“One need not be a chamber–to be haunted,” Dickinson reminds us; being an avid reader of poems suffices. Surely as revelatory as any Rorschach are those lines of poetry a reader has buried in her subconscious that surface when needed or conjured. Some of my own include:
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought
(T. S. Eliot)
and
Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed.
(Jorie Graham)
and the utterly singular—and confusingly erotic—
Honey-like darkness is there, near the veranda,
And comic young owls, and the scent of leather
(Czesław Miłosz)
or another favorite from Larry Levis’s “Two Trees,” wherein a tree, one of his only two friends left, commiserates about the speaker’s life’s failure:
You do not even have a car anymore.
I am haunted by probably a dozen such singular lines from the work of Ellen Bryant Voigt although “Largesse,” the poem opening her volume Shadow of Heaven, includes two such lines. The first, which also occurs to me most frequently, is the simple-seeming divining rod of a line:
What was it had made me sad?
It’s an abrupt and slightly peculiar opening to the second stanza of a four-stanza poem, interrupting a gorgeous opening description of the landscape and an open-air market in Aix-en-Provence. The incongruity between the dramatic landscape and the market’s embarrassment of riches with the speaker’s unshakeable sadness is what I find so startling. But also something about the formulation of the question itself. Only a single word, “that,” is elided from what the line would be if uttered more colloquially, but Voigt’s phrasing echoes to me what the line would be like if uttered in French “Qu’est ce qui m’avait rendu triste?” Either way the question is genuinely asked, not rhetorical or poetic, the answer unknown, oddly rare in many poems.
“What was it had made me sad?” Why is it this line that surfaces in my mind most often? I think because it’s a familiar dilemma of the mind trying to catch up with the body, a situation I find myself in often. Once, in tears, this line came to me and when I pondered the question, I realized that it was simply because sand had gotten in my eye, which had produced the physical act of weeping, which had provoked the matching emotional state. I wasn’t even sad, I just had sand in my eye! But in “Largesse,” there’s a vaster disconnect, not between mind and body but between the self and the world: why, or rather what, amidst the incredible abundance and sensual stimulation of an outdoor market in the south of France “with more fresh herbs than [she] could name,” had made the speaker sad?
Then she remembers: “Under a goose-wing, I had a violent dream.” And this is the second line that often resurfaces in my mind. What a strange and musical utterance, what a strange image, what a strange thing to happen! It makes me think of Anthony Hecht’s superb poem which also recounts a dream—or he calls it a vision—at a public market while abroad:
In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur,
I had a vision once – though you understand
It was nothing at all like Dante’s, or the visions of saints,
And perhaps not a vision at all. (“A Hill”)
Hecht’s speaker is so sheepish in his recounting that he practically talks himself out of having had the vision, but Voigt’s speaker doesn’t equivocate. Steeped with anxiety, the speaker in her dream she’s walking along a ledge while “blinded on and off . . . long minutes at a time.” Such a dream would be harrowing in its own right but the speaker is also carrying a baby, charged with the protection of a vulnerable enfant with “a spidery crack travers[ing] his china skull.” The dream isn’t interpreted, only presented, but it speaks for itself: how to navigate the vast and generous world that is simultaneously treacherous? It’s a bewildering question, but bewildering questions are something Ellen found fascinating—as she did dreams, positive or no. In “Sleep,” a late poem in Headwaters, the speaker pines for such violent but expressive dreams:
dreams it’s what I miss the most
even in terrible dreams at least you feel what you feel
not what
you’re supposed to feel your house burns down so what
if you survived you rake the ashes sobbing
Pondering this dilemma later at her desk, the speaker concludes that in her present moment she has been given a choice—whether to look down at the boars’ nest ruined by the previous night’s rain or to look up at Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain memorialized by Cézanne: aspirational and beautiful, but after such a dream, also undoubtedly frightening and complicated. Dreams, just like poems, haunt, and they allow us to experience the largesse of the world containing both views.
