This Strange Land

We’ve been watching the Jeeves and Wooster TV series with Walker (who is enjoying it as much as we are without having read the stories first) so when we were getting dressed up for yet another fancy dinner on campus last night, Ron pointed out that we were living the life of Bertie Wooster, just one party after another. That quite cheered me up about another night out.

Not surprisingly, my favorite part of the revamped campus job is the writing. My least favorite part is the human contact. And yet, I do enjoy a little of it, and it’s quite nice to put faces with names of people I’ve read and been read by for the past, um, two decades. As people get older, it’s often good for them to be shaken out of the comfortable ruts they’ve made for themselves, and I think it leads me a little away from the path of becoming just like my mother, a solitary person whose shyness and wicked sense of humor often presents as a steely disapproval of others.

So I was fascinated when I came across the following poem in Shara McCallum’s volume This Strange Land:

My Mother As Narcissus

Once I was like you, wearing solitude
as if it were a garment of the finest threads.

Mistaking loneliness for beauty, I knelt
before the pool, dipped my face toward its surface,

Meeting not my reflection so much
as the stillness of its depths.

At first, it was only a test. Then each day
I had to surpass the one before,

peering longer to feel time
spinning almost to a stop.

Daughter, believe me when I tell you my flaw
Was not vanity but pride. I thought

I could succeed where others had failed.
I thought I could stand to look

into the centre of myself
and not fall in.

Isn’t that a nice twist on the convention, and a turn of thought, to consider how vanity and pride overlap and feed on each other in solitude? Sometimes I think I’m too influenced by how others must perceive me, but then I read a poem like this and think that perhaps that awareness is a good thing for those of us who need a lot of solitude.

The volume has two other poems that spoke to me as loudly as that one did. The first one that struck me (because I was reading the volume in order, for once) is about those moments when your life changes. The moment when you’re in a car crash, or you injure yourself, or you find out the number of days left to a loved one.

The Waves

We walk into rooms that wait for us to enter them.
We walk into waves that threaten to drown us.

But they don’t. They fill us instead
with salt, sand, and their own light.

As a child, from a small boat, I watched my father
swim away, ignoring my mother’s pleas—her voice

sucked into the wind, my own no match
for the undertow or sharks I feared.

There are moments in a life
when everything comes apart, is ripped so clean

who you are is laid bare. My father returned to us
that day, but he was not the same man

I had seen enter those waves.

Isn’t the wave metaphor apt? It makes me think of my housemate Miriam, who always looked at our mail with apprehension, saying she feared a “letter of ruin.” It makes me think of the “check engine light” that came on again last night, the one that I’m going to cover up with a piece of black electrical tape as soon as I get some.

The other poem I enjoyed from this volume (published in 2011 and therefore eligible for the Indie Lit Awards) is this one, which must strike me particularly because Ron and I are having more moments with just the two of us, what with Eleanor being far away and Walker being busy with chess, theater, astronomy, and forty jillion other activities.

Blackberries

In another life, you and I
remain the couple of our youth,

living in upstate New York,
renting a farmhouse on thirty-three acres of woods.

Walking in winter, knee-deep in snow,
we came to a clearing. I could not see

the immensity of the field for the cold.
With each inhale air pricked my lungs,

almost erased sunlight and blackberries
we’d picked from brambles months before.

Love, marriage is that purple-black fruit,
even now searing my tongue.

One of the things that amuses me about the idyllic “upstate New York farmhouse” image is that it’s in one of our favorite movies, The Sure Thing. It was never our image of the good life, but it’s part of a story that is.

A lot of the poems in this volume were foreign to my experience, but these three spoke to it, so they’re the ones I picked out to share with you. It’s one way to read poetry. Do any of these poems also speak to you?