Poem For Maya

Dipping our bread in oil tins
we talked of morning peeling
open our rooms to a moment
of almonds, olives and wind
when we did not yet know what we were.
The days in Mallorca were alike:
footprints down goat-paths
from the beds we had left,
at night the stars locked to darkness.
At that time we were learning
to dance, take our clothes
in our fingers and open
ourselves to their hands.
The veranera was with us.
For a month the almond trees bloomed,
their droppings the delicate silks
we removed when each time a touch
took us closer to the window where
we whispered yes, there on the intricate
balconies of breath, overlooking
the rest of our lives.

   -- Carolyn Forche, from The Country Between Us

 *****************************************

The Country Between Us  by Carolyn Forche
(Harper Perennial)

Reviewed by Mary Leary

If poets' words -- I mean, each word -- were given a monetary value, by my estimation, Carolyn Forche's would typically be worth at least .50 each.  And this is partly because I agree with the generous summation of her contemporary writers and reviewers -- that she was the new Neruda.  And it is partly because I agree with critics who have marveled at her ability to contemplate and incorporate socio-political information with accounts feeling intensely personal.  But it is mostly because, whatever she has addressed, Ms. Forche has seemed to open windows and doors into her own dreams, into other worlds and into the dreams of many.  Reading The Country Between Us, for instance, I feel pulled and allowed by evocation into vistas hauntingly hellish or purgatorial, which may just as quickly shift into a delightful scent memory from childhood.  There is a slice of sweet white tablecloth, the taste of lemon in iced tea, the smell of potatoes burning over a frost-covered field, the sight of a face etched with a lifetime of lines that lead from one city into the square of another.  Some things like that. 

It is with a sense of irony and, to some degree, futility, that I decide to consider her work here.  After all, among the several listings for the book currently on Amazon.com, I note that both used and new copies of the slim volume are available for as little as $0.89.  Which in itself is about how popular Ms. Forche has been, or her publishers hoped she might be.  Which is about her having forded the gap from very small or academic press to a mass marketer.  But it is also about the relatively small audience for anything difficult, anything that might disturb.  It is about the very small audience for deeply crafted writing. 

As I was musing over Ms. Forche's work, the words "achingly beautiful" or "beautifully disturbing" came to me.  And I imagined the poet, at around the age of 10, considering such a description and rejecting it, intuiting its obvious and hackneyed shortcomings.  Somehow she has managed to emit hundreds of poems which either seem effortless or which imply so much effort, its contemplation is exhausting.  So what I want to tell you about Carolyn Forche is that she can lure me into reading page after page of verse that will tell me that everyone gets old and that some do so without relief from struggle and without much in the way of what might be called reward.  She will relate stories of revolutionaries permanently wounded, who have been lost to the bottle.  She will show sexual objectification - from the perpetrator's point of view.  And, again, she will keep me with her - at least for the space of four or five poems.  And I will pick the book up again, later, after I've taken some corporeal refreshment and allowed myself time to process her words. 

The Country Between Us was published in 1981, at a point in Ms. Forche's career when she needed to continue to prove her brilliance and when her youth was beginning to fade.  In this book she does something that might make someone craving solace a bit cranky:  she speaks of eating paella or drinking wine, and such interludes link into a bombing, or the results of a bombing; someone who has lost their limbs, and you get it that she is not going to allow a lovely little poetic trip escaping the realities of life, particularly those of the Salvadorans whose experience, in this case, is at the core of this collection.  She is going to force us to consider a larger view, despite our own fears and problems. And she may confound us by, as mentioned, mixing horror with joy and beauty and lust and longing. She may further confound anyone who likes to resolve their psyche's ensuing disruption by refusing to imply that the horrors of one person, or country, are more important than the horrors of another - the idea is that it is all important and that we may need to find a pair of grown-up clothes in which to start allowing and admitting it all.  Simple resolution is for sheltered children.

I am a poet and an arts reviewer, and poetry reviews are to me the most tedious and difficult.  I tend to resist analysis of anyone's poetry, feeling that this punctures a certain alchemy breathing through all lasting and effective verse.  So I will end with an easy illumination, a favorite poem from The Country... and I will try not to hope that the next time I look at the listing on Amazon, prices on the book, even for beaten-up, used copies, may have raised to, say, $2.00.  As if that had anything to do with how much this writing matters.

***********************************

The Colonel
    
What you have heard is true. I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His
daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the
night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol
on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on
its black cord over the house. On the television
was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles
were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his
hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings
like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of
lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes,
salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed
the country. There was a brief commercial in
Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk of how difficult it had become to govern.
The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel
told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the
table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to
bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on
the table. They were like dried peach halves. There
is no other way to say this. He took one of them in
his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a
water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of
fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone,
tell your people they can go f--- themselves. He
swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held
the last of his wine in the air. Something for your
poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor
caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on
the floor were pressed to the ground.

-- Carolyn Forche, from The Country Between Us

(Poetry copyrights revert to Carolyn Forche, 1981, 2009.)