... What he
means to miser, I’ve come to spendmost lavishly. And I feel fortunate again
to be historically shaky in the mathsOn her way out the door, blissfully ig-
norant of the toll being exacted, she
spots another drinker, “the same / busted
goldfish in his smeary bowl.” She offers
a toast in Hungarian: “Isten, Isten, mean-
ing,/ in translation, ‘I’m a god. You’re a
god.’ ” No “maths” are required for this
elegant equivalence.
The ultimate partner—and antago-
nist—is one’s own mind, surveying “the
strange and aging body,” a “nemesis
without / a zipper for escape.” In a sneaky
villanelle that opens the volume, the in-
tricate form allows the speaker to act
as both hostage and captor, offering her
own discounted ransom to recruit her
next kidnapper. “You’re no great sum,”
the woman persuaded of her own worth-
lessness says to herself. Her power has
been eroded: an easy catch, she is left
with only one choice, between blink-
ing “once for yes, and twice for yes.”
T
he lightness in this collection is
sometimes strained, deliberately
so. Few poems pass without a joke, and
some are, to my taste, jokey. But I can
relate; Belieu is roughly my age, and,
like me, a teacher and a parent. You
have to keep pumping out the jokes
until you get a response—a pulse, any
vital sign at all. Belieu’s corniness is a
nervous impulse to counter the unbear-
able tense silence that surrounds per-
formance. It’s also a form of flinching,
another manifestation of the tendency,
as she puts it, to “confuse the sum that
someone / wants from me with the bal-
ance of myself.” Though these poems
are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny,
it’s the groaners and knee-slappers—
poignant for never quite landing—that
distinguish Belieu’s style.
The notion of “balance” keeps reap-
pearing in this book. It suggests many
things: the balance of years left to a
person in her fifties, newly tallying, or
tallying in a new way; the balance of
unspent passion left over when a rela-
tionship, or a period of life, ends; the
emotional and physical set points of
the aging body. It’s also, as the kids say,
a big mood: for every joke in “Come-
Hither Honeycomb,” there’s some-
thing tragic on the other side of the
scale. This commitment to minding her
own balance means that Belieu, sitting
alone on her porch, keeps a “vigil with
no / body, before / no sun.” Some cats
turn up, which
refuse to be
touched,having learned
their certain distance:two fixed points
=
the length
of belongingto no one.
“Length” here is a temporal term; a poet
works with lines, but they’re powerless
to measure the years of life, and of lone-
liness, that are left.
Belieu’s poems gauge the distance
of her past, partly as a way of estimat-
ing the span of her future. A compet-
itive diver when she was young, Be-
lieu revisits the evolving meanings of
that beautiful, dangerous sport. In this
collection’s final poem, “She Returns
to the Water,” her comic-creepy coach
delivers a pair of shouted maxims: “The
dive starts / on the board.. .” and “Rub
some dirt / in it, Princess.” The first is a
lesson in poise, the second in aban-
don. Like the art of poetry, diving re-
quires both. Years later, as an adult
skinny-dipping, Belieu recalls her
younger self:... How keen
that girl, and sleek,tumbling more
gorgeous than two
hawks courtingin a dead drop.Now, floating alone—reduced from
“two” to one—she thinks wistfully of
her compact elegance, tucking and
twisting “like a barber’s pole.” Her cur-
rent body is a “fleshy sack / of boring
anecdotes / and moles she’s lived // in-
side so long.” The future used to be “In-
finite,” and every “possible outcome”—a
win or a loss—seemed equally within
reach. But, looking back, she sees this
series of promises as veiled threats: “the
silvery tissue” of a ring box, like the sur-
face of the pool or the covers of her
book, hides “a costly / gift.”