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 #317
Scarred Heart of a Selkie
My husband keeps resurrecting old photos of me: 26 years old, lean and sweat-straining in the Falmouth Road Race. Smooth-faced twin of a Campbell soup kid, my Dorothy Hamill-hair framing the 35 mm Olympus camera that I prized. Cropped headless by his camera, I was a naked Venus posed against the cliffs of Gay Head, my beach clay painted torso turning up the heat. I never wanted that pedestal. That girl didn't even appreciate what she had when she had it; always the ellipsis of self-doubt, the thin veneer of aspiration like spring ice on the Muddy River. She went hungry to make weight, replaced indulgence with abstinence, sacrificed love to selfishness. I've returned to the scene of those crimes, pardoned.
minding the body
lifting the weight of past souls
small bites of ripe pear
––Kerry Loughman
Nearly everyone is familiar with the Japanese haiku––since the time of Basho, it’s become one of the most popular styles of verse on the planet. Most of us will remember our earnest third-grade teachers instructing us in the ‘rules’ they thought defined the form, and then encouraging us to fill our notebooks. Fewer, though, will be knowledgeable about tanka and renga, considerably older styles of poetry from which the haiku was eventually derived. But I am surprised that the haibun has relatively little recognition here in the United States, even though there are scores of haiku societies and magazines devoted to traditional Japanese poetry. A thumbnail description: haibun is a hybrid genre pairing a short prose piece––traditionally akin to a diary entry, travel sketch, or personal memory––and culminating with a haiku that’s not simply a reflection of the prose but often a leap of the imagination, or a shift in the mood and context. Basho himself popularized the art form near the close of the 17th century with five prominent collections of ‘travel’ writing, most notably The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
By her own account, Japanese poetry and culture have been central influences for Kerry Loughman: accomplished photographer, retired educator, and––later in life––an avid Boston-area poet. Her letter to me detailed: “2 years language study at college level, 19 years studying Shotokan Karate, one visit to Japan, and many years of trying to write in Japanese forms.” A number of her poems confront the challenges associated with aging and, because of that, possess an invigorating kind of urgency. Her poetry has appeared in various journals and websites including Nixes Mate Review, The Main Street Rag, Lily Poetry Review, Writer's Resist, and Mass Poetry’s Hard Work of Hope. Today’s poem was triggered, not surprisingly, by a photograph––though not one of her own. Her husband, also a photographer, often reprints older images from their past––in this case, a 1980’s shot of Kerry, caked in clay in front of the cliffs at Aquinnah, on Martha's Vineyard. Again, I think I’ll let Kerry herself describe her thought process: “Sometimes I'm uncomfortable with the reminders of what I looked like [back] then. . .Most women know the feeling of constant attention to their bodies, their appearance––how it can define you, constrain you, and cause you to rebel and, sometimes, to grieve.” But when lament transforms into art, the creator behind this new clarity is not debilitated by its expression, but empowered.
In the prose section, I was snagged by the use of that word “resurrecting” with all its connotation: not just a new life but redemption. But the speaker does not glory in the recollection of that young body: “26 years old, lean and sweat-straining in the Falmouth Road Race.” Nor the innocence of that “Smooth-faced twin of a Campbell soup kid, my Dorothy Hamill-hair framing the 35 mm Olympus camera that I prized.” One of art’s great powers is to freeze a moment in time for our continual inspection. If only the subject of the art were also spared what we casually term the ‘ravages of time’ (the razor-sharp bite of that word, ravages, contains a lesson we can only learn with mounting years). But the description of the third photo is likely the one that will jolt us awake: “Cropped headless by his camera, I was a naked Venus posed against the cliffs of Gay Head, my beach clay painted torso turning up the heat.” The combination of robust sexuality with implied violence––the model beheaded by the lens––probably felt more innocent in the ‘80s (with visions of the “Venus DeMilo” popular at the time), but is decidedly less so today. As if the body’s beauty were not dependent on the mind enlivening it. The speaker has come to some greater acceptance of her old striving for perfection––and I can imagine a number of readers nodding in agreement––but the word pardon still leaves us to wonder. Unlike the mythical selkie of the title, we are not permitted to escape from and reinhabit those bodies into which we were born.
And then, after taking a breath, the haiku: “minding the body” (ah, the doubled meaning hinted here by that verb!); and “lifting the weight of past souls”––grown lighter, perhaps, as our hearts have ripened. And finally: “small bites of ripe pear.” I found that concluding line deeply satisfying and quietly unsettling, all at once. Those “small bites”––do they speak to savoring the sweet pleasure, or the pinch of abstinence? (And let’s not think too long about other women eating fruit from the mythological garden.) I even wondered whether Kerry was remembering a marvelous haiku from one of the masters, Buson: “Blossoms on the pear/ and a woman in the moonlight/ reads a letter there.” The womanliness of the pear––and its connotation of late-blooming fruit––suddenly conjures a half dozen possibilities condensed in that mysterious “letter.” Kerry, too, hints at the tension inside love: between emotional abundance and contingency; the tangled path between self-negation and self-acceptance. A difficult billet-doux for our troubled world, but a necessary one.
The Red Letters
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