630 The American Century: Literature since 1945this and many other of these poetic journeys. Elsewhere in his poetry, Gioia turns
from temporality and mortality to personal grief (“Prayer”) or to music (“Bix
Beiderbecke”), to the pleasures of the material (“Money”) or the pains of staying
awake listening to “the mortgaged walls” of his house “shifting in discomfort” in the
dark (“Insomnia”). A common theme in his poetry is the landscape of the West:
“I can imagine someone who found / these fields unbearable,” Gioia reflects in
“California Hills in August,” “An Easterner, especially, who would scorn / the
meagerness of summer.” “Yet how gentle it seems to someone / raised in a landscape
short of rain,” he concludes, “the empty sky, the wish for water.” And even more
common, always present in these poems in fact, is a pursuit of melody and
transparency, the wedding of often elaborate formal designs with what Gioia has
called the “music ... of common speech.”
That music resonates with particular melancholy in two of Gioia’s most
memorable poems, “Summer Storm” and “Planting a Sequoia.” “Summer Storm”
reads, in a way, like a short story. Written in gently ruminative, rhyming iambics, it
recalls a brief encounter, at a wedding, between the narrator of the poem and an
unnamed woman. The encounter occurred, the narrator remembers, during the
summer storm alluded to in the title, as they stood on the “rented patio” of the house
where the wedding reception was being held, “while the party went on inside.”
As they watched the rain “like a waterfall,” “you took my arm” the narrator says to
the recollected image of this intimate stranger, “a gesture you did not explain”;
and, for some reason, they spoke to each other in whispers, as if imitating the rain.
The storm ended as abruptly as it began, and with it its emotional equivalent, this
eruptive moment in the party and the poet-narrator’s life, ended too. But, the poet
discloses, another storm, set in the narrative present of the poem, has suddenly and
unexpectedly brought back the memory of that moment: that “party twenty years
ago” and the strange, intimate meeting with an unknown woman. With it has come
a feeling of disappointment, regret, the lingering sense of an opportunity missed.
The poem is poised between that feeling of disappointment – the unease or vague
yearning that the “so many might-have-beens” of life can inspire – and a harsher,
more realistic suspicion that to think about the “What ifs” of the past is futile.
Memory may insist, the poet concludes, on “pining / For places it never went” –
reminding us of the woman, or man, who got away, the road not taken – but perhaps
that impulse of remembering, pining rests on an illusion, the mistaken belief that
“life would be happier / Just by being different.” Perhaps, but then perhaps not: in
that uncertainty resides one of the paradoxes of our emotional life, the narrator
suggests, and the power of this poem. The emotions at work in “Planting a Sequoia”
are less paradoxical but equally, if not more, powerful. Here, Gioia describes planting
a tree in memory of his dead infant son. In a series of quietly variable, expansively
meditative stanzas, he reflects on the activity, the commemorative ritual performed
by himself and his brothers, as they “worked in the orchard”: planting the tree and
wrapping in its roots “a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord, / All that
remains above the earth of a first-born son.” The tree was planted in his father’s
orchard, Gioia tells us; and the planting is a kind of sad, defiant variation on the oldGGray_c05.indd 630ray_c 05 .indd 630 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM