280 PART THREE
“Because... because... because”: what ’s to come of this hanging, dropping,
bruising, sagging, drifting away, and the “claims” these causes frustrate? The
sentence beginning “But” bears a saving or at least hopeful logic, veering this
poem toward change.
In Jerusalem a clause spans beauty and hurt, flowers “so delicate / even their
motion through the air / bruises them.” Line by line freeze-frames their fall,
catching what we can barely imagine much less see. On top of this, surprise:
the blossoms “lie where they fall / like.. .”—like what? Like bonny curls of a
newborn babe? Like tiny sachets of crumpled silk? No, “like tiny pouches of
shriveled skin.” The decrepit figure risks a lot, and is not the last to do so.
A third “because” moves from botany to the human condition. Where
branches “hang down with blossoms,” our lives in like rhythm are “sagging
with marvels,” God ’s unfulfilled promises and miracles. And where “lavender
clumps... drop to the ground,” now “clusters of faces” drift away—family
and friends gone with the 7 A.M. news.
Because of all this, the “claims / we keep making or are made on us” go
wanting.But“the recurrence of change,” hanging on a line break, “can still
surprise us.” After such fallings and failings, is this enough? At least we have
late spring “lilac / that darts and flickers,” explosive as autumn crocus (“Look!
They say for a moment”). What ’s this lilac flicker like? Another surprise: “like
the iridescent head of a fly.” Skirting disgust, the image quickens to radiance: iris,
rainbow, a rainwashed covenant after the flood. Then back home to jacaranda,
“the tree making us / look again.” So much depends on looking again at things
and people, on heeding their claims.
A later poem, from Threshold,is still waiting:
No rain yet
good news doesn’t come
through the window
but the jacaranda
is more ferny than ever
filling
with so many birds
I don’t even know the names of
Nature ’s good news can outdo our grasp, and in this poem it ’s finally a jaybird
rasping countthedead countthedead.
With her contemporary Denise Levertov, Shirley Kaufman shares the lin-
eage of William Carlos Williams. His “Spring and All” brings dried weeds, but
“sluggish / dazed spring approaches—”
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf