On Peter Cooley’s The One Certain Thing

Gerald Snare

On Peter Cooley’s The One Certain Thing

When news of the death of Peter Cooley’s wife had reached me, his twelfth collection of poems, The One Certain Thing, had already appeared. The volume is surprising, for rather than the usual, often miscellaneous, collection of poems published earlier, this is a coherent and progressive series about one of the signal events of the poet’s life. At first, the reader cannot miss hearing the “lyric cry” in poems meant obviously as laments, where the speaker/lamenter appears without name, but surely in propria persona. There’s little escaping the force of Peter Cooley’s own appearance here.

An authentic lyric cry or expostulation cannot be just a simple, recorded ejaculation of grief-stricken emotion. The speaker here has a character throughout, and that character is a poet, and his craft is often the center of his poems. Moreover, the poet is perhaps known by his readers, or at least some of them. The person speaking the elegy appears; the object of elegiac lament appears as well; the mode is direct address. The overall effect of the volume is the sense of presentness and intimacy, but that effect is to me sometimes unsettling, as if one were to stumble onto an encounter not meant to be seen or heard. With this, comes a mild sense of embarrassment. Here, for example, is a passage from “The First Day of Advent” (p.36):

Our Advent calendar… you sewed twenty-five years back…. Little pockets number days until Christ’s birth, each holding a hook. I have to stop crying. I’ll loop a star on every one as the days come on. I have to stop crying. That day together we hung this calendar where I will fix it soon

by the front window. Until Christ’s birth. You sewed these pieces, you complained. “Why do it?” I shot back. I have to stop crying. We started quarreling after that. The intimacies discomfort us hearers.

At the center of a good number of these poems you wiIl find a continuing trope, call it presence and absence, especially evident in the six “Visitation” poems. The term Peter Cooley uses, “visitation,” seems to me surely meant in a sacramental sense. It cannot refer to something banal like a Thanksgiving visit from an Aunt Maud, but to the special and singular event of THE Visitation, when The pregnant Virgin visits her cousin Elizabeth, likewise pregnant, with John the Baptist, a category of coming-together of especial significance. And so we’ll take the term here, though these are ghostly visitations, a beloved shade appearing, as if, after the dread event, Euridyce comes to speak with Orpheus from Hades. Not so much of an odd inference since the singer of these poems is likewise a poet. The poems have an archetypal pedigree and echo, but sounded in an intentionally idiomatic diction and syntax.

I think the most arresting of these is “This Living Hand….” There appear here two significant objects, two necklaces intertwined that the poet tries to disentangle when the two lives that wore them cannot be disentangled. And that relatively mild metaphor is introduced by another, almost shocking image, of the poet snatching the necklace around about his wife’s neck just before she is taken to the crematorium. In another of these poems, “Visitation: The Eighth Sacrament,” the trope becomes specifically Anglo-Catholic, and articulates an exchange of persons: “… The unseen seen,/ leading me, winded back to our house./ You’re there, you’re there, you are this sacrament/ only the grieving know, together with the grieved.” And so the “unseen,” the shade, “seen” by the poet; “you’re there, you’re here,” as in a sacramental presence and, finally, “the grieving,” the poet, and “the grieved,” the shade: the repetitions of the

same roots almost elide subject and object.

The progress of the poems in the time sequence seems linear, often marked by the days or weeks since the time of the death that is the central subject of the collection. But there is as well a second temporal pattern evident, a liturgical one, in the poems named after the seven canonical hours or the Daily Offices. So thus the frame for the ruminations that constitute the subjects of each of them. These Hours appear at first glance randomly scattered through the five sections of the volume, appearing in this sequence: Compline, Vespers, Prime, Matins, None, “First Hour” (which I take to be Lauds). This would seem to be shy of the traditional number in Benedict’s scheme, which run like this: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline. Now I take it as worth our attention that four of these Hours cluster in the final fifth section, as if the sacramental thrust of the poems were being intensified. Just before “None” (named here “The Ninth Hour,”—i.e. 3 o’clock) there appears the splendid “Visitation: The Eighth Sacrament.” The “eighth” sacrament bleeds into the “ninth” Hour that follows. But this ninth Hour is curiously a morning poem and its imagistic heart clearly is the Eucharist. So outside the synesthesia I noted earlier, opposites conjoin in the imagery of presence even in a kind of absence, as in the Body and the Blood: “you’re here, you’re there, you are the sacrament/only the grieving know, together with the grieved.” Then comes this tour de force, the union of the sacrament with the writing of the poem:

Which one of us is writing this? Me? You? Why, both, of course, inspired by the light When dawn throws down its crowns, the blinding luminous, Shaping the fractured world into unbrokenness

This constitutes a kind of poetic sacrament where the divine/departed/ muse inspires with the blinding “light” of dawn, an utterance that in its power, like the holy communion itself is supposed to, shapes into unity

and wholeness a broken world.

We will observe, furthermore, that the sequence of Hours seems intentionally reversed from the usual progress through the day. Rather than beginning at Lauds and ending with Compline, the collection begins with Compline (the office immediately before retiring), for “Compline: a Canonical hour” is the last poem in Section One (p. 20), and ends with “The First Hour” ( the office usually said at daybreak) (p.72). Does the death bring night and the grief and the darkness that begins the volume? And does the progress through the Hours finally end in the coming of light and a promise of union at its conclusion? The “First Canonical Hour, Last Interrogation” is, after all, the penultimate poem in the whole collection. And that “First” signals a “Last,” surely a coda.

At any reading, the sequence prepares us fully for the last poem, “The One Certain Thing,” the title of it all.

A day will come I’ll watch you reading this. I’ll look up from these words I’m writing now— This line I’m standing on. I’ll be right here, alive again. I’ll breathe on you this breath. Touch this word now, that one. Warm, isn’t it?

I will return to this poem for extended treatment a little later.

When we readers arrive at Section Three, it’s hardly inadvertent that its first poems are “Mythos: A Visitation” and “The First Day of Advent,” announcements for certain significant changes about to come. And with these changes come as well a freeing-up of the syntax from the usual prescriptions, some bending of grammatical rules, certain leaps in connotations and semantic connections and, in short, a greater freedom in form and expression, even a kind of strangeness. And then, surprisingly, comes a return to the orderly bass-note of the pentameter in the poems that end the section. Days are passing in “Etude: Three-Part Variation on Loneliness” (p. 42), a year and a half have gone by in “Epidermal”

(p.43), memories accumulate, continuing into Four, and objects accrue significance.

One of the final poems (in Section Five), is “Just One of the Afterdeaths,” with a different, almost prophetic poetic voice, though couched in a modernist idiomatic diction, side-by-side with modernist elaborations, superb sonics, and the firmness of the accentual scheme.

All right, I’m putting in the call. Now, here the corners of the hours, call-and-response poured through the streets’ fissures when I look down, starting my prayers on their morning walk.

I think we can be assured there is a pun on “mourning” here; in “Monkeys,” a poem we’ll come back to shortly, we have “On the morning dresser, the mourning/dresser….” The whole pattern of the year and the Hours, beginning with “when they handed me her ashes” to the “eternal moment where we live,” (lines two and three), the poet has been narrating spring and winter and the return of spring.

From our false spring retuned to winter and snap, And then turned back to spring and blossoming. Whatever vow I made yesterday’s gods Won’t get me through this morning’s lacerations… There’s honey in the wind, my first god sings, A god hidden… until we call them in our desperations. All right, I’m putting in that call.

… Starting my prayers on their morning walk.

So this “afterdeath” begins in a morning walk, but ends in a spiritual aubade.

There is a poem in Section Three that will help me focus, finally, on what I take to be a special significance of the volume, something quite beyond the instances of griefs remembered and pondered. “The Monkeys, the Monkeys: An Anniversary Poem” (p. 39) contains what amounts to a paradigm of response to loss expressed by an insistent focus on poetry at large. The poem begins with all the accoutrements and satisfactions of formal order, an order that will almost immediately be abandoned.

Our days come so they may go away. We have so many-few, and who can stop the count? This sounds like the beginning of a villanelle! (p.39)

Now comes the rejection of that order.

No, no, I want pentameter to stop! There, I’ve stanched it.

The word is violent, as in stopping a bleeding wound. From this point, the two-line versicles run on without “pentameter” until the conclusion, just after the shocking and brutal image of the Beloved dead on the living-room sofa, “your tongue hung across your lower lip.” In the last three lines we come upon a restoration of formal order, an arresting and perhaps mysterious stasis.

I knew before I touch your cold forehead— Rhyme lets me say it. And pentameter. I knew you were dead.

Cooley’s terms “rhyme” and “pentameter,” here and elsewhere, can be both literal but are more likely metaphoric of something like “poetic construction.” Here the odd freedom of formal order, two pentameter followed by a five-syllable line, permits a declarative, even definitive,

conclusion in the full realization of rhymed lines. The progress from the almost charming, domestic image of “two little monkeys” bought in “the eponymous coffee shop” to the stark and very real presence of a dead body has been made possible by insisting on the manipulations of the poetic art that finally enables the poet to talk directly: “Rhyme lets me say it.” This will come to be an art that heals.

It may seem something of a leap now to bring my own reader to consider an issue these lines open on to. My guide here will be Seamus Heaney, especially his reading of some of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop in his The Redress of Poetry , the Oxford Lectures of 1995. Heaney’s preoccupation in these splendid addresses will bear directly upon what Peter Cooley has written in his collection, and especially on the poem that concludes the volume.

In his next-to-last address, “Counting to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop” (dated 1992), he takes up as his own conclusion her poem, a villanelle, “One Art,” from her last volume, Geography III (1976). Here is her concluding stanza that most intrigues him.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident The art of losing’s not too hard to master Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The villanelle will articulate almost obsessively “the art of losing,” “master,” “disaster.” By losing she obviously means the death of a loved one. To Heaney, this poem “is wonderful lyric writing; it is impossible to separate the poem’s reality as a made thing from its effect as a personal cry.” He will go on in his analysis to observe that “the shocking traumatic reality of what happened [which he will insist was in fact a disaster] almost overbrims the containing form. The verb ‘master’ places itself in the scales opposite its twin noun ‘disaster’, and holds the balance. And the secret of the balance is given in the parenthesis ‘(Write it!)’.” There

is a compulsion to render the reality of a death with its attendant cries into an order that lets us deal with it.

And thus in Heaney’s reading, “’One Art’ tells us…with an acute pang of intimacy, that the act of writing is an act of survival….” (185). I want to stress that Heaney’s huge subject, the redress of poetry, is precisely defined throughout by poetry’s power to re-establish something that has been lost, which is to say, that desired balance in a mind now, alas, burdened and tilted by loss. That power comes to the poet, in short, by following the injunction, “Write it!” This is what I find especially enacted in “The Monkeys, the Monkeys,” as I explained above, and I believe it is most definitively articulated in the formal order of the final poem, “The One Certain Thing.” Earlier, the prospect of restoration is palpable as well in “The Eighth Sacrament” (p.67). There are canonically seven sacraments, of course. Sacrament signifies sacred presence and the power of that presence to make sacred. The Beloved constitutes the eighth: “you are this sacrament,” and thus sacramentally present to the poet, even now as simultaneous author of the poem: “which one of us is writing this? Me? You?/ Why, both, of course.” Both sacramental poets are ‘… inspired by the light/…the luminous, shaping the fractured world into unbrokenness.” Both have become creators, shaping by their inspired art a world as yet to be whole, coherent, and unbroken. They now write the world into order by poetry, as both remain in the poetry they write.

Now if there is to be a resolution of these liturgical years of litany, we will see it in the cool control of this last poem. For it is here that Peter Cooley does indeed “Write it,” not in the intricacies of a villanelle (a form he outright scorned in “Monkeys”), but in having the figure of the Beloved come to inhabit the art of the poet. The usual trick of the elegiac trade—a metamorphosis—has no place here. There is no distant voice to declare

Now Lycidas the shepherds weep no more, Hence forth thou art the Genius of the shore.

The Beloved in all her immediacy becomes present in the very composition of her immortality.

A day will come I’ll watch you reading this. …I’ll breathe on you this breath. Touch this word now, that one. Watching you read, Eternity’s with us.

If there is to be a lyric cry of grief expressed in the whole sequence, as there has been, there will be as well an echo, the elaboration in the lyric that sounds it. And that at the end answers the profound disturbances in the poet who wrote it and in us who watched him cry. Heaney: “[Elizabeth Bishop] does continually manage to advance poetry beyond the point where it has been helping us to enjoy life to that even more profoundly verifying point where it helps us also to endure it. (185)