The Red Letters
In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.
To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.
––Steven Ratiner
Red Letter Poem #293
Making Love in a Cemetery
Here, the Tantrics and Sufis dance away fear
when the moon is full of herself, the sky a void.
Old four-armed Death can never lift her spear
when those monks chant and keep their circle squared.
Our bodies open now, atop the Mother,
we shudder in each other's arms. A Druid
terror enters with love’s ebbing tide—
what moon-drowned promise are we drawn to here?
Can we, ringed by darkness and our waning need,
utter one word for burial, place of seed?
Will we break this spellbound circle, or ever know
what Spirit, what lightening sky we're praying to—
here, where love and fear draw the same breath,
fusing our lives in this first phase of our death?
––Carolyne Wright
When I was an erstwhile English major (several centuries ago, it seems––a feeling many of you may also be experiencing), the literary portrayal of April contained decidedly mixed messages. There was: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,/ The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,”––Eng. 205, Intro to Chaucer. The professor made us memorize the first fifty lines of the Canterbury Tale’s Prologue and recite them before the class. I certainly understood the drought that epitomized my sophomore year––but as I spoke the verses, my attention kept drifting toward a certain young woman in the third row, and the sweet-smelling mist that seemed always to envelop her. How I longed to bathe every veyne, every leaf and petal, in love’s swich licóur. But, that same semester, I’d somehow talked my way into the advanced Modern Poetry seminar where I was offered austere Mr. Eliot’s pronouncement: “April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain.” Instant buzz-kill, to be sure, and my visions of passionate embrace were swept away. Right there, in the actual ‘spring of my life,’ the confluence of love and death made my head spin. It would take some time before I’d learn how inextricably woven they were, each amplifying the meaning of the other, and teasing out unexpected possibilities. Perhaps Carolyne Wright learned that lesson earlier than I, and used it to temper the steel and strengthen the silk of her poetry. Writer, educator, editor, translator, Carolyne’s life is the full flowering of that traditional English curriculum. Author of a dozen poetry collections––including, most recently, Masquerade, a memoir in poetry, and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (both published by Lost Horse Press)––her work has received numerous honors including a Pushcart Prize, a poem selected by by The Best American Poetry, three Fulbright grants and another from the National Endowment for the Arts.
I think today’s poem requires a few readings in order to feel how the formality of its diction and creative approach result in an array of push-pull forces, setting head and heart into motion. Carolyne is presenting to us that most unbridled of passionate encounters: teenaged lust, played out in one of the few places young lovers can resort to for privacy––the graveyard. But It all takes place within the staid elegance that is her loosely-rhymed Italian sonnet. “(T)he moon is full of herself, the sky a void”––and the tension between presence and absence is already rising. Quick bursts of mystic philosophy cloud our heads, but our senses are carrying us away. “Our bodies open now, atop the Mother,/ we shudder in each other's arms.” What a marvelous whiplash burst of electricity conjured by that one image: this couple writhing atop––either a gravestone marked Mother, or the primordial notion of the Great Mother whose planetary abundance is the source of all life. No wonder “A Druid/ terror enters with love’s ebbing tide.” Once we actually come to understand that death and loss are not simply childish nightmares––and that, impossible as it seems, we will not be exempt––every burst of pleasure, each act of love is a way to, if not forestall oblivion, then at least defy it.
The formal rhyme scheme of the poem is a stabilizing presence, even as we reflect on what such an act signifies. “Will we break this spellbound circle,” or ever know what undiscovered emotional, societal and, dare I say, spiritual forces are driving our actions? I remember when some prof at my university spoke of the 16th century French concept of ‘little deaths’ (la petite mort), referring to those moments of profound transition embodied in sexual release. What a haunting notion to plant inside the overactive mind of a nineteen-year-old! To accept that, as Carolyne phrases it, “love and fear draw the same breath” is to settle into our mortal bodies––not necessarily more comfortably but more honestly. Even thinking about this today, I recall the words of that other learned medievalist, David Bowie, who sang: “They pulled in just behind the bridge/ He lays her down, he frowns:/ Gee my life's a funny thing, am I still too young?” Some days, I feel that may be the case. Or should we white-haired teenagers turn to another lyric from almost the same year, this from Mr. Dylan: “May you stay forever young.” Something we can hum under our breath as we prepare ourselves for our April pilgrimage.
The Red Letters
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