Chernobyl Wedding, 1986 by Naomi Guttman

Chernobyl Wedding, 1986

They’d always believed the world would end

in a bright blast, then blankness –

not malignant pinpricks, invisible,

not toxins salting eccentric winds.

A bright blast, then blankness

would deliver them of adulthood,

not toxins salting eccentric winds,

not a seep, a spill, a pox on all gardens.

Delivered to adulthood’s mansion,

hidden in ligatures of love

while seeps, spills, poxes amassed,

they tuned their ears to shuttle and string.

They his in ligatures of love:

veiled, Ari circled seven times her groom,

tuning her ear to shuttle and string.

Together they smashed the wineglass underfoot.

Veiled, Ari circled seven times her groom,

wrapping him in a shell of blessings.

They smashed the wineglass underfoot

to remember the temple that burned and fell.

Though they dwelt in a shell of blessings,

still sorrow reached its damp fingers –

a reminder of temples burning, falling,

low chairs, torn sleeves, unwashed hair.

Sorrow still reached its damp fingers,

and an arsenal of poisons prepared to lick them.

The low chair, torn sleeve, unwashed hair

waited at the top of the stairs.

Arsenals of poison prepare to lick them,

malignant pinpricks invisible.

At the top of the stairs it waits:

the end of belief in the world.

from The Banquet of Donny & Ari: scenes from the opera

Editor: Eileen Moeller

Selecting a single poem from this wonderful novella in verse, by Canadian poet Naomi Guttman, was no easy matter. There are so many rich pieces, and they run the gamut from narrative, to lyric, from free verse to form, all the way to prose poem. And as in any fictional work, they shift point of view. I chose this pantoum from the Prologue because it foreshadows the trajectory of a long marriage, that survives life’s difficult events, whether personal or worldwide, but not without a price.

We become fond of the Backuses and their two children. They are characters with substance: intelligent and artistic. Ari (like Ariadne) is a weaver, attuned to what’s happening to the earth, in love with its offerings, but worried about the way humans are harming it. She recycles, gardens, eats little meat, and plies her craft to communicate her concerns to others. Donny (like Dionysus) is a sensualist, he feasts, and he aims high as a musician, professor, and choir master. He is in the throes of staging the opera, Orfeo, and so immersed in the mythic he tells them as bedtime stories.

This couple are grounded in every day life, but are also archetypes of the feminine and masculine who disappoint one another, who embody the struggle to understand one another The family are forced to face the death of Ari’s mother, and the way grief can separate. They drift apart, have flirtations, get lost in their work, and come back together nevertheless. In the end, Ari sees her husband for who is, but still hopes for more. The poem “In Praise of Uxoriousness” reminds me of one of the Songs of Solomon, in its erotic longing, and its hope for his continued attentions.

It’s a wonderful book, delicious in its language, rich in imagery and emotion, that can be browsed through, as one would do with any book of poems. However, I recommend reading it cover to cover, which brings a deeper engagement with the characters, and reveals more of the warp and weft of human experience.

Naomi Guttman was born in Montreal, where she attended Concordia University. Her book Reasons for Winter won the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry and was short listed for The League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award.  She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been a resident at Yaddo and the Chateau de Lavigny. Wet Apples, White Blood, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, was co-winner of the Adirondack Center for Writers’ Best Book of Poems for 2007. Her novella-in-verse, The Banquet of Donny & Ari: Scenes from the Opera, was published by Brick Books in 2015. Guttman teaches English and creative writing at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

This week's editor is US poet, Eileen Moeller, who lives in New Jersey, near Philadelphia. Visit her Tuesday Poem on her blog and go to the sidebar for a host of other Tuesday Poems posted today.

Love by Eavan Boland

Dark falls on this mid-western town
where we once lived when myths collided.
Dusk has hidden the bridge in the river
which slides and deepens
to become the water
the hero crossed on his way to hell.

Not far from here is our old apartment.
We had a kitchen and an Amish table.
We had a view. And we discovered there
love had the feather and muscle of wings
and had come to live with us,
a brother of fire and air.
We had two infant children one of whom
was touched by death in this town
and spared: and when the hero
was hailed by his comrades in hell
their mouths opened and their voices failed and
there is no knowing what they would have asked
about a life they had shared and lost.

I am your wife.
It was years ago.
Our child was healed. We love each other still.
Across our day-to-day and ordinary distances
we speak plainly. We hear each other clearly.

And yet I want to return to you
on the bridge of the Iowa river as you were,
with snow on the shoulders of your coat
and a car passing with its headlights on:

I see you as a hero in a text —
the image blazing and the edges gilded —
and I long to cry out the epic question
my dear companion:
Will we ever live so intensely again?
Will love come to us again and be
so formidable at rest it offered us ascension
even to look at him?

But the words are shadows and you cannot hear me.
You walk away and I cannot follow

~~~~~

This poem is taken from Eavan Boland's collection, In a Time of Violence (1994). It's a widely anthologized poem and appears on the Leaving Certificate syllabus here in Ireland. Boland is a highly acclaimed and published poet and often writes on explicitly feminist themes. In 1980 she was a co-founder of Arlen Press, an Irish feminist Press. Her most recent collections Outside History (1990) and The Lost Land (1998) explore the place of women in the past, particularly a past of violence and loss.

I love this poem because of the way it effortlessly weaves myth and the quotidian to achieve a sort of equipoise between the personal, the historical and the philosophical. You will recognize the allusion to Book 6 of The Aeneid by Virgil, where Aeneas visits the underworld and meets the ghosts of his former companions, who are both pleased and frightened to see him. Their failure to properly communicate highlights Boland's motif of separation and loss, as well as the failure of language to fully recreate experience. The poem is addressed to Boland's husband and captures beautifully, I feel, that pining for a fleeting moment of emotional intensity, call it love, happiness, joy.

It reminds me also of an anecdote related by Anthony Cronin about Samuel Beckett: He was visited in Paris by some friends and they decided to take a stroll through Le Bois. It was a fine spring day and each one was trying to outdo the other in extolling the beauties of the flora, the weather, etc., until one finally blurted out, 'it's a great day to be alive', to which Beckett responded, 'I wouldn't go that far now.' The conversation then turned to remembrances and one asked Beckett whether he was ever happy; he replied, 'O yes, I remember it very well, it was after lunch on April 13th, 1961, when I was taking a constitutional not unlike this one and I was suddenly suffused with an unbearable joy.' All joking aside, I think Boland's poem meditates poignantly on such effervescent moments.

John Griffin is the editor for Tuesday Poem this week. He lives and works in Ireland.

Take time to visit the other Tuesday Poets in the live blog roll in the sidebar.