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MIPOesias Magazine ~  ISSN 1543-6063 Volume 15 ~ January to March 2004

A MiPoesias Magazine Exclusive

#3 -Tres by Jack
A Review of Carol Muske-Dukes' poetry
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
– Carol Muske-Dukes’ Sparrow
by Jack Hughes
MiPoesias Staff Reviewer

In the myth of Orpheus, the archetypal Greek poet-hero voyages to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice. The guardians of the underworld allow him to return her to earth only so long as she walks behind him the whole way up and he does not look back at her. At the threshold of Hades and Terra, however, he forgets this injunction, glances behind, and she is gone. Orpheus can only return to earth with this image of his beloved. It is tinted with guilt since it was purchased at the price of her not returning. But he has gone under, and he has come back up, with something real, if only an image, from the liminal space between life and death. Likewise, Carol Muske-Dukes returns from her journey into the trying and dangerous psychological terrain of grief with the images which fill Sparrow, a set of elegies dedicated to her husband, David Dukes, who died on October 9, 2000.

Carol Muske-Dukes lives in the Los Angeles area and directs the graduate program in literature and creative writing at USC. She has published seven books of poetry as well as three novels, and critical essays. She has a website located at http://www.carolmuskedukes.com.

Muske-Dukes is fairly well-known in the academic poetry world. Her first volume of poems, Camouflage, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1975. The acknowledgement pages of her books indicate that she is on friendly terms with poets such as Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky, Mark Doty, Calvin Bedient, Jorie Graham and Louise Gluck. She shares stylistic similarities with them. Over her own career, she has been successful in obtaining recognition, prizes and grants, including a Guggenheim.

All of this may sound imposingly Establishment and Insider, but her familial roots contrast with this characterization, and perhaps help to explain her drive to become an Insider in the poetry world. Her family background consists of farmers in Wyndmere, North Dakota, on the Great Plains. Her mother was an outsider and a suppressed poet. I think this biographical fact is critical. Muske-Dukes said the following in a 2001 interview:

Back in the Great Depression they were land rich, but poor. My mother was a frustrated poet. She got a scholarship, but the family couldn't afford to have her go to college. So she married my father and had a family, but she always had a great store of poetry she'd memorized. I remember she would insert these asides into her bits, like 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds--put your dishes in the sink--admit impediments.' I remember it would puzzle me coming upon these poems and thinking, hey, where's the part about putting the dishes in the sink?

(Interview With Roger Gathman, Publishers Weekly, June 18, 2001). 

She added:

"I became one of those insufferable kids who are encouraged to produce poems on all occasions."

We learn more about her mother in Muske-Dukes’ essay in The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood, edited by Patricia Dienstsrey and Brenda Hillman (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). Muske-Dukes’ essay is entitled Heart Murmur. In it, she states that her poetics derives from the sound of her mother’s voice. Focusing on prosody, which she defines as the rhythmic and dynamic aspects of speech, Muske-Dukes notes Robert Hass’ comment that we are pattern-recognizing animals. She relates this idea to the very primal pattern of the totemic iambic of the heartbeat, the unborn in the mother’s womb hearing the mother’s heartbeat. Muske-Dukes reveals that her mother had a heart murmur. If rhythm itself is a kind of meaning, then this was meaning’s absence. This non-order relates to free association, non sequitur, displacement, ellipsis.

Further, Muske-Dukes’ grandmother died when her mother was 16, leaving her mother’s emotional maturity frozen in time to some extent. Then her mother married at age 24. Her mother’s ongoing grief at the death of her own mother caused an ongoing sense of distraction, which was not relieved by the fact that Muske-Dukes’ mother herself had 6 children. Muske-Dukes recalls in her essay how her mother used to recite poetry to them and subverted the sense of the ploddingly logical and rational. Her mother had lyric fluidity of affect; she sped through a range of emotions in a second. Her finest quality was deep compassion. She interrupted herself in the middle of one thought, with another. Muske-Dukes learned how to decode her mother’s tenuous connections. This provided an opening into reading works such as James Joyce’ Finnegan’s Wake, and foreshadowed her later exposure to L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry.

There was syntactical anarchy in her mother’s language. She felt her mother loved language but had lost control over it. Her mother had memorized much poetry and would recite it to the children, however, splicing in swift dizzy marginal asides and comments. The interjections could be viewed as a proto-feminist commentary, "riptide parataxis" and "blood-deep eccentricity." Her father was a businessman who got home late, expected dinner on the table and did not help out with household tasks. They had verbal fights. Muske-Dukes learned how to stand up to her father using words. Muske-Dukes felt instinctively that her mother was a poet.

Muske-Dukes says that "I was a hit-and-run smartass" as a child. She saw in herself funny and furious qualities carried over from her mother. When she wrote on paper she felt "freedom from her" – freedom and order in language. She could harness, control the words more, create symmetry and meaning, order.

The university academic environment was her route out of the farmlands. She attended Creighton, a Jesuit college in Nebraska, and then San Francisco State. She told Gathman:

I wasn't very hip when I left Creighton. I just walked into the whole San Francisco scene. I took a course in directed reading under Kay Boyle. (You know, I like saying this whenever I can. Kay Boyle should be part of the canon, along with her modernist brothers.) I got my degree, went to Europe, and even played in Hair in Paris. Then I went to live in New York.

(Gathman Interview). 

Her arrival in New York led to the following progression:

When I arrived in New York City in 1971, I joined consciousness-raising groups, but I found it impossible to express my own sense of conflict. I eventually sought out women in prison, because their isolation and extremity reflected a dislocation I felt in my own life and writing.

(from autobiographical essay in Carol Muske-Dukes’ essay collection, Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography, and the Shape of the Self (1997)).

I was really inspired at San Francisco State by Kathleen Fraser, who electrified me when she read Plath's 'Daddy’ . . . Fraser seemed to be able to be both a poet and live an ordinary life. I didn't see how I could do that myself. In addition to that, the public world of poetry then was controlled by men-- as it still is. What I thought would help was teaching in the Riker's Island prison, and so I was going between two enclosed places-- I was teaching at Columbia, and at Riker's. Eventually I set up, through the National Endowment for the Arts, a program for this, 'Art Without Walls.'

(Gathman Interview).

Her first book of poems, Camouflage, was published after entered these poems in a contest.

Then, she won a Guggenheim grant. In 1981, she went to live in Italy using the money from the grant. She met her future husband there:

I rented a house in Barbarino Val d'Elsa, outside of Florence. A beautiful house built into an ancient Etruscan wall. My friend, Jorie Graham, was in Italy then, too. Her mother, Beverly Pepper, is world renowned for her heavy metal sculptures. Her father, Bill, is an author and journalist. They own a castle in Todi, which they built from ruins of a 12th-century fortification and tower, the Castella Torre Olivola.

. . .

Jorie's brother, John, was an assistant director on the television miniseries, The Winds of War, which was shooting in Florence when I was there. Among the cast was a friend of John's-- David Dukes-- who was coming over to see John at his parents' place. Since Jorie had invited me to come, too, the plan was that David would pick me up in Florence and we would drive down there together. Of course, it was a setup. We drove down there, and imagine this place, with Beverly's sculptures surrounding the grounds like brooding sentinels. Jorie and I talk about poetry, John and David talk about acting. David was trained as a Shakespearean actor, he knew the classical repertoire, Moliere to Chekhov. Now, who wouldn't fall in love in those circumstances?

(Gathman Interview). 

Gathman adds:

Muske-Dukes shows me an album of photos of these places she made for her sixth wedding anniversary. It ends with a clip from Liz Smith's gossip column, announcing the marriage of David Dukes and Carol Muske, and a news picture of the bride and groom, looking radiantly happy.

She is not a pure imagist. She is interested in "integration of the senses and [of] thought." ("Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets," p. 42, Alabama 1983). Accordingly "I therefore have trouble with purely imagistic poetry." (same). She will not therefore depend strictly on presentation of the exterior objective sensory detail to infer interior moods. She will deploy abstract and philosophical reflections more explicitly on the surface of her verse than we have seen in antecedent modernists such as Elizabeth Bishop. In this respect she displays similarity to other postmodernists such as Jorie Graham and Louise Gluck. Like them, she will use occasional acute sense-image to anchor more subjective explorations.

Her approach to dealing with the subjective, i.e. the interior, reflects an interest in the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Rilke is a strong influence on postmodern exploration of non-objective, non-imagist modes, because he was such a radical subjectivist. In her earlier books one detects Muske-Dukes, like Graham or Gluck looking for ways to bring his voicing over into postmodern American format. There is an irreverent mention in "An Octave Above Thunder," section 8, with its reference to "the Duino Elegies tattooed / on everyone’s ass." (p. 18, New and Selected Poems, 1997). To a great extent, Rilke is a death poet, and so it is no surprise that we see much fuller development of the Rilke influence in "Sparrow." We see clear echoes of Rilke’s handling of the dead as figures in a land of strangely interiorized topology or topography in "Our Side" as it opens:

Disoriented, the newly dead try to turn back,
across the great expanse of water. But the distance
inside each of them, steadily growing, is what draws
them away at last.

(p. 60). 

This is heavily allusive of Rilke. Notice the "newly dead" and the description of interior space, "the distance / inside each of them." This brings to mind the "dead youth" found in the Tenth Duino Elegy, presented as a figure coming to terms with his new status in a new landscape of strange mystical-spatial relations:

He can’t take it all in, dazed
From early death. But their looking
Flushes an owl from behind the rim of the crown. And
Brushing downwards slowly along the great cheek,
The one of ripest roundness,
The bird limns into the dead youth’s new
Hearing, across a double
Open page, the indescribable contour.

(Tenth Elegy, in The Essential Rilke, trans. Kinnell and Liebmann, p. 143).


The Muske-Dukes poem also brings to mind the figure of the dead Eurydice being led abortively back to the land of the living, in Rilke’s poem on that subject:

She was within herself. And her being dead
Filled her with great plenitude.
Like a fruit, with its sweetness and darkness,
Was she full with her great death,
So new to her she understood nothing.

(Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes in The Essential Rilke, p. 23). 

In Rilke’s poems, we see a landscape, a dramatic setting, a stage, in which the sense of space, of presence, is strangely modified. It is like he is trying to find a way to say an interior space, trying to model consciousness as his sculptor mentor Rodin would model clay. He is also as if trying to find a way to express complexity of resonance when it comes to death, without nihilism but also without conventional religious clichés. Dead people walk on his interiorized stage. Objects flit between interior and exterior space, as with the owl which seems to fly from outside the boy to inside his hearing. There is a metaphorical fecundity, coupled with a strange innocence or even pre-innocence of awareness in the newly dead boy and in Eurydice. Even though her husband, Orpheus, is in hell with her, has gone down into the underworld to retrieve her, she does not recognize him. It is the unaware innocence of a newborn baby, or even a bit before that. It relates to Muske-Dukes’ own conceptions of pre-birth and pre-birth "language" in the womb, which are explored below.

Every poem in Carol Muske-Dukes’ book Sparrow is dramatic. You only need to know the historical context for the book. Her husband died. She was with him for almost two decades. They had a daughter together. We can tell from her earlier books, including not just poetry but novels and critical essays, that they had mixed into each others’ lives like two cups of water poured into one pan. The marriage should not be idealized, however, any more than any other: it was a real situation. Assume they had spats as well as joys: had suffered multiple revolutions of the full circuit of the Wheel of Fortune, the mandala of (marital) karma. Assume it a real love: like one of your own. Assume they were two Americans, upper middle class: Carol Muske-Dukes the writer/professor and David Dukes the actor. Assume reality, verity, in all its demythologized aspects. This is what she is trying to get at in her book. "It is life that we are trying to get at in poetry." (Stevens, Adagia, Opus Posthumous p. 185). Strip away all smooth clichés of success the American media machine wants to mask across their faces. Assume they are not/were not, in real life, such gods or monsters.

Can we say: the poet asks you to assume reality: in what may well be a post-real world of simulacra as Baudrillard suggests, this must be asked, this willing suspension of disbelief, ironically, in the unreal, such that we may at least temporarily believe in the real. Assume away all myths, even those of the childlike, the simple. Assume the worst grief, pain, interior numbness, disorientation, chaos, de-grounding, a death can cause. Assume all the unrealization of reality it can cause. Assume Muske-Dukes and her husband did not have the naïve strangeness of Blake and his wife merrily descended from heaven and sure of eternity. Let death affect you this much. Derealize your semiconscious cliché of the poet-seer we superimpose upon any other poet in proportion to their seeming validation, their success, apparently canonical status. There is no canon. Uncertainty permeates. Assume Carol Muske-Dukes and David Dukes are/were like you, except projected into their own existential situations, their own unique idiosyncratic luck-and-pluck peculiar historical fates – histories, linear finite strings of raw data, fact, which we as poets perhaps must be above, against, through, somehow, even as we are in them, stricken, finally. He was a renowned actor; they lived in L.A.; there were accordingly worldly and political aspects to his character: allow this, admit this, without denigrating, without jealousy. This was not a marriage of innocents, but of artists. She was worldly and political too: she had negotiated her way through communal, group settings, including stints working with women in prison in an outreach program, and more recently, developing a literature program at USC. Before the death she had grown very successful as a poet, winning prizes and recognition including a Guggenheim. This raises the question of whether we can apply the caricature-cliché of the comfy insider poet to her.

Well sure. But no real person is actually like that. As we will see, her poems are accurate to a real situation: her husband of 18 years has died. To the extent the poems are honest to the situation, any cliché of self is deconstructed. The self is generally deconstructed. Grief is corrosive, a solvent to metaphor. "I can connect nothing with nothing," said the stricken woman in Eliot’s "The Waste Land," alluded to in her book. Put yourself in her shoes: after the death of someone you loved, who wove into your weaving into them, who you in a sense became, a joint identity, then drifted back apart from, fright, then approached again, two figures seen in terms of each other = metaphor.

In this site, after the death of someone you loved, your own private Auschwitz, to the extent anything can be said, poetry is demanded. I think Adorno was wrong here. He said "there is no poetry after Auschwitz." I would say on the contrary that it is hard to imagine anything besides poetry that would be decent to the occasion. The situation begs for poetry, poetry as language-bandage. One senses any other form of speech would be indecent. With death so close, so palpable, the overwhelming question is posed: how is life possible, how, if at all, can humane space be reclaimed? Or, more tragically: how can I still speak, in a sensible way, in a space now rendered inhumane (insensible, senseless) by death? In a phrase that fascinated Heidegger, Holderlin reputedly said "poetically we dwell on this earth." If poetry, at least minimally, does not enter the field as we do, at least minimally, coincident with our exposure here, trying to find a way to be again, after such a death, then how can we really be here? This was the poetics of Holocaust survivor poets like Paul Celan, and is one of the vectors occurring, on a more private scale, in Sparrow.

There is another reason why Muske-Dukes cannot be subsumed under the cliché-caricature guise of "successful poet, validated, insider": her biography. This verges on sheer psychological speculation, but I believe her biography, as well as her poems in "Sparrow" show she can never be a total insider, that is, an insider who has become unconscious of the outside, the marginal, the exposed, the unvalidated. Because she cannot become unconscious of the outside, she cannot inhabit the cliché of being on the inside. This partially explains the existential discomfort shown in some of the poems in "Sparrow" aside from the fact of the death. In any event, her biography shows her born and raised in a situation drenched with resonance of outsiderhood. She is more like a case of outsider-gone-in, the assertion of a community of working woman poets on the inside of the academy including Graham, Gluck, Rich and Forche, among many others. Muske-Dukes was born and raised in farm country, Wyndmere North Dakota; her mother might have been a poet outright had it not been for gender roles and plains sociology and 6 children and a husband working full-time needing supper on the table. Her mother’s suppressed drive went to her. Years later she was haunted by the sense in which the mother’s poetic urge was suppressed into daily rational necessity from which it would escape around the margins like steam hissing at the rim of a boiling pot. This family background and the image of her mother may have preserved a haunted sense in her, a sense of being an outsider, that drove her toward becoming recognized in the university setting and the literary establishment.

This is paradoxical, but poets love paradoxes, which are like frozen moments of metaphorical possibility where prose rationality can collapse. In the "Acts of Mind" interview Muske-Dukes says "I love contradiction, I love the mind when it holds opposing notions." (p. 45). If, from within one situation, we are aware of its contradictory opposite, its pure exterior, its polar antinomy, then we live in the kind of awareness that can generate poetry. The poet is conscious of otherness to a haunted extent. "I is an Other" wrote Rimbaud: the Other may totally displace the Self; shoals of dissociation engorge the image; Sylvia Plath writes in her journal how her own face in the mirror seems a dead alien mask. The poet seeks fluidity. What are paradox or contradiction but frozen metaphor? Likewise, simple identity, tautology, feels like metaphor frozen at one of its limits. Between the extremities of absolute dissociation and absolute association lie all the infinite lights-and-shadows of metaphorical indicia

Why is metaphor primal to poetry? One way to approach the subject is to note how when we leave the zero-sum realms of knowledge and start to seek wisdom, the language as it grows more essential grows more indirect. Consider that noted wisdom teacher Jesus. Jesus worked in the form of artistic text known as parable. His shortest parables were aphoristic (for example, "Be passerby" or "love your enemy"); his longest were mini-stories (for example, the parable of the prodigal son).

He was a master of not giving a direct answer. Someone asked him "should we pay taxes to the Romans or not?" To put yourself in the right historical perspective, think of yourself as a slave in the American south in the 1830s, and Jesus as a fellow slave, and the Romans as the plantation owners. Jesus looked at a roman coin, a drachma, which had the face of the roman emperor on one side, the current Caesar, and he said "Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, give to god what is god’s." As noted by Crossan in his book The Essential Jesus, this was a trick answer to a trick question. (Crossan, p. 155).

Tricks, indirection, at the core, the essence of language. "Tell the truth but tell it slant" said Emily Dickinson. There is an urge to say that the way that Jesus or Dickinson tells truth is more direct than the way that others say it. I think this is correct. I think that the perceived slanting or gravity-bending in their way of saying truth is actually a critique of supposedly straight-line, denotative truthfulness, a way of indicating how the denotative prose reality is actually profoundly warped, profoundly clichéd. Language is strange, artificial, metaphorical, "untrue" to begin with – therefore to use it to tell the truth must be to use it poetically, as Holderlin said. As Nietzsche wrote in his essay On Truth and Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense, the primal beginnings of language, of text, even its biological origination in our bodies, is breathtakingly metaphorical:

A nerve stimulus, first transposed into an image—first metaphor. The image, in turn, imitated by a sound—second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one.

Nietzsche’s tone as he discusses this is decidedly negativistic, but one may view that as simply indicating the emotional energy-vector that takes him through his writing. Some people write out of ecstasy, some people write out of pain. Compare it to Emerson, who says many similar things in a happier tone. It’s no big deal. Nietzsche’s insight is correct even though one could as easily say what he is saying without being so depressed about it. He goes on to answer the legendary question that Pontius Pilate put to Jesus:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Therefore Jesus says "be guileful as snakes, be guileless as doves." (Crossan p. 86). Jesus is saying that we must be at the same time both cunning, masked, subtle, artificial, even cynical – and also simple-minded, open-hearted, open-eyed, exposed, childlike, innocent. This warmly poetic statement of the way is echoed, in Nietzsche, by a more negative formulation: "to write with great style means to write cynically, and with naïveté." (from "Ecce Homo").

Nietzsche states this truth in terms of frozen metaphor, simple paradox. The sense that Nietzsche’s writing always approaches things most acutely from a critical sense, not a poetic sense, might explain his negativity. To show you what I mean, let me contrast him to a more hopeful, poetic writer. Look at Keats’ passage on "negative capability":

. . . several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously -- I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-- Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

(Letter dated December 21, 1817). 

Notice how Keats goes (grows) organically from thought to thought, possibility to possibility, always speculative, verging on lyric – about to become poetry. In the "Acts of Mind" interview, Muske-Dukes states:

Keats was righter than anyone in his invention of ‘negative capability,’ the capacity of the poet to exist in doubt and dread, in contradiction.

(p. 46). 

Notice how she interprets Keats’ original language of "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts" over into a slightly less understated, less stiff-upper-lip, more American rhetoric of "doubt," "dread," "contradiction." It brings the force of his statement home. If we strip away the veneer of posthumous validation polishing Keats’ figure like layers of glaze, perhaps we can return to the original frangible wood. He was uncertain. He was unvalidated. He had no idea of the posthumous critical validation that would accrete around his name. In the deepest sense of self-identity as a poet, he was exposed; to the extent he had any content he was "remaining content with half-knowledge." Consider the tone of this draft preface for Endymion that he wrote on March 19, 1818, a few months after the Negative Capability letter, and two months after his brother Tom started spitting arterial blood:

. . . the work of an individual is of so little importance; his pleadings and excuses are so uninteresting; his ‘way of life’ such a nothing . . .

. . . .

A preface . . . should be . . . such a one that by an eye-glance over the type the Reader may catch an idea of an Author’s modesty, and non-opinion of himself . . .

. . . .

About a twelve month since, I published a little book of verses; it was read by some dozen of my friends who liked it; and some dozen whom I was unacquainted with, who did not . . .

. . . .

. . . as I proceeded [with "Endymion"] my steps were all uncertain. So this Poem must rather be considered as an endeavor than a thing accomplished; a poor prologue to what, if I live, I humbly hope to do. In duty to the Public I should have kept it back for a year or two, knowing it to be so faulty: but I really cannot do so – by repetition my favorite passages sound Vapid to my ears . . .

(Keats, Collected Poems, pp. 506-07, Penguin 1973). 

Certainly we can glimpse doubt, dread and contradiction in this document. His publishers were so disturbed by this tone they made him rewrite the preface.

Consider Keats’ "negative capability" statement again:

when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

I wonder if the key phrase here might actually be "when a man is capable of being." If we are "capable of being," then does it really matter whether what we are "in" is a miasma of "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts"? Isn’t that where the problem of death, its nihilistic assertion, becomes most difficult for us – where it takes away our "capability of being" (regardless of whether it’s "in" uncertainties), and substitutes brutal polarities, either/ors? That is where Keats was left after the tuberculosis manifested:

I wish for death every day and night . . . and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing. Land and Sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.

(John Keats letter to Charles Brown dated September 30, 1820, in Bate, p. 508). 

In Keats’ last letters we see a brutal, heartbreaking sense of how the approach of death narrows, polarizes, extrematizes the sacred play, the child’s game, of poetry – in a mind not frozen into ideology, not frozen out of metaphorical speculative play. Right up to the end, he was "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts" except now with his lungs shredded by bacilli and his stomach unable to digest, he was no longer "capable of being" there:

the sense of darkness coming over me – I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth place ring in my ears – if there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be we cannot be created for this sort of suffering (Keats, September 30, 1820 letter).

. . .

There is one thought enough to kill me – I have been well, healthy, alert & c. walking with her – and now – the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach . . . (Keats, November 30, 1820 letter).

. . .

I fear he has long been governed by his imagination and feelings and now has little power and less inclination to endeavor to keep them under . . . it is most distressing to see a mind like his (what it might have been) . . . (Dr. Clark, January 3, 1821 letter).

. . .

This noble fellow lying on his bed – is dying in horror – no kind hope smoothing down his suffering – no philosophy – no religion to support him – yet with all the gnawing desire for it – yet without the possibility of receiving it. (Joseph Severn, circa January 1821, letter).

. . .

Here lies one whose name was writ in water. (Keats’ request for his epitaph).

"Death is the great divorcer for ever": when he wrote this Keats knew death was taking him away from a marriage that never happened, with Fanny Brawne. 

What of when death interrupts an ongoing marriage, how does the loss differ? One would be tempted to say Keats lost an unknown possibility of intimacy, whereas Muske-Dukes lost a known intimacy of almost 20 years. But even within intimacy there is unknowingness. Mark Doty’s back-cover blurb is insightful here, stating how "Marriage is a pact with an other both beloved and unknowable – and loss, therefore, means losing both what we know and what we can never circumscribe."

Loss, death, tragedy, unknowability, metaphor: In a diary entry dated October 25, 1920, Virginia Woolf asks:

Why is life so tragic: so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss.

(Revelations: Diaries of Women, p. 228, Vintage 1974). 

This sounds like hell, doesn’t it? And yet as her diary entry proceeds she seems to pop out of it, via the writing process itself:

I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end. But why do I feel this: Now that I say it I don’t feel it . . . Melancholy diminishes as I write.

"Now that I say it I don’t feel it": The metaphor gives an image of hell, yet something about the metaphorical process itself, the metaphor-making, writing, diminishes hell. If I am feeling sad, and I can put it into an image, this process may relieve me, even if the image represents sadness. If I can embody my internal, inchoate terror, depression, anxiety, blackness, via metaphor, via words, this in itself may be a hopeful gesture.

From the reader’s perspective, there is something enjoyable about "a little strip of pavement over an abyss." It has everything to do with not actually standing on a strip of pavement over a pit at this literal moment. The literary artwork gives us a situation to experience imaginatively. If I read about Gloucester losing his eyes in "King Lear" it is not actually me losing my eyes in real life. If I am reading a literary artwork from a situation of relative calm and leisure – time in which to think, to imagine – then the artwork consecrates that time as an occasion to empathize with others whose situation is not (yet) ours. If I read King Lear with interest and enjoyment, this does not mean I am a monster. It means I am enjoying the intellectual freedom which allows images, metaphors to be made, presented, read – regardless of the awfulness of the content. This is similar to a child’s joy making army men "kill" each other. It is a form of play, even if, at the same time, we can tease a blueprint of my own flaws out of what makes me happy.

From Carol Muske-Dukes’ third book of poems, Wyndmere:

Hell is the absence of metaphor

. . .

souls drift in permanent
transience, in the light-distance of God's photograph,
which some call Poetry

There, she seems to associate poetry with metaphor-making, spiritual possibility. However, any denotative statement introduced into the field of a poem is subject to reversal. Viewed rationally, paradox will result. 

From a later book, Red Trousseau:

The rest of it, you see,
is my work: slowing the mind's quick progress
from the hypnotic of that startled world
to the empty solicitation of metaphor,
the loathsome poetic moment.

The reversal is the polar shift in the working definition of "metaphor" from a good thing to a bad thing. This reversal can be viewed two ways. From a rational perspective, there is an entropy of meaning, a dawning sense of infinite relativism, gray quantum mist, a morally desperate sense of "everything is permitted." From a perspective which, within rational prose, we can call "irrational," but note how that ascription is merely negative, we access possible mysticism, possible negative capability. The uncertainty, to be authentic, to have bite, needs to have this true reversal of valuation.

In this sense, the poet endures authentic destabilization of value. This must include destabilization of self-value and of the poet’s sense of the value of poetry. Compare Muske-Dukes’ passage above to this from Keats’ fragmentary Fall of Hyperion, in which a "veiled shadow" devalues the poet in contrast to regular people who are

". . . no dreamers weak;
they seek no wonder but the human face;
no music but a happy-noted voice –
they come not here, they have no thought to come –
and thou art here, for thou art less than they –
what benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,
to the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing;
a fever of thyself -- think of the Earth."

(Collected Poems, p. 439). This is reversal, the point of devaluation.

From Muske-Dukes’ Sparrow:

To you, joking, I’d said: You’re an actor.
Act like you love me. You laughed and turned
Away into the characters you played, acting like
An actor. We were caught in the force field,

The imagination’s need for analogy, the analogy’s
Need for identity. . .

(Heart, p. 9). 

We see the reversal again. One pole is "identity," "the hypnotic of that startled world." Another pole is metaphor, analogy. But in "Heart," we see these two poles, or vectors, deployed as a dialogue: an Other has irrupted the fabric of the mind of this very personal lyric poet sufficient to cause this occurrence. The Other here is her husband, and the dialogue is life and death. She is talking with her dead husband across the waters of Lethe.

Speech after death . . . what of speech before birth? In the "Acts of Mind" interview, Muske-Dukes discusses this. The infant in the womb absorbs "the magnified sound of the mother’s heart and breath." (p. 40). The infant receives messages from its profound linkage to the mother’s body: "blood-touch, emotional messages." She relates this "womb-language" or "mother tongue" to "nonsense, comfort murmurs, crooning songs, lullabies, sleep-talk." This language is "complete and sufficient": the mother’s body absorbs anxiety, adversity, absence that the fetus may not: "loss, falling, emptiness, abandonment – none of that happens or is understood, until birth." This language is lost when the baby is borne. Prior to birth, it was a language of profound oneness. And as we trace the language all the way back to the moment of conception, perhaps it provides a glimpse into a way of talking to those not alive, and some hope there. As the Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871-1945) said:

I wonder will death be much lonelier than life. Life’s an awfully lonesome affair. You can live close against other people yet your lives never touch. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living that even going and coming. Your mother loves you like the deuce while you are coming. Wrapped up there under her heart is perhaps the cosiest time in existence. Then she and you are one, companions. At death again hearts loosen and realities peep out, but all the intervening years of living something shuts you up in a "yourself shell."

(Emily Carr diary entry, July 16, 1933).

Echoes of the pre-birth speech associated with her mother continued for Muske-Dukes after she was born. Consider the following quote, from the same interview:

In the years before school, I remember that I often totally divorced the sense of words from their sounds, which were hypnotizing, thrilling, nearly tangible. Bits and scraps, rhymes, children’s repetitive chants, impassioned speech – I would make up a magic ring of words to bless and protect. We all continue to need language on this level. I think that’s why all these people are out ‘recovering their mantras.’

All this by way of explanation about the ‘presence’ of ‘absences’ which you noted in my poems. I think a lot of the musing and circling in my poems is homage to this holy language, its loss.

(Acts of Mind interview, p. 40). 

Note the words "ring" and "circling." They reappear again 20 years after the 1981 "Acts of Mind" interview, in last stanzas of this poem from Sparrow:

Exhausted by pity, I sit
in the sun near the pool.
The wind lifts the chimes
you repaired so patiently

last year, knotting the strings
from which the silver cylinders
depend. The sparrow I brought
home in my hand outlived you.

The stray white dog insisted on by
the clairvoyant came home following Annie.
Eighteen years. The chimes shudder
into sound. How reiterative is pity!

How suffering stares at itself –
Rehearses its strophic voices.
He was so beautiful, they say.
The widow sits with her white dog,

listening to chimes. Eighteen
years. The ring on the finger,
placed there by you. The ringing,
touching rings -- your careful

hands tying the knots holding
this bright appeal in place. The
fixed listening of self-pity -- so unlike
this pure sound, this consciousness

of you, setting the chimes chiming
that they might last a lifetime –
Here where the ring re-inscribes
itself as a circle of wind anticipated

not that long ago by your binding touch.

(Anniversary, pp. 33-34). 

There seems to be a continuity between the words "ring" and "circle" and a sense of hope -- between her interview text in 1981 and her poem text dating from approximately 20 years later. Between the ring of the wind chimes as a transmuted speech after death, and the mother’s heartbeat as transmuted speech before birth.

Think about the breath-sounds and heart-sounds of the mother as constituting a sort of language for the unborn baby. What is the signifier-value of the words, how would you spell the whooshes, tugs of air, blood? I am not sure. What is the signified-value, what do these sounds mean? Not sure. Too primal.

How would you spell the sound of wind chimes? Not sure. What is the meaning of the chime? Not sure.

We are thus discussing the limits of language.

Wittgenstein said "the limits of my language are the limits of my world." Poetry is a way of playing with words. Poetry considers the purely rhythmical value of words as raw signifiers, aside from signified content – like heartbeat, breathing, as "words" for the unborn baby. A child plays with words, skips rope to sing-song: could this be a nostalgia for pre-birth akin to an adult’s nostalgia for pre-adult? Poetry plays with the purely melodic, musical value of words as signifiers, apart from the signified-value, "what the words mean." And yet, one yearns to know what the wind chimes mean, what their chiming means.

Lets break the Anniversary poem down into sections and look closer:

Exhausted by pity, I sit
in the sun near the pool.
The wind lifts the chimes
you repaired so patiently

last year, knotting the strings
from which the silver cylinders
depend. The sparrow I brought
home in my hand outlived you.

Nietzsche once indicated that pity was the most dangerous of emotions. One instinctively disagrees. Pity, compassion, empathy, concern – how can there be love outside of sexual need without these embodiments? He believed in power and vigor and pity seemed to bleed away these virtues, enervate them. Indeed, pity does exhaust. However, one becomes skeptical of Nietzsche’s view in light of the tonal strengths and weaknesses of his own writing. He is unable to carry off believable empathy as a tone in his writing. One sense that his incapacity for expressible empathy opened up an exposure wherein his critical insight functioned. He works off a productive negativity. Also consider his biography. He never married; never had a close intimate lover-companion; never had kids. He seemed to love Lou Von Salome, but she found him off-putting, awkward. According to one biographer, he would have died a virgin were it not for a banal (evil) adolescent excursion to a bordello, while he was in boarding school – where he might have contracted the syphilis that might have killed him after taking away his mind. His aphorisms on the subject of women are terribly weak compared with the rest of his philosophical prose. Yet so many other areas of his philosophical critique are strong. Can we agree that after Nietzsche, pity becomes a problematic emotion, no longer shielded, invulnerable, no longer an indisputable virtue?

This poem begins with "pity" seen in a problematic light. The speaker opens the poem "exhausted by pity." Self-pity? Pity for the dead? The object of the pity is not identified. The first statement is of subjective interior mood: "exhausted by pity." The second statement is of outward objectivity: "I sit / in the sun near the pool." This is not a poet like Basho or Bishop who relies primarily on imagism, the external detail, to imply interior mood. So, there is a psychological topography, and an exterior topography. We do not see blatant disruption of ordinary syntactic and grammatical linguistic connections. The reader does not register the poem as being at war with ordinary American prose syntax of casual conversation, post-confessional first-person statement. The voice is mainstream in that sense. Muske-Dukes is a builder, not a disrupter of communities: we know this from her biography. She helped develop an organization to work with women in prison; we helped organize the USC writing program. Her authenticity is not that of the outcast, the solitary, Han Shan in his cave. She is not at risk of becoming corrupted by painful isolation like Thomas Chatterton gulping arsenic in his impoverished garret. She is at risk of the corruption of being involved with group politics. She has a public image to contend with: she is implicated in the corruptive mechanics of fame, power, reputation. Yet notice that this is not necessarily a less corruptive situation to be in than that of the unknown underground solitary. Lack of fame, power, reputation can corrupt (wound) just as badly. She circulated the poems in draft form to other established poets. This surely affected how she wrote them: one’s readers always inflect one’s voice. This can be a disciplining device, though also a mainstreaming device. She knew the poems would be published in magazines, later in a book. This, too, can discipline. The apparatus of fame, literary reputation, acts like a fence around the words. The author can sense the massiness of the text. It matters, makes a difference, whether she writes a line one way or another: because she knows the poems will be published, read, reviewed. 

Compare this to an underground poet who doesn’t know if anyone will read her work, or an internet poet who posts to a blog. There is less massiness. There is more of a sense of "anything goes." There may be more spontaneity but also less resistance against which the words can gather mass. In this sense the ephemeral sense of internet posting can demolish a poem. The purity of the poetic voice can be damaged equally by the mainstreaming orderings of being inside the system as by the isolate disorders of being outside of it. Choose your poison.

If we view Muske-Dukes as an orderly, inside-the-system poet, then consider the effect of the death of her husband on her text. Now she faces disruption, disorder, as acutely as a poet unshielded by the validating mechanisms of fame and reputation. She is affected, now, by a sense of loss of meaning, that will trespass any insulating validations of her worked-for, hard-won reputation, her fame, in proportion to the extent to which she has not been corrupted, that is, effaced into internalized cliché, by that fame. With this in mind consider the opening of the poem again:

Exhausted by pity, I sit
in the sun near the pool.
The wind lifts the chimes
you repaired so patiently

last year, knotting the strings
from which the silver cylinders
depend. The sparrow I brought
home in my hand outlived you.

Note the orderliness of the 4-line stanzas, the regular line lengths, the unobtrusive yet elegant music occurring with words like "pity" and "lifts," "repaired" and "patiently," "silver" and "cylinders" and "outlived." Also note the subtle elevation of voicing or diction which we see with the deployment of "depend," using the dictionary definition of the word to mean hanging or suspended from. The order of the form is to me exquisitely balanced against the disorder of the content, the death, the void opened there.

The speaker sits in the sun by the pool. From an underground perspective, her life is privileged: prior to the death, she had attained academic success, she had built connections and networked successfully within the American poetry institution; she met her husband David Dukes through Jorie Graham as matchmaker, in the context of a visit to Jorie’s parents’ Italian-castle estate in Europe; David Dukes was a successful actor with a busy career of film, TV and theater parts; they got married, moved to L.A. and lived in a nice house with a pool in a nice neighborhood; they had a daughter; Carol got a job spearheading the writing program at the University of Southern California. Enough to render any starving artist jealous.

But these trappings are as much nothing as they are everything. They don’t change her situation as a real, suffering person.

The stray white dog insisted on by
the clairvoyant came home following Annie.
Eighteen years. The chimes shudder
into sound. How reiterative is pity!

The couple’s young daughter is Annie. The reference to a "clairvoyant" opens up a door into another aspect of the speaker/poet’s biography: born in 1945, she came of age in the 1960s, and had her share of involvement in the experimental culture of that time. We will see the clairvoyant again in the Butterfly and Blue Morpho poems.

The poem continues to engage the reader with lucid and understandable descriptive images, a single, discrete scene. The second reference to the interior mindstate, pity, is as peculiar as the first: "How reiterative is pity!" It is read as a somewhat subtle moral reference. The abstraction, "pity," is handled delicately. The speaker is clearly educated, has access to leisure time, has the cultivated intelligence in her consciousness so as to allow these slightly abstruse, or elegant, reflections on pity. Compare Bukowski. We are in a totally different social context. The speaker is female. She has a young daughter. She is organized, responsible.

How suffering stares at itself –
Rehearses its strophic voices.
He was so beautiful, they say.
The widow sits with her white dog,

listening to chimes. Eighteen
years. The ring on the finger,
placed there by you. The ringing,
touching rings -- your careful

hands tying the knots holding
this bright appeal in place.

Pity is equated with suffering, suffering is equated with self-regard. There is a sense of progression through slightly skewed or different perspective or perception each time a thought or an image returns again. This could be viewed as a mimesis of the wind chimes. Wind chimes are orderly in the sense that the chimes are set to a determinate range of notes. Yet chimes are disorderly in the sense that how they sound depends on how the intentionless wind hits them. Each breeze is a new, slightly skewed, slightly different each time, vector across the same set of notes.

The phrase "stares at itself" invokes self-regard, tautology, solipsism, narcissism, sterility, dead-end of self = self, grayish receding tint of two mirrors turned toward one another, as in some mall store dressing-rooms. But if "suffering stares at itself" then where is the speaker at this point? She has been dissociated from her own interior. So we have the abrupt movement to "he was so beautiful," referencing the husband, but said by others, not by her; and the impersonal or third-person perspective applied to the speaker by the poem, "the widow sits with her white dog / listening to chimes." But then we return from dissociation to close association, a me-and-you statement: "the ring on the finger / placed there by you." Then a further association, via the pun on "rings" and the double meaning of "touching" – also a suspended sense introduced by the multiple –ing endings of "touching," "tying" and "holding." The reference to "bright appeal" foregrounds the sound of the chimes as a statement. The sound of wind chimes, again, has some human quotient to it, since the scale of the sounds is determined by the human craft of the chimes; and yet it does not quite have the determinate intentionality of a musical instrument played by a person: the chimes are "played" by the wind. The poem closes:

The
fixed listening of self-pity -- so unlike
this pure sound, this consciousness

of you, setting the chimes chiming
that they might last a lifetime –
here where the ring re-inscribes
itself as a circle of wind anticipated

not that long ago by your binding touch.

Now, pity is identified as "self-pity." The identification of pity with the self occurs when the wind chimes are identified with the deceased. The chimes remind the speaker of the consciousness of the deceased since before he died, he had fixed the wind chimes. I read "consciousness of" as having a double meaning. Think of consciousness of the deceased, in the sense of your thoughts about them, as also being consciousness of the deceased, in the sense of a continuation of their being, in you. This reminds me of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of "interbeing," or Rimbaud’s subversive injunction that "I is an Other," or the existentialist notion that there is no consciousness per se, but instead there is consciousness-of. In this poem, it is a hopeful motion that occurs once the self-piteous consciousness is identified as sealed-off and sterile – it disappears – at that point the speaker’s mind is briefly glimpsed to be the mind, consciousness, awareness, of the Other, the deceased, as it were the "Other" still continuing in the "I". For the speaker this glimpse is mediated by the image of the wind chimes. It reminds me of:

All day and night, music,
A quiet, bright
Reedsong. If it
Fades, we fade.

(Rumi, p. 57 The Enlightened Heart). 

The chimes bring to mind other consciousnesses as well. I think of Rilke’s use of the image of a bell or gong. The phrase "this pure sound, this consciousness" is Rilkean. It is abstract and interior. Rilke struggled all his life to find a way to articulate interior, subjective gists and spaces. His early poems are marred by extreme subjectivity. They feel wishy-washy, breathless, hyperemotional. He had a hypersensitive personality coupled with a sense that conventional Christian ideology of his time was not adequate to address his fear of death. Early on, he had an affair with Lou Von Salome. Lou was a very independent woman, attractive and freethinking, fairly dominant in her relations with men, feminist in her own way, all of this quite radical for late 19th century Europe. Lou had been the object of Nietzsche’s awkward, intense and unconsummated love before she met Rilke. From Nietzsche she absorbed the critique of Christianity also being advanced, in various ways, by Freud, Marx and Darwin. We can assume that Rilke absorbed some of this thought from her.

His time with Lou helped Rilke to strip off various ways of dealing with his powerful subjective states which were outmoded. However this left him exposed to silence as he sought to locate a replacement way of speaking poetically. His subsequent interaction with the french sculptor Auguste Rodin was helpful there. Rodin told him to pay more attention to outward objects and external things, and to sculpt interior space. Rilke had never been a very good poet of the acutely observed detail. A poet like Elizabeth Bishop has am amazing eye for exterior detail and at the same time is averse to using abstractions to articulate her interior self. Rilke wrote from a very different position. With him, one gets the sense of little bits or glimpses of external landscape, immediately processed through metaphor and abstraction.

Rilke is attractive for American poets because he suggests a way of dealing with the mystery of interior subjective spaces in a lyrical manner in a way that neither collapses into blind pessimism or nihilism like Philip Larkin or before him Thomas Hardy, nor has recourse to pre-Nietzsche Christian strategies. Compare Rilke to Hardy, who was roughly contemporary. Hardy has a stronger verbal texture when it comes to the sensory detail, as well as narrative and character abilities honed from his many novels. When it comes to philosophical resonance, he is post-Christian. He tends to become pessimistic and nihilistic when he starts to move away from the sensory landscape or dramatic interaction of characters. The subjective interior feels flattened by realism. I am not saying that is bad: he is one of my favorite poets. But it is still a valid line of critique. Rilke, by contrast, has a weaker imagistic texture but tempts with a strange, ambiguous and seductive adumbration of interiority which is difficult to characterize. He suggests a way of addressing death which is neither nihilistic nor Christian. In an odd way he suggests a continuation of lines of what Stephen Mitchell calls "wisdom poetry" which would also include Rumi, Hafiz, Ryokan, Kabir, Lao Tzu and other mystics and nondualists.

Think of a formulation like "I catch the ball, heavy with arrival." I have made up this phrase but I hope you can see how it is Rilkean. The abstraction, "arrival," is given a strange quasi-existent force. It feels like a different way of seeing things. There is a sense of promise in it. "Oh quickly fading photograph, in my more slowly fading hand" to paraphrase another of Rilke’s figures. One doesn’t usually think of a human body part as fading in that way. Again, there is a sense of a new way of seeing. This is Rilke’s seductive, mystical approach, which we see as a major current in contemporary American poetry, coincident with influences from eastern, nondualist and world poetry currents mediated through Gary Snyder, Jane Hirshfield and others.

Rilke can be easily critiqued. He is not insulated in myth like many more ancient poets. He had early success as a poet because his over-the-top gushy sentimentalism in his early work matched what the public understood and wanted. Early on, he became facile at networking within the European literary and high-society communities. His letters show disturbing and unattractive amounts of spoiled narcissism and flattery of others for purposes of self-advancement. He was only too willing to allow himself to be mythologized by cultic admirers as the tormented, vatic, orphic poet. For decades, biographers and critics treated him as a special case. Although he left his wife and child behind and flitted from affair to affair in the privileged European society, finally settling down in a castle turret an admiring and wealthy fan allowed him to use, he was not viewed as a philanderer or an adventitious social climber, but rather as a seer and sensitive soul who should be afforded leeway. He has been aggressively deconstructed by William Gass and others. Yet he remains a force to deal with. In my earlier years I was completely taken by Rilke’s seductive orphisms. Later, once I encountered the dirtier details of his biography and the swooning self-consciousness of his letters and journals, I disliked him viscerally. Nowadays, I tend to view him as an example of the mixed good and bad of one type of poetic personality. He was hyperconscious, hyperdelicate; his manipulativeness in the prose world is the yang to the yin of his subtle rhetoric in his poetry.

Muske-Dukes channels many other influences besides Rilke and thus avoids appropriating his worst tendencies. For example, in the following Muske-Dukes poem we see as much of the restrained, antimetaphorical poet Cafavy as we do Rilke:

That their statues are broken,
That their temples are empty
Doesn’t mean that they are dead, the gods.

The gods never die – but memory
Clears itself like the sky over Ionia –
Ionia the dream that is always forgotten
At dawn. The eyes of the god, the upturned

Eyes, take in everything, nothing escapes
That gaze – then it is all enveloped in fire,
Invisible fire of waking, the shudder of
Returning consciousness, the lit blades.

But once I caught the winged figure, indistinct,
Ascending. I saw him turn back and stare at me,
Not able to erase what he knew I’d seen. His eyes
Implicated in the loss, sudden pathos – then disappearance
Over the bright hills.

(Ionic, p. 3). 

She inscribes the poem as being "after Cavafy." Let us compare Cavafy’s poem Ionic in the translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard:

That we’ve broken their statues,
That we’ve driven them out of their temples
Doesn’t mean at all that the gods are dead.
O land of Ionia, they’re still in love with you,
Their souls still keep your memory.
When an August dawn wakes over you,
The atmosphere is potent with their life
And sometimes a young ethereal figure
Indistinct, in rapid flight,
Wings across your hills.

(Ionic, p. 17, Selected Poems). 

What has changed? She has added a metaphorical progression – the memory which clears itself like the skies – the god’s eyes relating to a fire of waking. She has superimposed her own metaphorical sensibility upon this most unmetaphorical of poets. As Auden said, "simile and metaphor are devices he never uses." (p. 335 Forewords and Afterwords).

The image she has added of the gods’ eyes is reminiscent of the gaze of the god-sculpture in Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo. Although the statue in Rilke’s poem is headless, the gaze is taken over by the perfect body as a whole, and thus "there is no place that does not see you." The poem also reminds us of Rilke’s opening Duino Elegy in which he describes how an angel’s gaze is so fierce that if placed in it he would become annihilated:

. . . if one of them suddenly held me
to his heart, I’d vanish in his overwhelming
presence.

(First Elegy, Poulin trans., p. 5).

Muske-Dukes and her husband met in Italy. This leads to a third strand in the poem: the god-gaze in the poem, and the image of the god-figure moving away from the speaker, identifies the god-figure in some respect with her deceased husband. Consider the repetition of the image of a strange gaze associated with the husband as departing figure in her poem Blue Morpho:

We have only the Book of the Infinite to guide us
and how we interpret its unthinkable premise:
This life then an afterlife.

At the end of his, he saw blue.
I was told this. Eyes upturned
drawing the sky into one extended
remembrance of a present.

I was told this by the Reader.
In the depths of the trance she
cried out – foolish, a foolish creature,
but "gifted," as we say.
Familiar with the color,

for example, inside the chrysalis,
the bruises, doubling – how the morpho
divides itself in a hemorrhage of iridescence.

There is a reason why (deep in the trance)
his eyes blinked, as hers did,
and the wings, twinned, shuddering

stained with the color of the afterlife
opened before them.

(Blue Morpho, p. 31). 

Sometimes, Muske-Dukes’ poems have a sense of hypersophisticated semi-philosophical rhetoric stacked up against something all of its metaphorical capacities are loathe to admit is nothingness. Here, however, the possibility of something besides simple nothingness is admitted, and to me the language of the metaphor of the morpho is truly beautiful. Despite the power with which Hardy, Larkin and Robert Lowell encounter nothingness in their poems, I am wondering whether an infusion of asian influences into postmodern American poetry is not a good thing in counseling us against a simple collapse into nihilism. It is often difficult to discern exactly how eastern concepts such as nirvana really differ from nothingness, but I have found one old Tao text which addresses the issue head-on:

Nothingness

Those obstructed by nothingness, clinging one-sidedly to this principle, sit blankly to clear away sense objects and think the Way is herein. None of them seek the secret of nurturing the three treasures. Though they speak of reaching nothingness, this is really not the Way. The ultimate Way is not in reification, nor simple nothingness. The mystic essential is to balance openness and realism.

Emptiness

Those obstructed by emptiness cling to this partial principle; not knowing true essence, they vainly talk of empty emptiness, and emptiness is not voided, so it becomes nihilistic emptiness. Ultimately they are unaware of the independence of original true suchness.

(Sayings of Ancestor Lu, in Cleary, The Spirit of Tao, p. 127).

Sparrow emerges out of a complex artistic context involving the competitor art forms of the novel and of acting. As to the latter, David Dukes was a well-noted and financially successful actor. He played roles in TV, film and theater productions, including The Winds of War, Bent and The First Deadly Sin.

As to the former, Muske-Dukes finished her third novel Life After Death shortly before he died. The protagonist in the novel is a woman whose husband dies of a heart attack while playing tennis. In real life, David Dukes died after suffering a heart attack on a tennis court. The characters in the novel are clearly distinguishable from Muske-Dukes and her husband, but I point out this strange fiction-fact coincidence as it cannot help but inform some of the tensions detectable in the poems.

She was actively at work on the novel during the years prior to his death. The dedication page for "Life After Death" states: "For David, who gave me constant love and encouragement in writing this book since 1994-- and whom I lost on October 9, 2000."

The tone of the novel, however, is different from the tone of the book of poems. In the novel, the tone is lighter and more distanced. The novelist is playing-acting the scenario of a spouse’s death as an abstract hypothetical, not applicable to her. The author is not basing it on her own real life. The bizarre coincidence that Dukes died in the same way the husband did in the novel creates a retroactive confluence which doesn’t really exist. There is a clear fictional distance in the same manner that Agatha Christie imagines murders in her novels without wishing her friends and family dead. We can see this fictional distance in the tone of Life After Death which is essentially that of a comedy of manners. While the tone does veer into the somber or profound here and there, this tonal seriousness is coupled with the emergence of a magic realism or fable aspect of the narrative, in which the world of the dead and the world of the living literally coincide. Thus, the occasional somberness of tone in the novel does not coincide with existential actuality, but rather a fictive fable. This distancing effect helps alleviate the reader from the potential heaviness or tragedy of the organizing trope of the death of the husband.

In an interview, Muske-Dukes explained that the novel was inspired by Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One:

I thought I might do something in a comic vein like that. So in St. Paul, I talked to funeral home directors. But the satiric impulse in the novel petered out as I got more interested in Boyd. Now that David has died, I have more perspective on her. I think maybe I didn't allow Boyd to be as shocked-- as traumatized— as she would have been. This novel had nothing to do with David. He was pyrotechnically active, and you simply wouldn't have suspected that he had advanced coronary artery disease.

(Interview With Roger Gathman, Publishers Weekly, June 18, 2001). 

What this all means is that when her husband died, in such bizarre déjà vu circumstances, Muske-Dukes was thrust into an existential situation of even greater destabilization. In the book of poems, a hypothetical scenario distanced from the author through fictional characters obviously not identifiable with the author or her healthy and vibrant spouse is replaced by an awful verity in which the speaker is the poet, the dead spouse is her husband, and there is no easy, ironic, hypothetical fictional distance.

The storyline in Life After Death involves a woman named Boyd Schaeffer. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her 42-year-old husband, Russell. She has an M.D. but has not practiced in years. Russell is wealthy, charming but alcoholic and somewhat superficial. He is a teacher in poetry but feels himself to be a failure as a poet. The novel opens with the couple arguing. Clearly their marriage is troubled. The occasion for the fight was that Russell apparently while drunk had left their 4-year-old daughter Freddy unattended at a park playground. A neighbor eventually took the child home. Boyd wishes in that exasperated way that a fighting spouse might do, hyperbolically, for Russell to drop dead: "I'd prefer you dead. Throw yourself out that window, for God's sake. Swallow some pills! You think I'm joking?" The next day, Russell drops dead of a heart attack on a tennis court.

Boyd goes back into medical practice and an ambiguous relationship develops between her and the funeral home director. In a magical realist style, she starts to be assaulted with ciphers and ghosts of her late husband. Boyd begins to read through notes he left in books, journal entries and poems. She wonders if they indicate a message from him to her that she never accepted him as an imperfect mortal with faults and loved him as strongly as he loved her.

The funeral director she meets is Will Youngren. Her initial interactions with Will show her to be grieving in a way fraught by dissociation, anger and irony. Eventually, though, with the funeral director’s assistance, she achieves some closure after she ventures into a fable-like landscape between the worlds of the living and the dead.

In classical mythology, rivers, bodies of water, serve as the borders between this world and the next. The death-figure Charon ferries people who have died across the River Styx to the Underworld. Alternatively, the dead and the living are separated by a caesurae in memory or consciousness: the River Lethe. To drink from this river is to forget.

In the latter part of the novel Muske-Dukes deploys an updated, Americanized Styx or Lethe water-body topography as a setting where the dead and the living mingle. She describes an underground cave, Carver's Cave, known to the Lakota Native Americans as House of the Spirits. This cave includes a large underground chamber with a lake. She has it located under prehistoric Sioux burial mounds near St. Paul, Minnesota, where the book is set. The novel resolves with an equilibrium between the living and the dead achieved via the mediation of this mythical, magical-realist setting.

The tonality in Sparrow is drastically different. The book is ferociously organized by the now-historical event: the death of the spouse, for real. In this regard the book brings to mind Donald Hall’s book of elegies Without written after the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. Both books are similar in that they are imbued with the singular idiosyncrasies of the writer-speaker. Hall uses the occasion to allow the raw event to tear the face off his artifice, by then polished by decades of writing. A harsh emotive note, unreachable by any poetic sublimation, yanks his voice toward a Thomas Hardy-esque vehemence of plain statement. One is reminded of the poems that Hardy wrote in memory of his wife.

In all three cases – Hardy, Hall, and Muske-Dukes – one sees a situation in which a poet whose style has been refined by years of craft-application is suddenly confronted by a personal existential situation in which no amount of craft, no amount of poetic braiding, can weave over the grief which breaks through. The result is a sense of mounting emotional and spiritual pressure.

Muske-Dukes elegizes her husband’s death in poems of clear and elegant severity. Using mixed patches of simple and erudite language, she constructs images in the reader’s mind as if they were memories in her own:

On my study floor, the books were piled high.
You stepped over them, smiling, as you came in
to kiss me goodnight. The dog growled deep in

her throat. She loved me alone. You scowled at
the dog, then looked at me, the lit screen, the
stacked pages-- and smiled. It would be hours

before I would slip into bed beside you, still
thinking about my book on life and death.
You always kissed me like that, late –

First pausing in the doorway. It was a ritual
You kept for years, begun after we’d settled in.
I remember our first night in the house –

I lingered in the room that would be my study. Bent
Over my desk, arranging papers, I saw, in the corner
Of my eye, a wavering figure in the doorway, half-perceived.

It frightened me then. Now I understand that it
Came from the future, which has become the past. Now
I understand that it was you, smiling at me. You put out

Your hand to ward off the bad dog, the mad guardian. She
Growls again as I lift my face, distracted, still, for your late, tender kiss.

(Late Kiss, p. 19). 

This poem is different in texture from many of the other poems in the book. It is more simply descriptive. There is less of a sense of churning, swishing-upward rhetorical-metaphorical capacity concerned that its wind is death. The poem is a statement of simple drama, as opposed to philosophical speculation. We see the husband, the wife and the dog. We see her real life in its most empirical sense: she is a woman of letters, she writes books: she spends much of her time in front of a computer screen with books on the floor. My supposition is that her "book on life and death" is the novel prefiguring the physical scene of how the husband would die. 

In the fifth and sixth stanzas there is an interesting extension of the drama. There is "a wavering figure in the doorway, half-perceived." Is this a ghost, a premonition? The speaker seems to suggest it may be. The empirical veracity of the scene as something readily read as straight autobiographical writing leads the reader to wonder what the tenor of the writer’s mysticism is, if there is such, to the extent the ghostly figure may be real. The poem is without flashy metaphor. It reads like a plainchant Cavafy piece. The extension of the last line in length is interesting here and elsewhere in the poems in the book. I think the modulation of gradually increasing line lengths against fairly regular stanzaic lengths creates an intriguing effect of the prose-sense of language slipping or sliding down through the poem-sense of form in a way authentically postmodern. We see more mystical resonances in the Butterfly poem and the Blue Morpho poem, each of which introduce the figure of a medium, a psychic. We feel a need for this, as a third way out, a third alternative, in this existential situation in which extremely sophisticated metaphorical cadences fight what feels like a measured retreat against advancing zero void, rather like the feel of Robert Lowell.

In a poem entitled David in her book An Octave Above Thunder: New and Selected Poems, she describes how, through his own mystique of personality as an actor, he had "survived / my imagination" and had led her to make "my pact with illusion." ("David," pp. 101-102). Something about his nature as an actor captivated her. The actor pretends to be other people. And yet he is himself. This is a paradox. She loves paradox. For an actor "I is an Other" every day. Rimbaud, go eat your heart out. We have a sense, from watching Jack Nicholson in movies, that we know who he is – even though we have only seen him under the guise of others. The actor embodies the paradox that we wear a mask to be ourselves. Potentially, an actor shows a surplusage of being: his own, plus the character he plays. Yet the actor also indicates an emptiness of being: he plays the character so well that we start to wonder how the self underneath, how human self in general, is anything other than a character, a simulacrum, a player on a stage. The poet who loves the actor wonders how to name this emptiness:

When he bursts in,
a face sweating from his face, the audience’s
cries still audible in the walls, he turns to me
so that I can see that he is empty: there is nothing left

not that anyone, even a wife, could name.

(M. Butterfly, in An Octave Above Thunder, p. 190). 

One of the names that occurs to address this emptiness, is a raptor-figure, a bird of prey, a hawk. In her novel Life After Death, the hawk image appears when soon after Russell’s death, Boyd discovers a letter which he apparently wrote her coincident with his death. This letter introduces the possibility into the plot that the lands of the dead and of the living will overlap, a possibility actualized in increasing detail as the novel proceeds. Boyd recognizes the hand script on the letter as being that of her dead husband in its "sharp wings, predator swoops" quality. (p. 60).

The image appears again in a poem that the wife, Boyd finds apparently written by Russell. The epigraph to the poem is a line from Rilke, "two solitudes that border each other," and the poem is titled Marriage, (p. 134). One line in the poem states how the "hawk falls upward / into height."

In the pre-Sparrow poem To The Muse she recounts a New Years Eve spent with her husband on a pleasure boat on the French Mediterranean. At one point the craft passes an American aircraft carrier, the Eisenhower, and the poem gives us an image of plane’s taking off the carrier "fifteen hundred screaming feet a minute / into an inaccessible shape: falcon, hawk . . ." (p. 156).

The hawk figure includes a sense of otherness via the inaccessibility of the solitary, predatory bird, its talons and claws resisting an approach by us. It includes a sense of otherness via the distancing of the hawk into the sky. In Marriage and To The Muse the hawk is glimpsed as it recedes up and away. The pressure of the image, its ferocity, pushes it away from us sharply into the sky. 

The image appears again in the following poem from Sparrow:

You give me up
You go away
You walk on a stage
And are re-made.

I long for you
But you have a strophic
Relationship to longing.

You move so gracefully
Between what the author intended,
What the audience requires.

Perfect messenger, you want nothing.
You never wanted more than that
Annunciatory light on your face,

The words learned by heart so that the body
Could make every human intention inviolable.
All is revelation in that world, how could I

Have ever competed with such implacable
Possession of gesture? When you crossed under
The arc of the proscenium, you were already dead

To me, yet more alive than ever. You turned back
Once to look at me over your shoulder, opening the Stage
Door. Not yet made up, but already a stranger, the hawk
Staring out of your face.

(Actor, p. 8).

The hawk image is placed on his face, such that the pushing away, the distance which is part of this image of the other, places sky in his face, one might say, or pushes him away onto the Rilkean stage-set of the dead.

Again, compare that image of the figure moving away, with the hawk in his face as he vanishes, to this image of the figure arriving, in this poem written before his death:

When he bursts in,
a face sweating from his face, the audience’s
cries still audible in the walls, he turns to me
so that I can see that he is empty: there is nothing left

not that anyone, even a wife, could name.

(M. Butterfly, in An Octave Above Thunder, p. 190). 

Which is preferable, "hawk" or "nothing"? Faulkner said he would choose grief over nothingness, and there is a sense of that here. But the grief is in the observer. The hawk is violently other, but it is not a figure of grief. Yet it is related to grief, in a polar way. Consider Joseph Severn’s comment on Keats’ appearance in December 1918 after an attack of sore throat which for Keats would have presaged full-scale tuberculosis – that Keats seemed "distraught and without that look of falcon-like alertness which was so characteristic of him." (Bate, John Keats, p. 433). We see a polar relation between grief ("distraught") and the hawk ("falcon") image.

In the novel, one of their first meetings, Boyd recites to Will these lines from Keats:

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death . . .

It turns out that this is the inscription Will chose for his sister's headstone. The lines come from Keats’ "Ode to a Nightingale." In that poem, the speaker knows about death and the bird does not. The speaker wishes to

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow . . .

(Keats, Collected Poems, p. 346).

When the speaker says "darkling I listen," he is listening to the nightingale, the bird. Likewise, the sparrow image has occurred else where in her poems. In Freezing to Death, from her first book Camouflage (1975):

Who breaks my little imprints into salt?
Sparrow tracks. A new brightness
Rises in my lungs.

(New and Selected Poems p. 40). 

These images of bird, sparrow, hawk, swiftly moving airborne creatures, relate to her interest in messengers.

From Sparrow:

"Lord I can // no longer live without messengers" ("Butterfly")

"a messenger / on some official errand of compassion" ("Not For Burning")

"Perfect messenger, you want nothing." ("Actor")

"Knew (or felt) the breath of the Messenger pent. . ." ("Handsel")

This emphasis on movement, messengers, is organic to her strength as a quickly moving, transfigurative metaphorical poet. The poems elegantly dart through oppositions of life and art, face and mask, perishing reality and unreal duration on stage, as Muske-Dukes seeks to search out her beloved, to

enter every semblance of you—
profile, ideogram, rainlight, zigzag kite,

shifting plinth.

(from A Private Matter). 

Elsewhere, she explores the metaphysical resonance of her subject in subtly articulated language which seems to intermingle shades of the rhetoric of Robert Lowell’s hermetic late poems in his last book Day By Day. In many poems, she experiments with a regular stanza form in which the line gradually grow longer in length as the poem proceeds, until they break into run-on lines at the end. The free verse she employs is flowing and easy on the ear, and cunning in how it shifts register between elevated and plain statement. For example, consider the sudden irruption of an idiomatic "you know" at the end of this poem:

When he fell, strangers ran to him.
Strangers called for help, lifted
his body and carried it. Then strangers
cut him, emptied him. Their ideas

of death determined when I would
touch him again. Their ideas of death
closed door after door between us,
altered his face, altered his presence—

violated the contract, the marriage,
took away even his wounded heart.
When he was at last delivered to me,
I was no longer myself—just as he

no longer had a self. They
had taken everything from us. Authority—
everywhere I turned. Just as he and I
once thought we were authorities over

our own lives, our work, our sense of
mortality, imagination—oh, and that
"sense of loss" that predicated everything—
you know, what we called our personal lives.

(When He Fell, p. 7). 

The movement is very quick here with enjambment not only from line to line but stanza to stanza and use of Dickinsonesque dashes. The combination of visceral personal intimate content and formal control is extraordinary. The content calls for lack of control and emotional collapse into tears. One would think that showing any formal control, restraint, poetic effect, would be indecent, almost. But instead the contrary is true. We see how really, in such extreme circumstances, there is scarcely any other way to speak about them except via poetry. Thus the modulated progression from "cut him" to "emptied him" to "altered his presence" to "no longer had a self." This is a beautiful progression taking us, as it were, back from the cliff-edge, toward humanity. The introjections of the idiomatic "oh" and "you know" at the end is brilliant, creating an effect of sped-up shaking emphasis. You forget about how difficult it would be, in the abstract, to address such a subject: imagine if your lover died and you tried to write a poem about it – the dangers of sentimental vs. numbness, crying vs. ugly control, etc. It really is extraordinary how direct ("cut him") and indirect (the metaphysical "’sense of loss’ that predicated everything") she is able to be at the same time.

When I heard the voice on the telephone
Telling me there’d been an accident,
I repeated my question twice
Without receiving an answer.

I was given another number
And at that number I asked again
Without response. At last someone took
Pity on me. That nurse in a distant blazing room

beginning to take shape before my eyes
paused, then put my question back to me.
Did I want to be told what was happening to you?
I looked at my daughter poised next to me, waiting,

Her hand over her mouth. She inclined her head.
I do, I said, like a bride. And then the professional
Voice, rising ever so slightly, called out to me, step by step,
Precisely how your body failed -- as she watched it fail

Before her. I held the phone to my ear, repeating each
Of these answers to my question, so that images of you,
Disappeared, appeared in the air. Our kitchen, the dishes
In the sink, the stove, that shocked gaze meeting mine –

Then your superimposed over hers – your eyes wide
In that other room where you lay, rapidly dying
Beyond the open receiver. The shouting technicians
Hovering over your body as that other sound, unearthly,

Spoke quietly beyond the monotone in my ear: blood
Pressure, pulse rate, respiration. The soul, its heraldic
Voice, murmuring other answers – then images, startled
One by one, from faith, from terror, from all that we
Ever sought to know about you.

(The Call, pp. 28-29). 

Another amazing example of speaking a poem about unspeakable events. The first stanza is entirely flat description without flourish. At the end of the second stanza "blazing" really hits hard, the effect redoubled by the stanza-break. The "beginning to take shape" gives us a bit of emerging internal space, as in Rilke, but we never saw a poem this direct about a death from him – the price he paid for avoiding long entanglements, leaving his wife and child? The metaphor of "like a bride" is exquisite – then the strange transferences of the gaze, the eyes, through the end of the poem, where we encounter the primal language of blood and breathing noted in her "Acts of Mind" interview, but now in the ending not the beginning of life. The poem closes with one of the characteristic run-on lines, with appropriate use of Big Words, "faith," "terror," in a personal context which certainly earns them.

A butterfly lands on my finger
and I gasp. The soul, the soul –
Come back as a cliché of Nature!

I cannot resist. One wing is
tattered, the other whole: my
heart, your heart. Lord, I can

no longer live without messengers.
The psychic murmurs the words:
glass of milk, white sails, ruby ring.

My god-given capacity to dream –
Have I given thanks for it?
See, the butterfly sits on my shoulder.

A new person, I connect hope & despair:
I connect nothing with nothing.

(Butterfly, p. 30). 

Aside from the beautiful tension and variation in this short poem, we see an interesting dynamic between the mystical door opened by the "psychic" and the dispirited door-slamming induced by the closing Eliot allusion. In this regard, there is a difference between metaphorical comparison (butterfly wings as metaphor for heart) and arbitrary comparison ("I connect nothing with nothing"). Ideal metaphorical balance is not quite rational, but not arbitrary either. If the metaphorical ratio created by, say, a blue marble and blue postcard sky in a Joseph Cornell box is not quite rational and not quite nihilistically random, then what is it? Can we call it "poetical," as a third category? Could this be another way of saying Keats’ half-knowing that he accuses Coleridge of overstepping in his negative capability letter? And if this third category occurs in life – then can we call it, in other forms, other manifestations, by such names as "déjà vu" or "what a psychic says" or "what the I Ching reads"? Does it give us any sort of opening into mysticism? If so, we have a little more daylight of a way out of the awful binary polar oppositions caused by death. Any righteous negative capabilitist at this point must say "I’m not sure." Think of metaphor as one thing in terms of another, or a balance, a mystical ration, of this against that, Object A against Object B. If metaphor fails and the ratio becomes arbitrary, nihilistic, then we are at Eliot’s character’s position in "The Waste Land" of connecting nothing with nothing.

Part of Muske-Dukes’ poise in handling the subject matter of Sparrow must have come from her long rehearsal of similar themes in prior writing. Consider this older poem:

In Benares
The holiest city on earth
I saw an old man
Toiling up the stone steps
To the ghat
His dead wife in his arms
Shrunken to the size
Of a child –
Lashed to a stretcher.

The sky filled with crows.
He held her up for a moment
Then placed her
In the flames.

(Chivalry, New and Selected Poems p. 71). The poem concludes:

. . . the memory of him
with her
in the cradle of his arms
placing her just so in the fire
so she would burn faster
so the kindling of the stretcher
would catch –

is enough for me now,
will suffice
for what remains on this earth
a gesture of bereavement
in the familiar carnage of love.

(pp. 71-72). 

The weaving-together of event-description with philosophical abstraction is seen here, though distanced to the third person. Sparrow also benefits from years of antecedent speculation on the ramifications of being married to an actor. Consider the complex metaphysics here:

I try to make myself afraid,
the way you must have been afraid,
stepping out onto this stage--
but with a fear so pure, so

perfectly informed that you strode
out shouting. Here, where
the neon yellow arrows painted
on the floor shoot forth underfoot

in blackness -- beneath the hanging
sequence of tinted skies -- out toward
that mindless immortalizing light, now
dark. Now I think I feel the heat you

must have felt rising from the front rows.
A gaping fire door, a furnace:
Your single body standing here
With no shadow, swinging on itself. . .

(Ovation, pp. 38-39). 

We can see a similar thread of inquiry here:

After his death, I kept an illusion before me:
that I would find the key to him, the answer,
in the words of a play that he'd put to heart
years earlier. I'd find the secret place in him,

retracing lines he'd learned, tracking
his prints in snow. I'd discover, scrawled
in the margin of a script, a stage-note that
would clarify consciousness in a single gesture—

not only the playwright’s imagery – but his,
the actor’s, and his, the self’s.

(The Illusion, p. 12). 

And then this strange dream-objectification of the actor as machine:

Night after night when he was young,
he told me he dreamed the same dream.
It was not a simple dream, the machine.

At first it half-coalesced as a drill press
or lathe, a thing that controlled the direction
of force to alter shape. Parts turned: ratchets

gears, bearings. The machine in his troubled sleep
was a series of perfectable gestures in the spirit of
the cam-shaft: a projection on a rotating part

shaped to engender motion—but was not erotic exactly.
The machine was the point at which the lever was placed
to get purchase, the fulcrum, the means by which influence

is brought to bear, the chime of iron against iron in a holding rack,
power against resistance. What was its purpose as he perfected
it each night? Not to assemble or sort or tattoo patterns on metal.

It shimmered, a thousand lit pins, a system—a series of moving
parts that would never still, synchronous. What would it
replace? The erratic—manufactured as a strap—a father lashing

a son into a place of dark stasis. He stood up to audition and he had
the words at last, he'd gotten his mind round the mechanism, the facets,
the repetitive force of illusion, the jeweled speeches kept in memory

as he hammered the boards of the stage, hauled flats, swung one-handed
from the flies to set lights. Sometimes a person wakes up, sees he's meant
for another life—the snap-clasp of the theater trunk, the high-voltage moving spot—

commoner, lord, poet—the armored breastplate. Sometimes he looks in
the mirror and sees no self but the invention, fathomable, fashioned—
the shapes of Art, all makeable—as in the machine, his machine,
the machine that made him.

(The Machine, pp. 10-11). 

To me this string of poems culminates in the following poem, an assemblage of bits and pieces of quotes from old scripts her husband had in his possessions, arranged as if randomly, along with sprays and flashes of metaphorical trope:

You, Never-You, the new vessel.
Dark/light of the sprung soul.

Flung upward or shuddered
up-ringing, iridescent as a fountain:

eyes flickering wide open in sleep.
And on the kitchen sideboard

Backs of script pages, cut up
By you to memo-size. If

someone jots a note, turns it over--
there are the words, dialogue of

people you once became or not.
Laura says she cannot command the

space station alone any longer, can't
he see this? Brent says he knows, he

knows what she has been going through.
I don't know what these words are for—

just as I know you will arrive no more
to counter this argument. You may

have said these things aloud. You walked,
you lay once beside me. Albert says suddenly

from a paper square: "Vague. Cryptic. Enigmatic.
Ambiguous." Claude says, "How do you mean?"

I want to enter every semblance of you—
profile, ideogram, rainlight, zigzag kite,

shifting plinth. Even this comment
from Mohammed: "I should be going—

this is a private matter." Earlier; Frieda
has said, 'You're upsetting me, Ira."

Let me consider this private matter in anger,
in terror, in reverence. Voiceless, let me

consider a thumbprint, a top-sheet, margin
shout. Here's Marc crying, "Bullshit

How can a man live in any other time but
his own?" At the tombstone, the fire pit,

at the anchor dragged brain-red over
consciousness, Yvan says, "I don't see why

I have to put up with your tantrums." In
this private matter; I refuse the lilac, the

anemone, all the lit banked candles.
Rachel says he's in the middle of nowhere,

without an alibi. Bring me no alibi.
Bring me instead one sprig, pale-white,

of your never-endlessness, one pulse-leap
inside the sick brilliant rose of your not-being.

Holden says, "That's my girl" Fire-rose, ash,
drawn petaled, unpetaled, along my wall of

solitude. You hover, eyelit, at falcon-height—
and Serge cries, "Read Seneca!" Laura is alone

in the space station, weeping. I am not weeping.
I am emptying the pockets of my own monologues.

I am listening to the semblances, what you were,
who you've been. 'You’re disastrously open-minded,"

a fragment says (it seems) to me, though I ask for
no feedback here in my space station, here in my former

life, where there is no gravity-- or this crushing gravity—
in my kitchen, my open mind. Where I listen closely to
no connections. To you, David. No you.

(A Private Matter, pp. 57-59).

This volume highlights the paradox of poetry as a nexus of death and beauty, the life of elegy tied to the end of life. Muske-Dukes successfully resists the pull of uncontrolled horror and pity in the face of the worst sort of loss, and one closes this book not just with a sense of pathos, but also with a sense of the strange, continuing hopefulness of poetry.

Tres by Jack © Jack Hughes 2004.
A MiPoesias Magazine Exclusive. All rights reserved.

Jack Hughes is a poet and critical writer living in Los Angeles. He got a B.A. in English at UNC and started a Ph.D. in English at Harvard in 1987. Then he dropped out of Harvard and pursued music and poetry while working service sector McJobs for several years. Then he went to Wake Forest Law School and got a J.D. and worked as a lawyer for 8 years. Then he met a girl named Jenni and had a midlife crisis. Currently he is taking time off from his law job and will probably be going back to school to finish his English Ph.D. in 2004. He left his Corvette in Indiana. He doesn't vote.