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.

Riding Bareback

HORSES
[Witter Bynner]

Words are hoops
Through which to leap upon meanings,
Which are horses’ backs,
Bare, moving.

I love this poem for several reasons.

One: It is about horses. Or at least, has horses in it, and the writer has captured something of how horses move, and of what it feels like to ride bareback.

Two: It is a wise poem, in its laconic brevity. There is an authority in the description here that has to do with being willing to say one thing, precisely; one thing, not everything.

Three: The lineation. Each line is a simple, compelling statement, which builds on the previous thought but adds something distinctly new. Each line, in fact, has the quality good story endings are supposed to have, of feeling surprising yet inevitable.

Four: I read the whole poem as a metaphor for words as signs, for the relationship between signifier (word) and signified (meaning). Its brevity works for it here, too, in that it shapes the image, in four strokes, and leaves it there. In the debate over whether words have anything like an objective meaning, what I find interesting is the tension. Common sense seems to demand an acceptance, simultaneously, of both extremes: Words clearly do not mean the same thing to each subjective person, and the possible slippage, and failure in transfer of meaning, has no limits; and yet in experience there are moments, both mundane ones and transcendent ones, when words make that leap and land, against all the odds, on meaning. Julie Brown, a poet-critic friend, put another view of the paradox to me once: “I don’t believe communication is ultimately possible. But I believe it’s necessary to live as though it were.” Her faith here reminds me of the two central claims of Christianity, which are both unresolvable paradoxes: God is three, yet one. Christ is fully human, fully God. The orthodox creeds assert both extremes without seeking logical resolution. Similarly, the taut physicality of Bynner’s bareback metaphor, the leap that is at its center, rides the central paradox of what human words are capable and incapable of doing, and being, in the world.

On Roses and Poesy

The third line of “Moses supposes” puzzled me at first. I always imagined that "posies" were themselves a kind of flower, and I’d only encountered the word in another nursery rhyme, "Ring around the rosie, / A pocket full of posies..." A posy is "a small bunch of flowers," as my computer's Oxford American Dictionary tells me.

Imagine my joy in finding, as I kept reading the entry, that an archaic meaning of “posy” is “a short motto or line of verse inscribed inside a ring.” Moved to consult the Oxford English Dictionary online, I found further that “posy” was originally a variant of “poesy,” so that a bunch of flowers and “a poetic composition” (1.a.) or “poetic expression” (1.b.) shared a location in the language.

They shared a word. I was tempted to write that a bunch of flowers and poetic expression were once, somehow, the same thing, but this obviously not the right way to talk about a word with many meanings. I wonder whether the metaphor I’ve chosen – a location in the language – shows any promise at all.

Delightful Errors

Inaugurating the Weekly Rhyme:

“Moses supposes his toeses are roses
But Moses supposes erroneously;
Nobody’s toeses are posies of roses
As Moses supposes his toeses to be.”

[from The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, assembled by Iona and Peter Opie]

I’m not much for baby talk; usually I find it annoying. This rhyme redeems itself for me at the end of the second line, where “erroneously” plunks down like a full professional architect’s blueprint in the middle of a toddler’s collapsed pile of colored blocks. The word “erroneously” tickles me pink for its spot-on match in rhythm, mostly-match in sound, and its total mismatch in diction: The whole rhyme is in dactyls (stress unstress unstress: MOses supPOses his TOEses), and “erroneously” doesn’t miss a rhythmic beat. The sounds are mostly long “o” vowels and short “eh” sounds, with the occasional “ee” sound. “Erroneously” matches perfectly in vowels, but the most common consonant is “s”; the “r” and “n” in “erroneously” are not repeated anywhere else in the poem, except for the “n” in “Nobody.” But the word really diverges from the rest of the rhyme in diction: “erroneously” does not belong with “toeses.” This contrast is a kind of internal mockery of the rhyme’s own use of baby talk. And with that five-syllable word echoing in my mind, the two last lines, explaining Moses’ error in words that rhyme with “toeses,” are a delightful continuation of the joke.