10.21.2009

The Chinese Cauldron

SECRETIVE HEART

What’s this? This is an old toolshed.
No, this is a great past love.

[Yehuda Amichai]


Heart falters, stops
before a Chinese cauldron
still good for boiling water.

It is one of a dozen or more,
it is merely iron,
it is merely old,
there is much else to see.

The few raised marks
on its belly
are useful to almost no one.

Heart looks at it a long time.
What do you see? I ask again,
but it does not answer.



Poetry is my loo reading at the moment, and it’s working well; I’m through an anthology of horse poems, Li-Young Lee’s Rose and into Jane Hirshfield’s The Lives of the Heart, where this poem stopped me, got me to re-read, read it aloud, and then hold a monologue to myself about why I love it. The monologue went something like this:

This poem describes, simultaneously, three different experiences that have made me feel isolated. They all take place in museums or places like museums, places where the primary goal is attention.

The first experience is of not being able to lose myself in anything, of feeling overwhelmed by how much there is to see, and maybe also by what I’ve paid to get in. The frustration of bouncing off the surfaces of everything around me, and getting more and more irritable and harried, can be exacerbated by a companion who’s been caught and stopped by something. Then I am like a three-year-old child: Stop looking at that. Look at me. Mommy, let’s go. I want to join in the absorption, but the only questions I can think of are ones that attack the object of absorption, that list all its unremarkablenesses. “It is one of a dozen or more, / it is merely iron, / it is merely old, / there is much else to see.”

The second and third experiences are similar. One is losing myself in something and being asked to explain it, and either growing tongue-tied or sullen, depending on the questioner, or hearing my mouth give out words while an inside part of me says “What in God’s name are you talking about? That isn’t at all what attracts you. And it’s not even true.” Then I am like the heart in Hirshfield’s poem, either unwilling or unable to answer.

The last is losing myself in something and being alone. It is the experience the poem most directly describes, the most mysterious of the three. In that case, I am the absorbed one and the bouncing-off one at once, the heart and its questioner saying “Why this?”

I see the epigraph as an answer to that question: because this thing means more than can be empirically or pragmatically determined. In this case, the toolshed and the cauldron both mean love, mean long years of work and handling, someone’s devotion.

2 comments:

  1. Funny, as I read through the poem for the first time just now I didn't imagine a museum at all. I imagined walking through the Chinese countryside and finding it abandoned, which would be equally unremarkable and equally arresting: *why* was something so obviously functional abandoned on the side of the road? Were its owners fleeing something, or just harried and upset and having to carry something made of iron? Is it a former treasure? On the other hand, what's unusual about debris on a rural highway?

    Your setting seems more likely even without the context of the poems set around it in the collection.

    As to your solitary experiences: I don't expect to be arrested by more than one item in any given gallery, to be optimistic about the average. Yet I adore art musea (if not to the extent I adore natural history musea) and am perfectly willing to wander aimlessly through gallery after gallery until something does cry out to me. I haven't often been to my favorite museums alone, but perhaps that's the next logical step in being a museum-goer. Having another's impressions handy can be useful, but also distracting. Perhaps one should experience both as often as one can.

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  2. That makes a lot of sense. I like your plural of "museum"! And apologies for the atrocious response time -- we hibernated for a while, and I missed this completely.

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