Poetry for Students

174 Poetry for Students

Sun-flush slides rosily off the wall. Dusk dawns.

Cats want out. Deer nose out of the woodlot. Bats

scour the near air as it cools.

Wheel-house: the house rides a cooling land-mass.

Oceans hiding desirable continents flank it. The

round earth turns as it rides.

Its flank turned to the flank of the hill, the dog

turns off the vista and sniffs at fresh grass.

Angels fly into the fresh vat of cream & suddenly

it’s butter.

Sudden awe sudden dread: the visible fontanelle

just under the scalp of the delicate new-born head.

The delicate tip of the window geranium broke

off. The root-threads pop out a strong bud, lower

down.

Let me begin by commenting on the end. Marie

Ponsot writes wonderful ends of poems. This final

pair of lines tells a story of loss and recovery, set

in the vital miniature world of the window box. It

suggests not only the burgeoning that can be in-

duced by pruning, but the adjusted point of view

that enables us to see the “strong bud, lower down.”

The poem has already carried its reader through a

dizzying variety of perspectives—in the house,

hearing the water somewhere—looking out at var-

ious times of day—suddenly spinning and dwarfed

by the scale of landmass, oceans, and planet—

shuffled down from earth flank, hill flank, dog

flank, to the dog’s nose—whisked from the ether

with the angels into the interior of the churn. What

could the “underbutter” be? (I don’t know, but I

want some!)—perhaps some of it lies through the

fontanelle “just under the scalp / of the delicate

new-born head.” Though the poem’s speaker tac-

itly urges adjustments in consciousness, it scarcely

reveals the mind of the human person inside the

container of the house. “Underbutter” is mysteri-

ous: “Sudden awe sudden dread” pulses a rare

inward interruption in the searching outward gaze,

in the terse descriptions.

Close to the kennings of Anglo-Saxon verse, Pon-

sot’s evocative word pairs comprise a bright thread

running through the poem’s fabric: “entrance-ways,”

“sun-flush,” “woodlot,” “wheel-house,” “land-mass,”

“new-born,” and “root-threads” evoke an archetypal

pattern of arrival, dissolution, cycling back. This tale,

embedded in the nouns, does not contradict the top

layer of implicit story: a person (woman?) in a house

considers its structure, notes both times of day and

woodland neighbors, carries out ordinary tasks with-

out dulling to their mysteries, considers two kinds of

delicacy, human and vegetable. Along the way the

earth gets older, cream turns to butter, and the sight

or memory of an infant’s skull swerves into the sub-

lime emotions of awe and dread. The causes of these

disorientingly different actions remain obscure,

except for the angels who make the butter come. This

gives the poem the feel of riddling, as in the first

stanza: ‘This house has three entrance-ways. / Water

flushes its hidden places.” Answer: the body? Ques-

tion: Is then the underbutter the soul or the life force

inside?

Marie Ponsot’s poems both invite and disarm

this kind of readerly questioning. Some poems are

so direct that a collection of their last lines can rea-

sonably evoke the power of their themes. From

“One is One,” a command addressed to a wayward

heart: “Join the rest of us, / and joy may come, and

make its test of us.” From “Pourriture Noble,” a

moral: “Age is not / all dry rot. It’s never too late. /

Sweet is your real estate.” From “The Border”:

“Getting married is like that. / Getting married is

not like that.” And from “Festival of Bread”: “The

widow shoves her night-time self aside, / kneads

silence down into dough, and lets it rise.” This sam-

pler of conclusions suggests how accessible, how

aphoristic, and even quotable Ponsot’s poems can

be. Yet there is never anything pat about the think-

ing or phrasing even in the most rigorously formal

of the verses.

Ponsot risks losing some readers when she re-

turns again and again to elaborate Provencal verse

forms, sestinas and villanelles, and she ups the ante

when she adds (arcanely) two “tritinas,” one of

which I quote below. A tritina goes the troubadours

one better, evidently requiring the recycling, in

decasyllabic lines, of three end words in one-two-

three, three-one-two, two-three-one order, with a

concluding line that employs each end word in one-

two-three order. (There may be other rules I have

not discerned.)

One Is One

Like Elizabeth

Bishop, another poet who

conjured up the elemental

from the homeliest of

subjects, Marie Ponsot uses

demanding forms without

making the reader feel the

strain of artfulness.”