The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

Desks

Desks My parents’ stairs had fading green carpet on which shafts of sun took their own time. The windows directed quiet light where beams of dust were welcome. On the window seat, the slow pillows kept their places in their softened pockets of air. Cats moved more deliberately here than elsewhere. Though my parents were always reading something new to each other in bed in the mornings before breakfast—George Herbert, Chiang Yee, Trollope, Dogen, Christina Rossetti, Sri Aurobindo—and though my mother’s art dolls and my father’s philosophy books kept increasing in number, it seemed to me more and more as I got older that nothing in that house ever, ever changed. And nothing ever had. Her arms and chest were deep as earth, her lap astoundingly soft and warm. It reBected and absorbed me, baked me to a meld of soft stone and yielding eyes. I lent my slope of mouse-brown silk awareness, the crown of my energy, to the feel of my mother’s face behind and above me, her tripod of gaze and breath just grazing my warm enraptured head. The book must have had big pages. I followed the strong Angers as they offered up each one to the expert slide of her worldly, tapered thumb. The book was probably chosen from the overloaded shelves of her costume and history collection for its luxury, its doll costumes : a full-page plate of Queen Elizabeth; one of a shiny courtier in tight stockings and long shoes; and then came the sudden image of the almost embarrassingly intelligent forehead stretching nakedly over the almost too-open eyes. The words Banked him like designs in their archaic typeface, as the etching’s monotone traced an ever-deeper cave to echo the rich message her voice poured over my head. “Shakespeare,” she said. Then she heard my own Arst word, or the Arst word she remembers 103 hearing me say. “Shakespeare,” it must have lisped and echoed in the warm cave of the house. For years after I left in ninth grade for boarding school, driven out of the house by violation and fear, whenever I returned I could feel the dust rising up in the same pattern as it had before, over the window seat where I had sat with her before I could read, and where I had sat with her when I was twelve and wrote: The other person sighs, but the air is still too calm, and the dust sighs also, as it drifts up and down. ❧ My Favorite Passage from Dante. The Body of God by Eric Gutkind. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus read thirty, Afty times over and marked in a different color each time so that almost every sentence was underlined . The books on top of the desk, Daddy told me the year before he died, were closest to his heart. After his death, when I had his desk shipped to where I was living in Ohio, I needed to scrub off a deep layer of sticky grime from its front edges, the residue of decades of his elbows. Cleaning his study that year, I wore a dust mask while moving all the boxes of papers and magazines that covered the Boor by then, and I still coughed for days. His padded cell, a friend joked. Photos of Wittgenstein, the family , the monastery in Greece where he’d stayed, propped unframed , dust-covered and faded amid the double-parked weight of books, pictures settled strangely askew during those decades of deep, shaded privacy. In the middle of those decades, in times that felt like they would never, never end, I braced hard and slid open the very slow heavy oak drawer. I was here for a stamp. That was allowed, safe, literary, modern, clean. He kept stamps in the middle lefthand one, favorites in old denominations in neat white envelopes , sometimes labeled in his inky hieroglyphics—“Einstein ,” “moon landing,” “balloons,” “Emily Dickinson.” ❧ Ordinary yard care, like sit-down family dinners, or driving us kids anywhere, tended to be either beyond or beneath my par104 ents. My father had planted the sap-scabbed pines and giant macabre-branched Ars that towered and drooped, by the time I was in college, high and low enough to transform the smallish front yard into a uniquely spooky ordeal. Through that grassless tunnel the weathering gray Victorianesque house loomed like a museum, a university, a time capsule, after forty-plus years of continuous occupation by my...