think that it might be time to let poets run the world... Anyone who can craft something with this much complexity of meaning must have something important to contribute. Probably.

In Which I am a Freebird College Student

It is difficult to shift between home and school. I went home this weekend, and the pace was so different. I had to contend with my parents' wants and needs rather than just my own. The life of a college student it quite autonomous... at least for most, I think. It is for me, anyway. I set my own schedule. I eat when I want. I sleep when I want. It is up to me to do work and go to class. It is much more complicated at home, where there are errands and chores and pets and parents to deal with. But I like going home. It is comfortable--and there are home-cooked meals. But it is an adjustment. My life at school is very different from my life at home. I'm not sure how I feel about that--my first instinct is to make a value judgement: which do I prefer? But it isn't that simple. I wish it was that simple, but it isn't. So, navigating the waters of the home-school  transition will take some work--but is probably worth it, in the end, because complication adds richness to life. And gives me something to write about...

In Which I Decorate

I scraped my knuckles on the ceiling the other day. The ceiling of my room is rough, like stucco, so it tore strips of my skin away. I was surprised how much it hurt. That is one of the disadvantages to having a bunk bed: proximity to the ceiling. Although this bed is not so bad. My freshman year at Case, my bed was bunked so high that I had to wriggle, half lying down, half crawling, to get out of bed. This is not anywhere near as bad.
I have added a lot to the decoration of my room. My roommate essentially doesn't live in the room, so I have taken some liberties with it. I have a collection of bits of paper, odds and ends, that has accumulated over the last ten years of so. There is a post-it that I painted with pink glitter nail-polish again and again until you can no longer see the original color. There is a doodle from my Modernism class--a branching swirl that belches bubbles and line arrays, and 'I want to live as a giant in time' written over and over in small blocky print. I don't remember what that is from--maybe I made it up. There are note cards, revived and not yet sent. There are sheets of stickers and bits of ribbon. There are bottle-cap pendants (one with a picture of an elephant swimming to the surface) and post-cards from place my father has gone on business trips. It is a collage of memory, feeling, impulse, and appeal--my personality spelled out in scraps.

In Which I Contemplate Goths

There is something wonderfully mystical about Jane Eyre. There is a Fae-like feel to Jane's first encounter with Mr. Rochester--the secluded lane, the foggy dark of night. It is all very poetic and very shivery-in-a-good-way. I do wonder at her descriptions of Jane. She is described as small and pale and plain. But there is a sharp edge to her thoughts, despite her Quaker looks and dress. Is it traditional in a Gothic novel to have a supernatural heroine, as well as an air of the supernatural infusing the plot and setting? Jane Eyre is the quintessential Gothic novel, but to me, it reads as more: more mystical, more mysterious, more romantic. But then again, I have read very few examples of Gothic novels. So. Next on my list: one of Anne Radcliffe's Gothic novels, as she is the pioneer of the genre. Perhaps The Mysteries of Udolpho--with ghosts galore!

In Which I am Snow Flaked

I left my room wearing impractical shoes this morning, so, of course, it started to snow. I am resigned now to the fluffy frozen bits of water that strike my forehead and give me brain freeze. It is only a thin layer of snow, so far. But it is falling in delicate and regular flurries, powdered sugar sifted for hours and hours, layers and layers, eventually ten stories tall. I don't mind it so much, I suppose, because when the snow that matted by hair melts, it will force curly waves as it dries. This it the only way to get my hair to curl without risking burning it all off in the process. So I will walk in falling snow, and furtively plan to sneak back to my dorm room to change into my boots. It's fun to have something other than homework to plan.

In Which I Make Connections

I just read this poem, "The Victims" by Sharon Olds. I'll copy it here:

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and
took it, in silence, all those years and then
kicked you out, suddenly, and her
kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we
grinned inside, the way people grinned when
Nixon's helicopter lifted off the South
Lawn for the last time. We were tickled
to think of your office taken away,
your secretaries taken away,
your lunches with three double bourbons,
your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your
suits back, too, those dark
carcases hung in your closet, and the black
nonses of your shoes with their large pores?
She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it
until we pricked with her for your
annihilation, Father. Now I
pass the bums in doorways, the white
slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their
suits of compressed silt, the strained
flippers of their hands, the underwater
fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the
lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and
took it from them in silence until they had
given it all away and had nothing
left but this.

I'm fascinated by her imagery in the last sentence of the poem--comparing bums to sunken ships... The contrast of the remaining fire and the death underwater is a powerful metaphor. This says a lot about people--the way they treat each other, and the way that resentment can build up. There are people who suffer in silence and let anger fester... This reminded me of the Chimamanda Adichie novel I just finished, Purple Hibiscus. The main character, Kambili, does finally get away from her father. She and her brother find love and support with her aunt and come home changed. Her father discovers a picture of her grandfather--who still follows the traditional ways of ancestor worship--and beats her almost to death. She does not go back to live with her father. And a few months later, her father dies. Her mother deliberately poisoned him. With rat poison. And her brother goes to jail for it. The end is tragic and bittersweet. Kambili escapes her father only to be thrust into crippling responsibility--for her now mentally unstable mother and imprisoned brother. Her aunt and cousins move to America and are unhappy there. There is only the strength that she found--that she was able to pull from deep within herself.
I see so many parallels between this poem and the novel. He father did wonderful things for his country but stifled his family. I wonder how Olds would have portrayed him...

In Which I am Convoluted

I'm reading a book by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie called Purple Hibiscus. It was her first novel, and she received quite a bit of critical acclaim for it. I am in the very middle of the book, so I'm not exactly sure how things will unravel, but the main character, a teenage girl named Kambili, is a fascinating character. Her father dominates the family relationships, and is physically and emotionally abusive. It is very difficult for me to read about this. I am screaming at her--in my mind, of course--to defend herself, to defend her mother. She has been cowed by her father. She has no understanding of the context of his actions, that they might be considered wrong. The entire household revolves around her father's opinions and desires. He is fanatically Catholic--in such a way that he has not spoken to his elderly father in years because he practices the traditional religion of his village. I am having a difficult time with Kambili's situation emotionally, but I am starting to see the patterns of the prose. There is rich symbolism and imagery in the religious rituals her father insists that they follow--the motifs of whiteness and light, references to European mythology, and colonial influence emerge despite Kambili's limited perspective. She has begun her transformation--I think that she is the purple hibiscus, that will bloom and flourish. She visits her aunt, a professor at a nearby university, and, for the first time, experiences a typical and relatively healthy family life. She spends a great deal of time contemplating her aunt's garden, where a botanist planted several hybrid plants--including purple hibiscus. I think I will be able to write more about this when I have finished. Kambili's story is not yet complete for me--my thoughts about her are only half formed--as is she.