Starting with a Bone by Anita Barrows
For my Rilke-buff, poetry goddess and beloved friend, Alison ... all of you really ...
Louie~~
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it
The country music station plays soft
While my conscience explodes
***
Anita Barrows ... poet and psychologist, and translator of Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
for Anne
1
Sometimes, on winter afternoons,
somebody's mother would make a soup
starting with a bone, a shankbone
the butcher had put aside.
The whole house would fill with the smell
of onions, celery, potatoes
releasing their crispness, offering
what earth had offered them
to the broth swirling around the bone
that sat at the bottom of the pot.
All the flavors that had come into being
in different ways, mixing with what
the bone, too, gave forth, bone
of this animal who had lived its life
in a field, a pasture
somewhere we never imagined, we
who waited to be fed.
2
We watched a film about a boy
who would have done anything to survive,
& did: became a traitor, invoked murder
on the heads of his own people.
Who can judge him? He was a boy,
He wanted to live. In the end
he lived, was reunited
with his brother, fathered sons
of his own. The innocence or pragmatism
in his face gave way to sadness.
He sang a song: How good it is
to be sitting together
with friends.
Always I have thought
that, given such circumstances, I would have gone
down with my hand in some
stranger's hand, hoping only
to remember some song of grief
or praise to sing in the face
of terror. But who knows?
The film asks if there is something
to choose that is more
than survival. The film asks whether survival,
in the end, is the only way
to transform desire into wisdom,
wisdom into sorrow.
3
What is hard is transmuted
to softness & we say
it is heat that performs
this mystery, makes space
expand among molecules, invisible
widen around invisible. What is locked in
begins to emerge. What can't be eaten
turns to something
you could eat.
What is dormant
sprouts green, knows at last
what it has been
created for, gropes its way
into daylight.
4
.... and how sometimes, eating this soup,
you would find in your mouth the bone
or a piece of it, curiously
tender
How you would crush it between your teeth
& find it not even as resistant
as raw apple or a crust of bread
How it would come apart, then,
in your mouth, & how you would taste
the flavor of all it had taken in, the flavor
of everything that was
this soup:
vegetable, animal, salt
5
This soup is for the sick
This soup is for those who mourn others who have died
This soup is for those who have not yet learned how to mourn
This soup is for those who are cold
This soup is for those who stand in line for hours, waiting for water
This soup is for those who have no water
This soup is for those who are too weak to walk, & have fallen by the way
This soup is for those who sit, holding the heads of those who have fallen
This soup is for the child who has just started to name what is in it, who says
beans, peas
This soup is for the child who has forgotten the name she was given
This soup is for the child who has searched every tent, looking for his father
This soup is for the cow whose calf was stillborn, the cow who came to the edge
of the field so the children could put their hands on her broad head
This soup is for those who planted these carrots, for those who planted these
onions
This soup is for the rain, this soup is for the soil
This soup is for the animal whose bone it was made from
This soup is for the animal whose bone it was made from
6
If you have too structured an idea of your life......
If you are in anguish over what you have lost.....
The man in prisoner's clothing
hears a familiar voice, looks over
at the crowd of newly captured prisoners, finds
his brother, separated from him
years before
& Lara, long after the weeks
in the frozen rooms, where Zhivago
wrote -- daily -- poems of their love --
sees him from the window
of a bus
passing through the crowded city
moments before his death
7
Take my hand, look for me
How, across widening space,
will we know one another
Will you eat this soup?
This earth is a body of broken bones
We belong
to nothing
except as we are transformed
by it, except as it is transformed
into ourselves
***
Anita Barrows, May's Poet for Peace, a clinical psychologist with a private practice specializing in autistic children, after years of teaching and translating from German, French and Italian, feels obliged in her poems, even though her materials be the most commonplace, "to probe that territory for which form and discipline form the vehicle but that contains something else, transcendent." Her two occupations happily collaborate in her poems. And her two daughters and granddaughter heighten her sense of the immediate, the political, even as her practice in Theravadan Buddhism has helped to center her life and work.
She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Quarterly Review of Literature award, a Riverstone Press award, a runner-up for a PEN Translation Award for Rilke's Book of Hours with Joanna Macy, and many others. She lives and works in Berkeley.
and many more:
http://www.poetrymagazine.com/archives/2002/May2002/barrows.htm
© All Copyright, Anita Barrows.
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