Don Riggs

Making Things Out of Words

I have moved from one apartment to another six months back, then moved from one office to another about one month back. In both places, I still live among boxes—at my apartment, a massive stack of them in the middle of the front room, like Switzerland or the Massif Central in France, in my office, like stalagmites rising from the floor of a cavern, lining the walls and partially blocking the bookshelves which I would need access to in order to empty the books from the boxes that block them.

As I point out to my science fiction classes when we get to that part of Frank Herbert’s Dune where the Lady Jessica is unwrapping twine from cartons in their new home in Arrakeen, the Herberts had lots of experience moving from one house to another, often just a step ahead of the creditors! I didn’t have to move for that reason—nor have the Harkonnens and Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV conspired to trap me on an inhospitable planet, inhabited by other poets and the psychology department—but the result is the same. I have lots of boxes that I unpack randomly, based more on how close they are to the surface than how urgent it is that I obtain their contents.

As a result, I wind up stumbling on papers, among them poems, that I haven’t seen for years, in some instances, and these unexpected trouvailles act as those little cookies that Marcel dipped in tea then tasted in his aunt’s house…memories emerge, unbidden...

For example, the following poem:
 

Daphne-Apollo
after Alice Fulton after Ovid

Take Daphne’s hair: free, each strand doing its
own thing. One ribbon twines through it, a snake
slips through lianas. Apollo wanted
order—a Clairol girl in a glossy
mag. No way that would happen with him in
hot pursuit. ‘Run more slowly,’ he yodeled,
‘I’ll slow down too!’ Right. As if they both ran
on a Grecian urn, him never to catch her
in a wedding hymn—nor a blesséd place
where cool springs massage the crooked toes of
uncomplaining trees. She knew this wood’s paths
as her long-distance sprint caromed off each
jab of bright fingers into the wood womb.
 

I know that I wrote that in 2001, because the poet Alice Fulton was going to come to Drexel to read, but canceled in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. I don’t know whether I had written it before it was known she was canceling or after; all I recall is that I had been sensitized to her name and when I saw her section of that book of contemporaries’ translations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I was struck by her interpretation of it, and I went back to the original.

I had studied the Metamorphoses in graduate school under Brooks Otis, a noted classical scholar who had been forced into retirement at Stanford and then was snapped up by UNC-Chapel Hill’s classics department. Unfortunately, he was not appreciated by the grad students at the time, but that was a very fortunate circumstance for me, because there were only four of us in his seminar on Ovid. His whole point was that Ovid’s poem was what he called an “anti-epic,” in which Virgil’s Aeneid and the Homeric epics were played with, conventions teased, and contemporaries in Rome slyly implicated in improprieties—it has been said that Ovid was banished from Rome to an area not far from Sochi because he had accidentally “seen something” disgraceful in the Emperor’s daughter’s behavior, just as Actaeon was ripped apart by his hounds for accidentally seeing Diana naked in her bath.

Otis guffawed at Apollo’s asking Daphne to run slower, promising that he would reduce the speed of his chase correspondingly; I don’t recall what Fulton made of that, I think her treatment of the attempted rape was a bit more serious. The “blesséd place” that Daphne doesn’t wish to be caught in is the locus amoenus that we had studied in ancient poetry and which I saw along the creeks threading their way through town, and my fiancée had crooked toes from years of dancing ballet in point shoes, and which I massaged after taking classes and workshops in shiatsu, polarity therapy, and foot massage at the local Wholistic Health Center. Ah, those were the days!

Another old and forgotten poem I must have written a year or more after “Daphne-Apollo” because I remember the office I had moved to when the woman in question visited me there, doesn’t have the same complex web of grad-school associations the earlier poem has, but is more centripetal in its focus:
 

Her Heart around Me

The heart must not be tentative to clutch
at what it yearns to wrap in its chamber,
that dark hot red slick rubbery muscle
invisible in the body’s dense night.
But it must relax, that its object might
slip in, that slight woman whose eyes’ amber
preserves a prehistoric dark wrestle,
whose agile tender limbs make me their catch.

Caught I’ve become, acknowledge it with pen.
I wish it were her heart around me wrapped
to let me underwater gasp her blood,
heart’s air that roars like fire throughout my head;
may it be more than my own wish that has trapped
me in my own mind’s spider-sticky seine.
 

This is like the LaBrea Tar Pits! There is the extended metaphor, or the conceit of a Baroque poet like Donne, by which the heart is both the figurative center of emotions celebrated in Valentine’s Day cards and also the blood-pumping muscle in modern anatomy and physiology; the difficulty comes in trying to develop both aspects of the image simultaneously, for if I have a place in a woman’s heart, then I have to breathe blood. Her amber eyes suggest the insects trapped and thereby preserved in prehistoric amber, and it is just a short hop from that image to one of two insects caught in the act of interpenetration by the golden ooze that has in eons since hardened.

A friend of mine who is more of a performance artist than I obviously was using air quotes when he recited my line “Caught I’ve become, acknowledge it with pen” because that kind of inversion is not only verboten on the stage, but even is quite déclassé in poetry today. Actually, since Pound and Eliot heaved the pentameter. But when you are in the throes of an infatuation, such as I was then—and even though an infatuation is by definition being inflated with emptiness—you don’t think in terms of what is appropriate or acceptable. A crush is a crush and your sense of proportion is turned all to mush. Still, the thought of the heart as a fist, that would hold on to someone else, leads inevitably to the realization that the heart clutches only to let go and find itself empty once more; to clutch and never let go is to die.

Just as the Scandinavians leave their winter sauna hut and jump into a cold pond or roll around in the snow, a much cooler poem will end these musings:
 

Genre Scene

Sound is motion. Noiseless flight
is simply too distant
for human ears to understand,
stand under. Hunters in the snow
stride motionlessly into the white
noise blanketing the seashell ear.
The dogs’ mouths are closed
to preserve their tongues from dry
cold. No barking. We don’t hear
as well now that we grow old,
but what of the tableau
of Pieter Brueghel the Elder?
No noise. They walk in snow.
 

In undergraduate Art History surveys we were told that outdoor scenes were “genre” scenes, with dances, farming, hunting and the like collectively presenting us with “slices of life” of the times. Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow has long been one of my favorites, but I wondered, before I knew what “ekphrastic poetry” was, whether I could get across an aspect of the painting’s essence in words.

For one thing, the first thing we find out about words is sound, starting with the WAAAAAAA of the newborn finding itself in a blinding void. Here there is no sound; those hunters have progressed no farther than they were 450 years ago, so there is no crunch of boots, no huffing of breath, no grunting from the disappointing lack of game encountered along the way. Since sound is motion—isn’t that what modern physics teaches us? we “hear” because of motion in our inner ear?—we hear nothing except the noises John Cage heard when he entered a totally soundproof chamber at Harvard: a low tone and a high tone, the one being his circulatory system working, the other being his nervous system. And does all the snow lying on the ground, branches, and roofs make white noise in the background?

Don Riggs has been writing verses, some of which aspires to poetry, since the sixth grade, which is half a century ago. He has self-published three chapbooks: Walks (1983), Hermenoodles (1988) and Self Portraits in Words and Images (1997). He has most recently published his first “real” book, Bilateral Asymmetry (Texture Press, 2014). All of these feature both texts and drawings, often deliberately interrelated in some way. He studied the Middle Ages in graduate school, and he is now middle-aged, so he has become what he has studied.