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Overview
In this book of transitions, Robin Morgan’s poetry crosses the boundaries of age, race, culture, and gender. The lifelong love-hate passion between mother and daughter is here, as is a vivid, rhetoric-free depiction of the suffering and rage of women cross-culturally. Morgan also traces the slow dissolution of a marriage, parsed in poems of alternating hope and despair, humor and fury—and also in a tragicomic, two-character, one-act verse play, “The Duel: A Masque.” The play, which inverts the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, was performed at the Public Theater in New York City.
Praised by the literary world for her technique, but dedicated to keeping her craft accessible and impassioned, Morgan takes us through inevitable deaths and resurrections of the self in pitch-perfect language shot through with dazzling imagery and irony.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504006378 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 03/24/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 135 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Depth Perception
Poems and a Masque
By Robin Morgan
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1982 Robin MorganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0637-8
CHAPTER 1
Piecing (for Lois Sasson)
"Sometimes you don't have no control over the way things are. Hail ruins the crops, or fire burns you out. And then you're just given so much to work with in a life and you have to do the best you can with what you got. That's what piecing is. The materials is passed on to you, or is all you can afford. But the way you put them together is your business. You can put them in any order you like. Piecing is orderly."
An anonymous woman quoted
in The Quilters: Women and
Domestic Art
Frugality is not the point. Nor waste.
It's just that very little is discarded
in any honest spending of the self,
and what remains is used and used
again, worn thin by use, softened
to the pliancy and the translucence
of old linen, patched, mended, reinforced,
and saved. So I discover how
I am rejoicing slowly into a woman
who grows older daring to write
the same poem over and over, not merely
rearranged, revised, reworded, but one poem
hundreds of times anew.
The gaudy anniversaries.
The strips of colorless days gone unexamined.
This piece of watered silk almost as shot with light
as a glance he gave me once. This sturdy
canvas shred of humor. That fragment of pearl velvet,
a particular snowstorm. Assorted samples of anger—
in oilcloth, in taffeta, in tufted chenille,
in every imaginable synthetic and ready-to-wear.
This diamond of tie-dyed flannel baby-blanket;
that other texture of deception, its dimensional embroidery.
A segment of bleached muslin still crisp with indifference.
This torn veil of chiffon, pewter as the rain
we wept through one entire July. These brightly printed
squares across which different familiar figures
walk through parks or juggle intricate abstract designs.
Two butterflies of yellow organdy my mother cut
when I was eight months old. A mango gros-grain ribbon
fading off toward peach. The corner of an old batik
showing one small window that looked out on—what?
A series of simple cotton triangles in primary colors.
And this octagonal oddment: a sunburst or mandala or pinwheel
radiating rainbow stripes against what turns out
upon close inspection to be a densely flowered background.
It's striking enough to be a centerpiece.
Once I thought this work could be less solitary.
Many of us, I imagined, would range ourselves
along the edges of some pattern we would all agree on
well beforehand, talking quietly while we worked
each with her unique stitch inward to the same shared center.
This can still be done, of course, but some designs
emerge before they can be planned, much less agreed on,
demand an entire life's work, and are best viewed upon completion.
And then, so many designers bore too easily
to work the same theme over and over, with only
the slightest gradual adjustments, like subtly changing
your thread from brown to gray.
Still, the doorbell does toll in visitors, some of whom
slash rents across the section just perfected
all without meaning to,
and some of whom admire the audacity or quality
of scraps—but rarely notice the order, which is
the one thing you control. But some contribute:
a quarter yard of paisley, or a length of gauze
fine enough for bandages. Once somebody left behind
an entire pocket of gold lamé, all by itself.
The challenge is to use it so
that the tarnished griefs she stuffed it with
to lend it shape need be no longer hidden.
Throwing such a piece away is not the answer. Nor
has hoarding anything to do with this.
And nobody really hazards piecework in the expectation
that someday all these fragments might inevitably
fit
into a gentle billow of warmth, to comfort
the longest winter sleep.
Not even that.
It's just the pleasure of rescuing some particle
into meaning. For a while.
Of course, this means that you yourself
are placed where you risk being
worn all the more severely
into translucent linen, held up
toward the light.
Heirloom
For weeks now certain hours of every day
have been wiped sterile by the visit
to her hospital room where semi-privately
she semi-lives. For weeks
I've sourly reveled in the duty
while loathing its victim—my philanthropy
about as gracious as the bestowal of a poison cup
on a thirsty beggar who embodies a convenient excuse
but with a regrettable smell.
For days I've watched her reason fracturing
faster even than her body's fragmentation, as each
cell gradually detaches itself and shudders off
via the Parkinson method of interentropic travel.
For days the medication has made her more intense
than usual: cantankerous, weepy, domineering, sentimental,
and and and repetitive, a record that will not break
but always seems about to—the scratch on her soul itself.
No wonder she's abrasive. The wonder is,
since nothing will help her anyway,
that I can still be so ungenerous.
But then this afternoon we took each other
by surprise at the quite unexpected intersection
of Insanity and Humor—La Place de la Hallucination.
Forget that she frequently remembers I'm her sister,
or her mother, or her niece, or myself—her own child
but four years old again. Today she had some style.
Or something in me finally recognized whose style it was
I thought I'd made my own.
The patent-leather shoe with the round white buckle
had no business being up there on the night-table, even
if it did ring so insistently. The fly that walked the track
on which the room-partitioning curtain could be pulled
was going to get run over but he refused to listen to advice.
The teensy lady who perched cross-legged on the windowsill
while wearing the whole poinsettia plant right in her hat
really should have left much earlier—but people just don't
realize how visitors can tire a popular patient out.
And whoever had sent the basket of Florida newborn babies' heads
certainly had weird taste.
And I, who should know better, who at a younger age and chemistry
than she have heard radio static stutter in strict rhyme,
flinched from a Navaho blanket that snapped its teeth at me,
watched beloved faces leer with helpful malice—
I find myself explaining to her
What Is Really There. Except she's caught me
as suddenly as I catch her, and in astonishment
I shrug and say, "You seeing 'em again, huh? Well,
whatthehell, why not. What else is there to see?"
—and miracle of bitter miracle, she laughs.
And helpless I am laughing and the semi-roommate laughs
and the invisible lady in the poinsettia hat
can be heard distinctly laughing
and in this space of semi-dying there is life
and magic and shared paranoia thicker than water
and more clear than blood and we are laughing
while the bright shoe rings
and the fly dares death
and the oranges clamor to be fed
and all the thousand spear-carrying extras
direct from Central Casting come scurrying in
got up in white to hustle us apart—
as if our waving to each other weren't a sign
beyond their understanding;
as if the giggly last whisper, "Try to get through
the night any old way you can, Love. See you
in the morning," weren't a hiccuped message
encoded too deep in each of all our lonely cells
for any deciphering.
Death Benefits
What might I do to get beyond
living all these lives of quiet
courage too close for comfort
to endurance or mere suffering
or graceless martyrdom—all of which
equal cowardice: the unsaid, undone, unheard,
unthought of, and undreamt undoing of what
I've undeniably understood
this undertaking would unfold
or even (unconventionally) unify?
"Leave your loved ones
fixed for life," the saying goes—and stays.
Life insurance and death benefits
are what a sensible person hopes for.
Meanwhile, Denial
leaks from our containment vessels
and passes through the doors and walls
of houses, fiats, lungs, conversations,
an odorless, tasteless, non-discriminating
equal opportunity destroyer,
the blinded head proud in its even,
ceaseless, swivel.
Is it Denial then I follow in a burst
of irritation with my own obsessive focus
on one subject: this man, this woman, their
tiresome and pretentiously embattled love?
Others are aging and dying, sharing a crisis
of energy, sickening, telling kind lies,
outgrowing commitments, not getting involved.
Others, long starved into hatred, are killing
still others for the death benefit that reassures
them they are not merely part of a tactical phase.
Others glide through back alleys, blunted
triangles of shadow, movable famines, bolts
of coarse cloth whispering How disrespectful
to god it would be to appear
out in public not wearing scar tissue.
Besides, it's protective, they add, turning
away. Why is that swivel familiar?
How can Denial deny coexisting
with the fiddlehead fern even as it exudes
its own Bach Air for Cello too loud
for our ears? Or, wordless, deny
how a cat celebrates its own tongue
with each suave coral yawn? Still,
before Affirmation becomes a denial
remember that this time cat, frond, and
melody too will be forced
to share benefits deadly as our own
denial of what they have never protested to be
their own innocence—too pure for that.
Which is not a disclaimer. I too have had policies,
kept up my payments, gone veiled, benefited
from death—and denial of death.
And thought of cashing it in, more than once,
really fixing my loved ones for life,
escaping now, here, eluding what's due to me
anyway on its maturity, swiveling once and for all
beyond any benefits I could accrue
through denial of what is denied to be life.
To deny that insurance, of course, breaks
the scar tissue open, leaking what we yet could
say, do, hear, think of, understand, dream
from the containment, leaking a different
radiance over bared heads.
What might I do then to get beyond
dying so many lives of affirming Denial?
Who is this figure I swivel behind like a shadow?
Who are the woman and man I'm being drawn back to—
again, the flaw here, the fall now, the original
schism, the atom entire?
Policies lapse. Nothing is sure
any longer. That fact alone is
a renegade benefit, something like grace,
green, mimetic, audacious—daring to bleed,
sing, embrace simply each other, to find
in those arms a planet entire, swiveling up
at us its azure, full face,
blinking new eyes, yawning into a loud
rain of relief to be home. Almost as if,
this late, unveiled and forgiven, even
Denial might weep again. And if not here,
where, you ask; if not now, when? Oh my dear,
who am I to deny?
Nature's Garden: An Aid to Knowledge of Wild Flowers
The Wake-Robin, or Nodding Trillium, droops
three whitely margined petals under a whorl
of rhombic leaves. This is its season
in Eastern thickets, though it can thrive
westward to Missouri, south to Georgia.
In late summer an egg-shaped, pendulous berry
will poise at the summit, pealing color deep
as a ruby crystal.
Some say these roots are poisonous; in them
the next year's leaves lie curled throughout
the winter, as in the iris and Solomon's seal.
So do we bring our blizzard closeness safely
through the spring in cities, but under the same
May moon, a nightsky's unplucked, thickening eyebrow
wryly arched over our doorstep, where
a junkie, not a trillium, nods.
They have torn down that other building
where sixteen years ago this night
we first wound like the vines of Purple Virgin's Bower
around the steep and rocky elevations
of each other's naked love.
Leaves of wax saved from a candle
that blazed us through till dawn
still celebrate how the wick's spine dances
in this our ritual burning.
Leaves of poems still lie curled in our roots,
though as we age it grows more difficult
to separate who felt which thought
or merely spoke it first aloud.
He never brought me flowers in those years.
But one day bore me home, despite
our poverties of various kinds, a wilted book
found growing in the gutter, literally
discarded there until he plucked it up.
He always understood the ways of reclamation
better than those of purchase, fearing
merchants the way an archeologist might wince
to see fifty identical ancient wine-cups hawked
with hand-painted fervor at a bazaar.
But this was a bouquet. Such a bouquet!—
of Four-Leafed Laughing Loostrife,
Trout Lily, Mother's Heart (a small white flower
with notched pods, boat-shaped petals, and arrow
leaves clasping its stem, its distribution nearly
the entire earth). And Bunk. And Lizard's Tail,
and Devil's Paintbrush, and the double putty orchid
they call Adam and Eve, and hundreds more to bloom
and wither, seed and pollinate, creep, twine,
wilt, and root, in poem upon poem like a High Heal-All
of the wounds we gave one another,
like a Ghost-Flower of the courting we never did,
like the Fever-Bush of our lifelong battle
or the Scarlet Painted Cup from which
we drank our fatal potion—
this bouquet. And do you think that fifty
identical hothouse roses could compete?
Or do you understand the gift
of such a spring as this might not transform
even our city rubble, the miracle
unearthed over and over, rippling
as if through the focus of a ruby
its wick-brief incandescence, its citysunrise
ripeness, its carillon at matins singing
Wake-Robin! Wake-Robin!
—to discover it was not a dream?
Peony
(for Suzanne Braun Levine)
What appears to be
this frozen explosion of petals
abristle with extremist beauty
like an entire bouquet on a single stem
or a full chorus creamy-robed rippling
to its feet for the sanctus—
is after all a flower,
perishable, with a peculiar
history. Each peony
blossoms only after
the waxy casing thick around
its tight green bud is eaten literally
away by certain small herbivorous ants
who swarm round the stubborn rind
and nibble gently for weeks to release
the implosion called a flower. If
the tiny coral-colored ants have been
destroyed, the bloom cannot unfist itself
no matter how carefully forced to umbrage
by the finest hothouse gardeners.
Unrecognized, how recognizable:
Each of us nibbling discreetly
to release the flower,
usually not even knowing
the purpose—only the hunger;
each mostly unaware of any others,
sometimes surprised by a neighbor,
sometimes (so rarely) astonished
by a glimpse into one corner
at how many of us there are;
enough to cling at least, swarm back,
remain, whenever we're shaken
off or drenched away
by the well-meaning gardener, ignorant
as we are of our mission, of our being
equal in and to the task.
Unequal to the task: a word
like "revolution," to describe
what our drudge-cheerful midwifery
will bring to bear—with us not here
to see it, satiated, long since
rinsed away, the job complete.
Why then do I feel this tremble,
more like a contraction's aftermath
release, relax, relief
than like an earthquake; more
like a rustling in the belly,
or the resonance a song might make
en route from brain to larynx—
as if now, here, unleaving itself of all
old and unnecessary outer layers
butterfly from chrysalis
snake from cast skin
crustacean from shell
baby from placenta
something alive before
only in Anywoman's dreamings
begins to stretch, arch, unfold
each vein on each transparency opening proud,
unique, unduplicate,
each petal stiff with tenderness,
each gauzy wing a different shading flecked
ivory silver tangerine moon cinnamon amber flame
hosannas of lucidity and love in a wild riot,
a confusion of boisterous order
all fragrance, laughter, tousled celebration—
only a fading streak like blood
at the center, to remind us we were there once
but are still here, who dare, tenacious,
to nibble toward such blossoming
of this green stubborn bud
some call a world.
Three Definitions of Poetry
1
Two thousand years ago, the Chinese
Princess Tou Wan designed herself
a burial suit which would preserve her
body for all time. This armor,
a mosaic of jade fragments tied
with pure gold thread, is still intact,
untarnished, the moss-blue veins still subtle
in contrast to the bright metallic arteries.
Within the shape of her own mold, Tou Wan
is safe as dust.
2
Birth is the mortal wound,
life the infection entering in.
Love is the fever, truth the chill.
Age forms the scab dying alone rips free.
Some pick at it every day
while others try to soften it
by soaking in salt-water. And some
do wrench it off with one swift motion.
Art lies in the x-ray, as you might have guessed—
the whole story in negative,
the diagnosis, treatment, relapses
and remissions. Unless this record is misfiled
or overexposed.
3
Outside it's raining catatonics and dogmatics.
Inside, inside the room, inside the cover
of the cage, inside the cage itself, inside the head
under the hunched wing, the eyes of the poem
tick, unblinking, in sockets of oil.
When the cage cover is removed, everyone marvels at
such spontaneity of song.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Depth Perception by Robin Morgan. Copyright © 1982 Robin Morgan. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Publisher's Note,ONE,
Piecing,
Heirloom,
Death Benefits,
Nature's Garden,
Peony,
TWO,
Three Definitions of Poetry,
Battery,
Two by Two,
Phobophilia,
The Ruining of the Work,
THREE,
The Duel: A Masque,
FOUR,
Documentary,
Aerial View,
Elegy,
White Sound,
The Fall of a Sparrow,
FIVE,
The Harrowing of Heaven,
Three Salt Sonnets to an Incidental Lover,
The Undead: A Pentode of Seasons,
Depth Perception,
The Hallowing of Hell,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,