SOMETHING ALIVE IN MAY SWENSON 245be mimicking Dickinson.
A bee rolls in the yellow rose.
Does she invite his hairy rub?
He scrubs himself in her creamy folds....
When he ’s done his honey-thieving
at her matrix, whirs free, leaving,
she closes, still tall, chill,
unrumpled on her stem.Dickinson too “was a skeptic,” but “possessed intense emotional urges, her
senses always sharp and at full pitch.”
Poets’ affinities speak also for themselves, as when we ’re told that reclusive
Emily “was capable of... passionate love.” Instinctively Swenson casts her
love poems in moments from nature. She titles her remembrance of a college
soulmate “Digging in the Garden of Age I Uncover a Live Root.”
The smell of wet geraniums....
A gleam of sweat in your lip’s scoop.
Pungent geranium leaves, their wet
smell when our widening pupils met.“Four-Word Lines” speaks as a flower, not at all skeptical.
I’d let you wade
in me and seize
with your eager brown
bees’ power a sweet
glistening at the core.Well, we can never have too much of the birds and the bees.
One other element, lifegiving and destructive, runs through Swenson’s poems.
When Stanley Kunitz suggested a posthumous collection, Nature, its final section
was reserved for “Waters”: ocean’s “purple heave,” “glossy swells,” “Wave after
hissing / wave,” “racing foam,” “smooth-sucked stones,” “the sound of water
over stones.” In 1938, new to the East Coast, she ’d written of a woman “looking
at the sea for the first time,” standing in tidal surf and “watching in fascination
the glossy green coil of water roaring upon her,” then sucking back the sand
from under her. Eventually she had homes in Sea Cliff, Long Island and Ocean
View, Delaware, where the Atlantic pulled poem after poem from her.
Like Kunitz, whose sloping dune garden holds “something at rest and in
motion at the same time,” and A. R. Ammons’s “dunes of motion,” Swenson’s
“The Wave and the Dune” touches a mystery.
The wave-shaped dune is still.