A H A N D P I C K E D P O E M
presented by Michael Todd Steffen
From the December 14, 2024 online Daily Rattle, from the printed Rattle Winter 2013
The Famine of Love
by Jenneva Scholz
After his mother forbids him to marry Psyche, Cupid puts down his
bow and all living things on earth stop mating.
First the fruit flies fell around the fruit bowl and the air was still,
the figs and apples ripened and then were gone. The end of bees
means the end of plums and roses, the end of rye and amaranth.
Soon, no mice: we noticed their silence after the years of traps
and scratching in the ceilings, no droppings in the flour, no footprints
in the butter. I found an owl dead in a glade. Take less
time than you might think for horsefeed to look like food
if there is no food. There are our orchards, there are
our fields, empty of hum and buzzing, empty of peaches
and wheat. The male swan left the lake, just flew away,
and his mate made widening circles over town,
honking her grief until we shot her down.
The goats stripped every bush of leaves but bore no kids,
no cats birthed kittens, no kits for the foxes, no goslings,
no grubs, no nymphs, no infants. My son now prefers the empty
woods to the dancing girls—it’s true they’ve grown bony,
and though I go to watch them they don’t stir me. I’m hungry.
At the town council we address the issue: how long can we survive
on leaves and boiled bark? Two months, if we eat our seed corn,
and slaughter our horses. One month if we save some corn,
save some horses to try to plant in the spring. My wife
once rode that horse fifty miles just to see me
for an afternoon. Once she rode over a river in winter,
the ice spackled with rabbit tracks
and filled with unlucky fish, just to marry me.
Once we made love in the garden, under the bean trellis;
in our bed we made a child. I make a list
of her good qualities. I try to find my love for her
in things, wearing the clothes she gave me, reading
notations she left in my book. Re-reading her letters
I think, I’m so hungry I could let you starve.
It’s hard to know yourself anymore
when you can think a thing like that.
Some things might outlast this. Tortoises, maybe.
But look at them: each grooved to fit smoothly with the other,
built to heave those heavy bodies together and lock in.
See how his belly is arched
to cradle her shell.
I keep thinking: I don’t need her.
I keep opening the cupboard to find nothing.
~ ~ ~
From the onset with the fruit flies (the virologists’ study analogues) the poem gives us a terrible vision of the end of a world, not just the death of an individual, but a general diminishing of resources, animals, fruits, grains, insects dying off to foreseeable total depletion, of a community undergoing famine—
Two months, if we eat our seed corn,
and slaughter our horses. One month if we save some corn,
save some horses to try to plant in the spring…
The situation is hopeless, expressed in a logic that makes no sense: They have a chance to plant later if they starve themselves to death first in order to preserve corn seed. (Other interesting elements in the poem don’t stand up to the scrutiny of reason, like gender: At one moment the narrative voice is communal, at another moment it is Venus taking up from the epilogue talking about Cupid, at another moment it is a man talking about making love to his wife in the garden and the child they made…)
What helps keep the poem interesting, instead of just desperate, is the magnified awareness of the poem’s being a poem, the way we sometimes abide a nightmare by being vaguely aware we are only dreaming. The artificiality (or artfulness) of the poem is announced in the prompt in the epigraph about Venus and Psyche and Cupid and how all things on earth stop mating. It situates us in an etiological or mythic realm, not the real world. As with every poem, there’s a big implied As if running throughout it. In reality, perhaps, a long lonely Friday night without a date might have inspired Jenneva Scholz—or fretted her—with the intensity to begin seeing this poem under her pen. Remembering the story about Psyche and Cupid would be all the spark needed for the fire. It was written, I think, close to its first appearance in the early 20-teens, when the world was having a voluble discussion about the disappearing number of bees (second line) and how that affected the whole food chain.
For a lot longer we’ve been told about goat grazing and the depletion of vegetation on the Mediterranean islands. When the goats stop mating here, the drop-off we feels is the hollowness of eating or consuming without love, without procreativity, without creativity. It’s a dilemma for me evoked in our present world with the consumption of much processed food, without real taste or appreciation, without love.
The really big drop-off we feel, however, is earlier in the poem. The onset of the poem enumerates the deaths of small beings, which hardly matter to us, seemingly, fruit flies, bees… And then mice, maybe a little more troublesome, yet they are pests that keep us awake. The bluntness with which Scholz announces the significantly larger death is telling about our first somewhat immediate encounter with death: “I found an owl dead in a glade.” It’s an utmost poetic stroke of the unpoetic, the bluntness of bluntness. (Sorry belles-lettrists and this failure to encompass poetry with the merely beautiful!)
Though the dilemma here is famine, the withdrawal of food sources, we are reminded again and again of its “mythic” cause, that Cupid has ceased to shoot his arrows of desire at the creatures. That element is re-invoked powerfully by Scholz in the image of the male swan leaving its mate on the lake. Without love: the lone left swan honking out grief until somebody in the community shoots it, out of irritation, sure, but then also for the food it provides.
The thing that makes a poem like this all the more urgent, and true, is its ability, proven as it so happens just now by world events, to open a vivid intimate door onto the ongoing disaster of humanity, who we are. I’ve been hearing about people undergoing famine all my life. I’ve seen the images of the bloated children in magazines and on TV. Never have I, as a tax payer, felt so involved, at however a slant. But works of art like Guernica, or this poem, “The Famine of Love,” bring us as close to that failure as possible without actually being there, with the power of art to carry us into that realm of woe and suffering stripped of ideology. The imagination is a far more powerful vehicle than mere fantasy. Ask any nightmare.
The speaker in the poem undergoes the simultaneity of grief and want, the excruciating loss of the love Cupid is deliberately no longer delivering and the hunger resulting in that withdrawal. It is such a polarly opposite set of deprivations:
I make a list
of her good qualities. I try to find my love for her
in things, wearing the clothes she gave me, reading
notations she left in my book. Re-reading her letters
I think, I’m so hungry I could let you starve.
I love you and hate you, more than anything. It brings us to the breaking point, where Robert Lowell in a similar despair, in the poem “Skunk Hour,” another poignant love-loss poem, utters the lucid perspective of insanity: My mind is not right. When the universe seems to have gone as deaf to our cries as a child-god brooding over his implacable mother’s injunctions, we can only recognize the validity of the thorough breakdown—
It’s hard to know yourself anymore
when you can think a thing like that.
When that’s what the world is saying, that’s what we need to recognize. That’s the step that needs to be made before any remedial steps can be taken. The admission that we, we all, not just the people in the news, are doomed.
