Nature: Poems Old and New by May Swenson
It was in reading Megan
Marshall’s recent biography of Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, that I was reminded of the
poet May Swenson, of her friendship with Bishop, of their lengthy
correspondence, and of her poems themselves, which I’d remembered liking very
much. Considering them again, I was pleasantly surprised.
Water Picture
In the
pond in the park
all
things are doubled:
Long
buildings hang and
wriggle
gently. Chimneys
are bent
legs bouncing
on clouds
below. A flag
wags like
a fishhook
down
there in the sky.
The
arched stone bridge
is an
eye, with underlid
in the
water. In its lens
dip
crinkled heads with hats
that
don’t fall off. Dogs go by,
barking
on their backs.
A baby,
taken to feed the
ducks,
dangles upside-down,
a pink
balloon for a buoy.
Treetops
deploy a haze of
cherry
bloom for roots,
where
birds coast belly-up
in the
glass bowl of a hill;
from its
bottom a bunch
of
peanut-munching children
is
suspended by their
sneakers,
waveringly.
A swan,
with twin necks
forming
the figure 3,
steers
between two dimpled
towers
doubled. Fondly
hissing,
she kisses herself,
and all
the scene is troubled:
water-windows
splinter,
tree-limbs
tangle, the bridge
folds
like a fan.
Digging in the Garden of Age I
Uncover a Live Root
( For E.W.)
The smell
of wet geraniums. On furry
leaves, transparent drops rounded
as cat’s eyes seen sideways.
Smell of the dark earth, and damp
brick of
the pots you held, tamped empty.
Flash of the new trowel. Your eyes
green in greenhouse light. Smell of
your cotton smock, of your neck
in the freckled shade of your hair.
A gleam
of sweat in your lip’s scoop.
Pungent germanium leaves, their wet
smell
when our widening pupils met.
Anna Thilda May Swenson was
born to Swedish immigrants in Logan, Utah in 1913. After college she settled
all but permanently in New York City where she worked—while writing and
publishing her poetry—as a stenographer, a ghost writer, and a manuscript
reader at the groundbreaking New Direction Press. Her honors included
fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ford, Rockefeller, and MacArthur foundations,
as well as a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Of the poet and her work
writer Cynthia Ozick remarked, “Swenson sees more minutely than anyone, and
with a nearly holy exactitude.” Note for
yourself the ‘nearly holy exactitude’ in this, perhaps my favorite of all her
poems:
That the Soul May Wax Plump
My dumpy
little mother on the undertaker’s slab
had a
mannequin’s grace. From chin to foot
the sheet
outlined her, thin and tall. Her face
uptilted,
bloodless, smooth, had a long smile.
Her head
rested on a block under her nape,
her neck
was long, her hair waved, upswept. But later,
at ‘the
viewing,’ sunk in the casket in pink tulle,
an
expensive present that might spoil, dressed
in Eden’s
green apron, organdy bonnet on,
she shrank,
grew short again, and yellow. Who
put the
gold-rimmed glasses on her shut face, who
laid her
left hand with the wedding ring on
her
stomach that really didn’t seem to be there
under the
fake lace?
Mother’s
work before she died was self-purification,
A regimen
of near starvation, to be worthy to go
To Our
Father, Whom she confused (or, more aptly, fused)
With our
father, in Heaven long since. She believed
In
evacuation, an often and fierce purgation,
Meant to
teach the body to be hollow, that the soul
May wax
plump. At the moment of her death, the wind
Rushed
out from all her pipes at once. Throat and rectum
Sang
together, a galvanic spasm, hiss of ecstasy.
Then, a
flat collapse. Legs and arms flung wide,
Like that
female Spanish saint slung by the ankles
To a
cross, her mouth stayed open in a dark O. So,
Her
vigorous soul whizzed free. On the undertaker’s slab, she
Lay
youthful, cool, triumphant, with a long smile.
Here, bristling with intelligence,
with life, is one of her many long letters to Elizabeth Bishop:
Finally, this is Swenson
reading some of her own work at the Poetry Center in New York: Click Here
Peter Adam Nash
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