Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets

Lookalikes

13 Lookalikes Stanley Plumly You might call this a descriptive report, which means that its signal ambition is to paraphrase the content—that is, the contents—of a poem entitled “Simile,” a poem that appears in a new collection called Old Heart. I’m certain, in the space available, that I’ll not have enough room to say all that might be said: not because my poem as a text is infinitely inexhaustible (a redundancy?) but because all texts—at least as understood by postmodernism —are apparently inexhaustible subjects, objects, and window glass darkly. I’m trying to limit myself by use of the term “descriptive”—or what is visible and touchable as opposed to what is not. In a way that transcends issues of “isms” and interpretations, I’m looking to present the imagination of the literalinamorepersonalsense:howthemindandheartingoodtimeacquire such matters as experience, information, knowledge, wisdom, gravity, guilt, fear, anger, loss, longing, and so on down the litany—acquire and attach these invisible things to visible things in order to make metaphor. Make from, as I’ve often said, not up. It’s this personal, idiosyncratic, individual text of the assembly of who we are that is the truly inexhaustible in poetry. SIMILE This heart I found at lowtide this morning, accurate to a fault, hand-sized, heart-shaped, with the thick weight of a heart, a perfect piece of limestone cut by hand by the sea who knows how long, brought up from the bottom again and again, split like our own hearts, nicked from the top half down, as if in another life it had been real, stone atrium, stone sorrow, stone ventricles, stone arteries and veins. )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 stanley plumly 14 And these glittering halves of oyster shells I picked this afternoon, like the stones worn into shape, swirled, half-eaten-out, still oiled and pearly-wet, with edges sharp enough to clean a fish. Imagine that the oysters have survived, like the eyes of the otherworldly or symbols of some sexual potency, look-alikes for testicles or a woman’s soft insides, as we drink them down by swallowing them whole. . . . In the doctrine of signatures things become themselves as something else, as we are who we are word of mouth. Then I found a bird, a kind of gull, eaten by the fish and other birds, one missing wing, one eye, the rest of it so rendered past resemblance you throw it back, into the void, the chaos it came from, yet the moment it goes under it’s a memory, a metaphor, we say, for what we can’t quite name, tip of the tongue, whistle in the bone, death in its variety, its part-by-piece detail. Like the skull washed up one lost-and-found new year, fallen from the ocean sky, dead off the moon, something to conjure with, now set on the desk on the bony back of its head, neither human nor animal but brilliant white brain-coral, pitted, scalloped, furrowed at the brow, its stone, teardrop-shaped face a mask for mourning. Unlike the shapely clouds, changeable, emotional, a skein of moving mare’s tails, a skimmer’s broken wing, cumulonimbus palaces where once-and-future beings act out their human longing. I went down to the sea, the source of life, it was filled to overflowing. The blue horizon line, however many miles, parted nothing more than air from bluer water, though it was poetry to say what it looked like.1 )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 lookalikes 15 The “doctrine of signatures” is an ancient medical concept updated through the practice of medieval and romantic medicine and corrupted in modern times into something like a quid pro quo of resemblances, in which, for example, a walnut cracked open looks like the cerebral cortex, suggesting —literalizing, actually—that eating walnuts will make you smarter. And what do oysters resemble? Hence their fabled powers as an aphrodisiac . Such “signs” from nature derive originally, it’s thought, from the Hippocratic method of reading real signs of illness and applying medicinal herbs. Language, as another kind of signing, has its history lodged in similar transformations of metaphor and simile. Resemblances are our masks for meaning, even the way in which words themselves are masks. What interests me, always, is the source of the mask, the thing that resembles another thing, the way an image resembles the idea...