In his essay “Autobiography and Archetype,” Stanley Plumly tells us that “My Mother’s Feet” was the result of having heard, as a young boy, someone say that his mother “walked on water.” At the time, he said, he “understood that it could be either praise or a putdown,” but “from the tone of what was said, [he] realized it must be praise.” “Praise” that as an adult he came to treat “with a certain affection and irony” because, in fact, he knew them to be “working feet.” He thought of the poem as “an elegy to vulnerability” and as a “panegyric” to her feet. He noted as well that his mother was “like the form found in [his] poems—half-measured, precariously balanced, quietly obsessive.”
I like to think that the form of “My Mother’s Feet” mimics some of those attributes. There’s the precarious balance, for example, of the offset first line, offering a space, we might imagine, for slipping on a shoe? And there are the quietly obsessive: six unrhymed, loosely iambic quatrains. Five of the quatrains contain paired clauses: “How no shoe/ how she used to; How she bathed/ How she let; She was the girl/ She was the girl; I have watched/ I have seen; and, more loosely, wander/ and warm.” There are also two, four-footed syntactic patterns, astride the stanzas, that hint at the poem’s subplot, a kind of pas de deux between mother and son: “How no shoe/ how she used to; How she bathed/ How she let;” and “I have watched/ I have seen/ I would rise/ I could find.”
These formal arrangements help to establish one of the things I admire most about “My Mother’s Feet” which is its quality of painterly composition, especially as it’s found in the first three stanzas. Before Plumly became a poet, he studied visual art in college and briefly taught art at a high school. He gave it up, he said, because he was terrible at creating perspective. Those four, initial “how” clauses show us how he carefully moves us visually through his mother’s bathing ritual while at the same time keeping it whole and in front us. And yet, the last line of the second stanza, “How she let the fire pull her soft body through them,” invites us to imagine something a painting, no matter how kinetic, could do. Only a lyric poem could gather the details of the propped feet, the coal-stove fire, the intimacy of the massage, and bring them together to make such an oddly beautiful, triumphant, transforming image. Like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
You’re probably thinking as I am that those “bricklayer’s hands” appear with an odd but sudden rightness. Plumly returned to write about his mother’s feet several times throughout his career. In “Extremities,” a prose poem in which they’re featured, he confesses to having his “mother’s…pancake feet,” which he thought of as “…the most human…vulnerable and reassuring…part of her.” And “as a small child [he] loved to touch them, particularly the calluses, which were…ugly, otherworldly, magical.|” He believed his mother had moments in which she must have “loved [her] feet, loved them the way we come to accept our flaws as essential to our identities.” At the end of these recollections, he tells us, “I once compared the warmth and character of my mother’s feet to a ‘bricklayer’s hands,’ and those hands, I realize now, are my father’s hands.”
What a weird creature he’s made from his parent’s extremities. Look at his mother’s feet one way and they are his father’s hands or looked at another and his father’s hands are his mother’s feet. And what about that final line: “Every step of the way shining out of them”? What’s the “them”? Feet or hands? Feet, of course, but the simile conflates them. Mostly when writing about his parents Plumly kept them separate, but at the end of “My Mother’s Feet,” he manages to create a rare physical and psychic convergence of both. “[W]hen I evoke one of my parents, say my father,” he says in “Autobiography and Archetype,” “I want the experience in the poem to be fair to memory and larger than life, since father is a word as well as flesh.” What could be larger than life than a mother who walks on water or has feet like a bricklayer’s hands”? And larger still, although it took him many years to realize, is that the flesh of those hands are his father’s. Two words, mother and father, one flesh—the son.
The life we see enacted, and re-enacted, whenever Plumly wrote about his parents is not a life imitated but rather a life transformed. It’s how he thought about autobiographical poetry. He believed, “Events and parents teach us” not only “how large fate is and how small we are” but also about “the value of being small again within the larger tangle” and “puzzle” of our lives.
To discover who we are is the work Plumly urged us to do—“work for the sake of work as a transcendent virtue: a purifier, rectifier” and as an apology for our flaws. What else except the need for transcendence would have pushed him in the last months of his life to continue working as doggedly as he did? He had already put together the table of contents for his Collected Poems. He had typed a list of the titles of his poetry books and penciled next to them the number of poems each contained. Yet to his treatments and hospital stays, to his chair in the living room, and to his office at school, he would bring his black binder containing work in progress, which is the work of hope and hope’s belief in the possibility that again, as he wrote in one of his last poems, something “silver and black with shining” might rise from “the bottom to the broken surface” of a lake so that above the lake, “the fine cold stars” would appear “one at a time.”
