What Lies Beyond

What Lies Beyond Poems

Judith Farr

de er br o ok edit ion s

pub li s he d by Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions f i r s t e di t i o n Š 2019 by Judith Farr All rights reserved ISBN: 978-0-9991062-8-0 Book design by Jeffrey Haste Judith Farr portrait by Richard Basch Studios

Once Again, For George If I should cease to bring a Rose Upon a festal day, ‘Twill be because beyond the Rose I have been called away —Emily Dickinson, Poems, 1859

Contents T he Gardener

11

Portrait of Florence in Central Park

16

Elegy on My Mother’s Madness Walking to the Post Office

Mean Girls, or Reunion at the Girls’ Academy Secret Love

Five Poems Inspired by Five Paintings: Grand-mère

15 19 21 22 23

Looking at Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Evening Agnolo Bronzino’s Young Lady with a Small Boy

Jacques Louis David Talks About His Portrait of Mme. David On Rembrandt Van Ryn, Self-Portrait

Five for Emily Dickinson:

Remembering 28 August, 1971

32

Emily’s Economies

T he Marathon Poetry Reading As Emily Dickinson Dies

Restoring Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom: 2015

To a Nun Who Taught Ninth Grade English T he House of Pain

His Youngest Daughter, Mildred,

Prepares the Body of General Robert E. Lee for Burial

Reconciliation Elegy: Hester Prynne to Arthur Dimmesdale Meditation on John H. Twachtman, the Painter

T he Medici Fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris Emily Brontë at My Prep School

T he Brontë Parsonage in Haworth Dawn Declensions: Florida

40 41 42 46 48 49 50 51 53

Loss 55 T he Parents’ Gift

56

What Lies Beyond

59

Holding Hands

58

Acknowledgements 61 About the author

63

What Lies Beyond

T he Gardener Her husband having flown on business five thousand miles to where

they once had lived,

the gardener passed up dinner to labor on into the evening, setting in heliotrope, windflowers, angel’s trumpets and cosmos, flowering maple, lilies of the Nile, ladybells and bell flowers, blue star and lady’s mantle, coreopsis and lobelia,

white narcissus, Poet’s Jessamine.

Some names were like poems, sonnets maybe, especially now, when life seemed formless.

Or sometimes they seemed like madrigals, lute-songs, delicate as the pretty-fingered clematis clinging to the hand when you tuck it in the ground, soft as gillyflowers, kiss-me-over-the-fences, bridal wreath, names with earth still clinging to them, though, stout like the whorled loosestrife, the rough bedstraw, or candle larkspur, chubby as the fists of infants.

She liked romantic names, not scientific ones.

At her parents’ summer home where first she gardened, she planted flowers she’d met in Shakespeare’s plays,

camellias that stood for secret lust, or satiny Bourbon roses with the title of some French countess executed during the Terror. T hey wouldn’t grow.

T he Cape Cod soil, all sand and prose, had tufts of grass, hard as Brillo, that throttled life from anything set down, except potatoes. T he gardener learned, finally, to respect them. T hat was forty years ago.

11

T his year she would grow anything she wanted.

Her illness was like fertilizer. As her body sickened, her mind grew more acute, inventive. She mucked about in the soil, scarcely needing to read directions on seed packages. T he earth quickened, turned green under her fingers.

Some of the flowers the gardener planted were mere seedlings. Others were sturdy plants already, with hopeful, happy faces.

She’d selected her varieties with care as if she were a general, planning the ultimate attack.

She needed success, at last, this summer.

She required bloom.

A woman who had always worshipped beauty, she found it most poignantly displayed in flowers,

rare flowers, in particular,

like the memory of an impassioned kiss whose fire,

not altogether put out of memory, tormented her by its powerful singularity. A pure ideal,

the obscure lily she loved best was the metaphor of everyone, everything she most valued : her husband, for example (much too powerful, too strong for lilies, but able to ravish her with tenderness, like some perfume); or her children, whose sweet clumsiness

reminded her of a lily’s stamens— sticking to her, soiling her dresses, yielding impressions

of their inmost selves.

12

T hen, finally, some lilies made her think of art: the paintings she had loved, the books she relished, music, gardens she either made or walked in: things wrought with such pure perfectness

it shamed her for the empty dream she’d hoarded—to be an artist herself,

a singer or a poet, she, whose genius was for nothing at all,

not even love.

When her husband returned, however,

he would find one sunlit grotto, planned so carefully that the annuals’ shapes made designs around perennial foundations while the meanings of the flowers (roses for passion, violets for fidelity, heliotrope for devotion) left him a message she could write no other way.

Once he had loved her: more than she deserved,

perhaps, being neither beautiful nor rich.

What she could offer was reliance on him, his person, thoughts and words, though fifty years had passed since he took her hand from her father’s, smiling at the altar. She remembered how her knees

trembled, how she felt like fainting

because three hundred faces were staring at her hair, shoes, veil; how he had whispered “Hi there,

Going my way?” And they laughed

out loud, despite the minister, the crowd.

13

He would be angry that she had not told him.

Perhaps their son would tell him afterward.

“Mother wanted to die. She was glad to.”

(T he gardener judged it right to tell her son: T hat she would stand the pain no longer, that she yearned, like Persephone, to descend into the perfumed gardens of the Dead.

Her son was of her making, her flower.)

With her husband, she’d spent one summer on Lake Como. Always she remembered the maid throwing the shutters open:

How the lake blazed upon her consciousness

like a Milton ode. So gorgeously

it shone, she longed to be buried in that water,

so the dust that was her hands and forehead

might sift down into the deepest shade,

becoming particles of light

within the shadows.

T hat would not be bad, she thought.

But better to be enclosed in earth, like the seeds she’d planted.

So the gardener lifted her trowel

14

And set in some Birds of Paradise.

Elegy on My Mother’s Madness My mother dreams in a darkness made of cyclamen leaves, petals threaded with forgetfulness like strange roads visited at midnight with a map that does not mark the way.

When I open her eyes I see peacocks preening, lonely in the stillness by a stream that fails to make reflections.

Her flesh is anxious for no grasp.

She smiles without meaning at some puppets, dancing in a doorway: faces of her oldest friends, tinier than ears of bees strung together on a necklace.

I ask her, “Mother, what do you think about?”

I say, “Mother, don’t you remember me?”

Her gaze is a bright carousel, deserted for the winter.

She says, “Yes. You are my sister June.”

Pleasantly she waves to me, drifting down lilac boughs: past century and seasons.

15

Portrait of Florence in Central Park School was several blocks from there

But every afternoon, at first with nursemaids Later on our own

with curfews, We met to ride the painted horsies, Climb the jungle gym, sail your brother’s boats, Or feed the soiled and anguished llama.

Afterwards, we ate ice cream.

You always ordered lemon-nut pistachio-mint triple-royal-almond-fudge.

I craved vanilla; and furthermore I always had it.

T hen, inevitably, as in a movie where the change of seasons Is expressed by trees within a narrow window Turning green, then flame-color, then falling from the bough that whitens, We were seventeen.

In the uniforms

we hated

From the private school

we loathed,

You made me Stand Under the Clock

At the Biltmore to Look for My Dream Man

(T hough I knew he would never come Since he lived only in novels). You wore

Lido Venice Pink Lip Glacé by Chanel

And absolutely forbidden three inch heels

While you quoted to me Anais Nin, Howard Fast,

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ayn Rand – to me, 16

Whose taste, even then, was for George Eliot.

Often, since the Park was our chosen place, When you returned from Newport in the fall, and I, from being lonely with my mother At the Cape, we met late on the dim lawn Behind the Metropolitan. T hen you’d say something My other friends found stupid but I thought

wonderful: such as, “Let’s lie down on the grass and wait for the dark

to bring out the stars. Let’s pretend

we’re Vincent Van Gogh.”

You lived poetry. I only tried to write it.

Finally, you thought your Prince had come.

We drank sour tea in crude white cups at the Zoo Pavilion (Because the Plaza, where we pretended to be

toasts over salmon sandwiches, Was not a serious enough place

to Make a Life Decision).

He was Irish, you said, sexy-sweet, A bartender but a Poet in Disguise.

He reminded you of Sean O’Casey,

your current passion, And though your parents hated him, You intended to elope that night at eight.

My Florence, I see your face framed in the mirror Over the hot table with the gelid turkey sandwiches.

I see your brilliant eyes, warm with love, 17

your tiny nervous elfin figure, Your black and burnished hair.

When he left you in Vancouver with five children, After years of debts and walk-ups, after you minded

the children of other girls he slept with, Or cooked for Canadian ladies who entertained, You wrote, “Meet me in Central Park,

I’m coming home.”

By then, the Park was dangerous at any season.

But I came. Near the Children’s Zoo, I waited,

On the same bench we did our homework on, T he bench where we giggled after buying (By ourselves) our prom gowns from Bonwit Teller.

Yours was an iridescent peach-lime rose called “Jeune Romance,” and mine, unmemorable.

Since you were always ninety pounds,

I was unprepared when you hove toward me

on thick legs in Birkenstocks

With everything about you gray:

your hair, your rayon house-dress,

your blunt, fat fingers.

Gray as if you had

eaten grease for thirty years.

T hen you greeted me. “Look, love, look up at the sun!

See how the air shines like perfume from paradise!

My beautiful friend, it is Poetry to see you.”

18

Walking to the Post Office one day this winter, I saw my mother –

dead, now, thirty years – walking along ahead. She was wearing her gingham apron, the one with apple decals on the pocket, the one she wore whenever she made pancakes at our summer house in Chatham, the white frame house flanked by dogwood trees, with a red barn and an old rowboat out back, gleaming in the moonlight. My mother

rarely cooked. She had been ill so often and so long, her hands had lost their memory (she said)

for cooking. Our Irish housekeeper did it for her.

Rosaleen McQueen: the letters of her name

made Gaelic music. And she herself, her brilliant hair glowing like a sunset while she pounded soda bread

or peppered corned beef, might have come from a song about homesickness for the Old Country:

I remember her, panting uphill after the mailman, begging Sure, he must have letters for her,

from Kieran Quinn in Cork, it might be, that flighty article full of foolishness and charm, who’d be needing a sharp woman to settle him, and not the priesthood, certainly. When Kieran came

to his senses, it’s back to Ireland she’d be flying.

Meanwhile, she was scrubbing carrots for our family, for us, descended from crass Englishmen and wicked French, in a Yankee house that was cold even in summer, where the only laughter was Fibber McGee’s on the radio.

I remember my mother reclining in the garden,

fragile, distant, a book of poems upon her lap unread, the leaves rustling, lifting, turning in an idle breeze.

For her, there was never a postman, No longed-for rapture, no time. Occasionally, she roused

herself and calling to mind her only child 19

who was seven, she would rise and, like a sleep-walker,

stumble into Rosie’s pantry to mix pancakes – children liked them, she’d heard – in the grave stillness of a

midnight hour.

When I saw my mother again this winter,

a thousand miles from Florida where we buried her, walking toward the post office in her apron,

her naked skeleton picked clean of flesh beneath, I called out, “Mother, turn around. Won’t you look at me?”

It was Eurydice’s question, the one she asked of the living But we always ask of the dead. And like all the dead,

My mother would not turn. What was she mailing, I wondered? Perhaps a postcard view of Chatham Light

for Rosie McQueen who left us, all smiles, to go back to Dublin when I was ten. Or was it a note

to my son, her grandchild, for whom just once, as in a dream, she made pancakes? Or was the thing

she carried ( her bone-body shining in air, spectral, vanishing even as I spoke ) a letter to me?

20

Mean Girls, or Reunion at the Girls’ Academy Now they are wearing green eye shadow and Cartier diamonds by the yard, No more stiff serge in nun-like gray to be assured that “No boy touches you!”

T he spiteful words, though, remain the same: “What became of your fat arms?”

“Do your parents still give you dinner dances?

Who did you think you were?”

A few of the elderly nuns attend the luncheon, loyal to the school for which they gave merely their lives. My French mistress, Mademoiselle Claire, embraces me: “Your fine accent, Chérie, made me believe you were a French girl, what a shame you are not!” Poor Rosemary Annette Quigley could not attend. She was dead.

Although she had beautiful hair, nobody liked her and she had never been kissed, which everyone knew.

21

Secret Love If it has a music, it is in the quietness of growth.

We bend our ears beyond the metaphor: roses rustling, branches arching, to hear stealth

instead, the windless, endless poem. Rows of iris: not a single one singing without secrecy.

What is lavish as the cherry tree blows bloom into our hair is its unwillingness to speak.

And so my love for you, this steady garden, quaint as ancient seasons; silent, since forbidden; shaded, for profound. And yours for me:

that patient song of stillness, unbidden

stamens in a line of lilies, the unsaid word

which in our dreams is marigold, and free.

22

Five Poems Inspired by Five Paintings 1.

Grand-mère Corot’s “Rocks in the Forest of Fontainebleau” Was for him, so prolific, another study Of light’s effects on masses, volumes.

One notes the nearly abstract intersections of trees, T he complication of rocks, the spirals Of leaves: it’s impersonal, unimpassioned, A methodology of forms. But a word in the title Of that painting caught me: Fontainebleau.

I saw the word’s shape Best, inscribed below the canvas. And you

Came back to me, Beloved form of all forms from my childhood, Your long clear fingers with their opal rings, Your thick white hair, brown eyes, Your crippled legs, Seated in an armchair by the window, Reading to me.

“Goldilocks,” it was, or “Sleeping Beauty,” T he accents of your French of Paris glittering Like jeweled daggers round the bread-soft names, Changing Olive Oyl and Popeye Into Nicolette and Aucassin in some château Beside a river: swords and roses, Harps and danger, beggar-girls and queens, Princesses that never slept, knights on palfreys, All, vivid in your syllables.

And everyone was French.

“Cendrillon,” of course, was French; But so were Donald Duck and Gulliver, 23

T he Bobbsey Twins and Honey Bunch, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, Dick Whittington of London and Robin Hood, All were French, T heir histories lisped upon the air With sweet altitudinous inflections, Like aureoles of light.

T hen our apartment in the New York dark, Its steel floors stretching, dingy, Up to heaven, Became a castle in an April sky, With crenellated turrets, moats, And lovely dungeons, Where everyone spoke French No matter what their language And came, like you, ma chere Grand-mère, From Paris (Yet played in Fontainebleau Among the shadows of the queens)

You, sleeping now My childhood’s sleep, As in that “Frenchman”, Wordsworth’s, lines, “Rolled round by rocks and stones and trees.”

24

2.

Looking at Edward Hopper’s “Cape Cod Evening, 1939” I notice the dog so plumed with pleasure noticing (himself ) the left side of the canvas that leads to life, freedom, with none of this flatly groomed melancholy: the woman with her gravid belly, grave face and arms, the man who’s full of need and beckons (too rich a word) calls the dog that listens to the sweet and waving bravery of the forest, all yellow, trembling, and so passionate, while the man with his stringy arms asks him to come to, come back, come close upon that musty house, each floor-board tacked with cosiness: and what’s in rooms beyond (I imagine): Pond’s cold cream, margarine, elastic bands, the radio, Spam, and soap erasers; all defended by the Gothic valences, stolid curtains, hollow panes toward which the grass moves like an army on the march or as the sea surges, near but nowhere in this picture, a picture stilled with pangless loneliness to show the power of human emptiness, this Cape Cod evening, 1939.

25

3.

Studying Agnolo Bronzino’s Young Lady with a Small Boy I Eyes distrustful, glacial, and the bitter lips, Slim hands, grim delicacy of clasp; Gown stiff above the breasts with hasp Of gems, turban like a crown, her hip Permitting the boy, a son, to gently hover, Already watchful, disillusioned, where Before Bronzino painted in his face, He’d drawn a letter from her lover: T hus this lady stands. Hides, rather, Behind a somnolent and cruel elegance T he sprezzatura of her dream’s a trance Of empty grace, her womanhood’s a tether On her manifest ambition, faith beguiled From her at Court, as from the child.

26

II In the still-life of the dress Is a wind like a woman sighing, A sibilance of brilliant folds:

Red, rouge, carmine, rose, Black, Like the marble corridors of the Medicis, And Green, T he life of lawn, oceaa, serpent.

(Yet this is the poetry of paint: T hat every calculation of the clothes Describes an emptiness of spirit, T he masked body, a masked heart.)

On the still-life of the dress Plays a light like a woman smiling, Some craftiness of cheerful contour:

Flesh-color, putty, puce, and White, Like the soft inside of a thigh,

Or Pink As the nipples of Bronzino’s Venus, Bronzino’s Venuses, who suffer the embraces Of their sons, giant boys, goldilocked, avid, And frolicsome with lust.

In the still-life of the tunic, Fluting and shy, the boy’s spirit winces, Kept aloof from satyrs, At the margin of his innocence, Destined for another ”Limbo” by Bronzino.

27

4.

Jacques Louis David Talks About His Portrait of Madame David “David . . . astre froid” —Baudelaire T he picture you see before you of my homely wife I did with as much care as other portraits.

I always got a kick out of painting women!

(Don’t know why!) I sketched the Widow Capet, Our last queen, on her way to “Surgeon Guillotine.”

She was thirty-six when, thank Reason, T he Republic had her stopped. Austrian whore!

To be frank, her fat tits hadn’t dropped So far as I pictured them; you could see T hey still were breasts. And she sat Like a statue on her offal-cart. I heard Later that she pissed, trying to climb in: Pride, squatting in a courtyard!

It was an odor of the grave she stank of.

I could smell it from my studio, watching At the window: the smell of blood. (Yes, She bled below, apparently, much ashamed.

When we Jacobins were through, she bled Up top. Heigh-ho!) I’d smelled her scent Of death on women’s skins before: Madame Chalgrin’s, the Marquise de Pastouret T hat was. I drew them both in prison During the Terror of T hermidor. (T hen, I was Safe myself.) T heir arms got me excited, Folded like flaccid flowers, fluttering Or plaintive, playing with some occupation.

If I hadn’t been a painter, no power Could have kept me from breaking their arms, Snapping them off like bread-sticks.

28

As it was, I merely painted them.

Hatred’s an aphrodisiac for painting.

Listless Madame Chalgrin (“Madame Chagrin,” I used to call her); the mute Marquise, Blouse open, feeding her brat – Already they were both rancid flesh: Soft flowers of putrid flesh, ripe For the palette knife, and for that other knife, Lady Guillotine. I carved them into lines, Pitiless designs. Death to all aristocrats!

With sacred joy, I voted for the King’s death; For the death of randy women, with elation.

(And all were sluts who screwed the nobles, Babies at their dugs notwithstanding.)

But there’s something disgusting in every woman.

Just look at my wife here. She’s plain, Plain as horse-dung. Twice, I left her.

All her father’s money – “setting me up In business,” he called it – wasn’t enough When that nose of hers kept coming into view.

I’m an artist, for Reason’s sake!

I divorced her. Still, do you think She’d had enough? She came to the prison Every day when I was under suspicion, T here she’d be, weeping – with our boys Clutching, each, a hand – her big nose, A highway for her tears. Charlotte, Her name is, like a pudding. Charlotte!

She’s always full of liquid: Tears, blood, the milk of human kindness.

Anyway, I took her and her money back; And here she is, still the pig she is, Dressed up to meet the Empress Josephine, Now that we must be courtiers again.

29

For me, I prefer the old days, T hose days of Robespierre’s purifying madness, When the knife etched designs on the necks Of sinners. But I am a painter, after all.

I’ll paint anyone with enough edge to her, Even Napoleon’s Josephine, blowsy hag, Even my pig-eyed Charlotte. Here she is.

30

5.

On Rembrandt Van Ryn, “Self-Portrait” Old man, I gave you my youth.

Warm summer days, and you repaid me.

I know your debts, fears, women. See: Despite centuries, the tutored or uncouth Stay, watchful, before your portrait.

T he guards watch. T he people wait.

It is yourself they wait for, what paint Cannot do, they expect. And I, my taint Of need so corruptive in my flesh, I, too, await your coming, coming Down from this dark framing, turning Toward me (as I dream it), solving All my anguish, you, your fresh Hopes gone, your clenched hands burning.

31