230 Poetry for Students
nonlinearly elliptical, relying on image and metaphor
to engage the reader. Santos’s basic tone is at once
confessional and noncompensatory, and the poem
begins by offering a traditional disclaimer—“I can
already feel her slipping beyond / the reach of
words”—that is almost immediately belied by a
passage of astonishing visual and linguistic clarity:
Bolstered by pillows, I’d stayed inside,
my headcold clearing in the camphored room,
though I wasn’t simply imagining things
when I watched a field rat bore back out
from the mulch pile tumbled behind her;
or when, sinking her pitchfork into the banked
hay bales, a blacksnake speared by the tines
wound up like a caduceus along the handle.
Santos conjures an incident from his child-
hood, as he remembers his sister doing yardwork
in late spring. Embedded within a rich texture of
language, the poet’s images presage his sibling’s
unhappy fate. While the rat connotes but ill luck
and pestilence, the blacksnake “wound up like a ca-
duceus” suggests a number of meanings. The ca-
duceus is the wand belonging to the divine
messenger Hermes who, in Greek mythology, dou-
bles as the psychopompos, the guide of souls to the
underworld. Did Santos receive a premonition of
his sister’s suicide? The irony deepens when we re-
alize that the caduceus also symbolizes the physi-
cians who unwittingly collaborated in her death.
Moreover, the very transience of Santos’s vision
lends it a numinous aura: “there she is, made over
again / by my own deliberate confusions: bare- /
shouldered, burning, imperiled in the yard.”
Sometimes Santos’s elegy lapses into a lin-
guistic mediation between the quick and the dead,
an apologia for his sister’s mental and emotional
instability: “that darkening shape-shift she could
feel / was somehow, through her, handed down, /
mother-to-daughter, daughter-to-child.” But more
often, he evokes her “unabated spiritual yearning,”
which renders so poignant the Danteesque phan-
tasmagoria of section twenty-two:
A lead-colored hoarfrost solders the grass
to the staked, transplanted cedars along
the new “park walk” on the hospital grounds,
where a patient empurpled like a fake
carnation nods toward the thousand-
windowed front. It’s just past ten, the first
of Sunday’s visiting hours, and now,
in broken files, past ghosted, rainbow-
coded signs, the families come forward
from the parking lots... which to her
still seem some vast frontier the healthy
into exile cross: dogged, downcast,
hunkered into the cold, drawn in caravan
from the smoke-filled feudal towns beyond.Santos’s blank verse sonnet could serve as a
microcosm of the poem as a whole, which in dra-
matic terms resembles the medieval psychomachia
or “soul battle.” The poet sets the tone in the first
line, his rolling o and r sounds slowed to an inef-
fable dolor by the repetition of d in “lead-colored”
and “solders.” No frost fires crackle on the lawn,
but a dull fume rises, as from a soldering iron. Even
the pungent, uprooted cedars are staked fast to the
frozen ground. The hospital as an institution had
its inception in the Church during the Middle Ages,
but in lieu of the stained-glass radiance of cathe-
dral windows, we now have luminescent “ghosted,
rainbow- / coded signs.” Indeed, few ravishments
greet the eye in this purgatorial setting, as families
and other visitors move like penitents in “caravan”
from “smoke-filled feudal towns.” But transience
is inherent, both here and elsewhere: visitors and
convalescents transgress invisible “frontiers” every
day. Santos never attains formal solace in “Elegy
for My Sister,” but in detailing Sarah’s escape from
the dismal home of her childhood, he achieves tran-
scendence, albeit metaphorical:
A warm spring night. A streetlamp beyond an open
window. Beneath the sill: a girl’s hushed voice ex-
horting itself in whispers.
One morning, she leaves the house before dawn. She
doesn’t take the car. By noon she finds herself in the
business district of the city—a taxi is waiting, the dri-
ver is holding the door, and she sees that now, after
all these years, she’s about to take the great journey
of her life.
Like Baker and Wade, Santos celebrates the
tenuous and transient nature of being through the
felt rhythms and vivid figurations of the lyric form.
Each of these poets has devised a personal aesthetic
of startling resonance and exceptional power.
Source:Floyd Collins, “Transience and the Lyric Impulse,”
in Gettysburg Review, Vol. 12, No. 4, Winter 1999,
pp. 702–19.Sources
Buckley, Christopher, Review of The Southern Reaches, in
the New Leader, Vol. 73, No. 1, January 8, 1990, pp. 15–18.
Campo, Rafael, “Poetry,” in the Washington Post, March
21, 1999, final edition, p. X03.
Collins, Floyd, “Transience and the Lyric Impulse,” in Get-
tysburg Review, Vol. 12, No. 4, Winter 1999, pp. 702–19.
Pope, Deborah, Review of The City of Women: A Sequence
of Prose and Poems, in the Southern Review, Vol. 29, No. 4,
Autumn 1993, pp. 808–19.Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End