What Can I Write Him, Poor As I Am?

So already, about two weeks ago, I began writing a poem--or trying to write a poem--about Donald Burroughs, my very good friend who died almost two months ago. So far, no poem.

The other day, when I was walking near the Civil War cemetery* in Merrymount Park, I came upon a memorial for a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who died in August. It hadn't been there a few days earlier. Clearly one or more people who love and miss Liana Dararaksmey had gathered there to remember and represent who she was, to pray that her soul was in the keeping of Jesus and Mary, and to convey that she is, and will always be, in their hearts.

I hoped that both creating this installation and having a ceremony in connection with it had consoled them. But I had no way of knowing whether they had. I was glad, though, that I had happened on the memorial because something had knocked one of the candles out of place, and I was able to put things right.

In contrast to Liana's friends' memorial, my poem and the consolation it might offer seemed to be getting further out of reach. Maybe it was because of the John Berryman quotation** one of the women in my poetry-writing group had shared recently. According to Berryman, "You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest."  

Frankly, I haven't been worrying that I'd write a poem that merely echoed my usual poetic efforts. If anything, I've been feeling that the poem that Donald deserves exceeds my reach as a writer, in terms of both craft and conception. If anything, I've wanted to do just what Berryman says: to write that poem that I can't write and want to achieve. What consolation and inspiration could a poem that didn't sufficiently honor Donald offer to me or anyone else?

 

My combination of need and aspiration has been paralyzing.  How to capture Donald's simultaneous majestic public presence and his rich, private interiority? How to convey his ability to respond so fully to the individual person in the moment of interacting with them*** while paying attention to the needs, reactions, and perspectives of the surrounding others? How to capture his simultaneous groundedness in both the quotidian and the transcendent? Donald could make folding a sweater into sacred act! His many facets were ever shining light--sometimes direct, sometimes slant--into the world.

 

As usual, I found antecedents for this kind of challenge in the poems of others. I heard Christina Rossetti's question in the final stanza of "In the Bleak Midwinter": "What can I give Him, poor as I am?--though I didn't confuse Donald with the infant Jesus. And I heard Whitman's questions in two of the middle sections of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Speaking of Abraham Lincoln, for whom he grieves deeply, Whitman asks,

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?

And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?

And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love? (Section 10)

 

O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?

And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,

To adorn the burial-house of him I love? (Section 11)

I could imagine those mourning for Liana wrestling with similar questions as they determined what photos and artifacts to arrange in the clearing to honor her.

 

Last week over dinner under the heat lamps of Little Donkey, I explained to my friend Melissa Rivard that I was trying--and failing--to write a poem about Donald. She had two questions: was it too soon for me to be writing about him, and was it possible that I would need to write more than one poem about him? She wondered if I might need a walk-in closet rather than a single poem to hold everything I wanted to say about Donald.

 

Melissa's walk-in closet idea really resonated with me because I'd been thinking that my yet-to-exist poem might rely heavily on clothing imagery--Donald always looked so beautiful, so easily, unconsciously fashionable. I'd already spent some time thinking and doing research about the words "dress" and "fashion." We dress ourselves, but we also dress wounds; in some situations, we dress up; and in others, we dress down or are dressed down by others. We wear fashion on our backs, but we fashion things with our hands, often guided by our minds and our imaginations.

 

I'd even gone so far, on the morning of the memorable nor'easter we had a couple of weeks back, to begin writing a poem in terza rima about Donald's capacity to remain resplendent even when battered by the elements: 

On such a day of penetrating rain  

And wind that willed to drive us from the path,  

In haste we’d trundle bundled from the train, 

 

Then cross the college yard, a flooded strath, 

Tread gingerly on sodden copper leaves, 

Avoiding chill immersion in their bath. 

 

Arrived, when we slid arms from rain-soaked sleeves, 

I looked to have survived a damp ordeal. 

But no one seeing you would such conceive—

You dripped sartorial splendor crown to heel.

Then I stopped. This wasn't it. Yes, it was regal and complex; but it wasn't bold and free. I felt like I was dressing Donald in borrowed robes. (Many of Donald's former students would catch that literary reference.)

 

What I really want to do is to dress Donald in a coat of many colors. Not Joseph's coat, though both he and Donald were, in like and unlike ways, favored sons. But Donald's unique coat of many colors.

 

Some parts of Donald's coat would necessarily be as bright and variegated as the Rosie Lee Tompkins quilt**** adjacent to this paragraph; other parts would be mutely hued. The coat would also need to be richly textured and pleasing, even intriguing, to the touch it compelled. And it would need to flow, maybe even trail, with subtle, supple, certain authority.

 

I like what I'm thinking, but that doesn't mean I feel ready to fashion Donald's magnificent coat right now. What I am doing now is spending time in that walk-in closet sifting through the soft, beautiful, dramatic stuff of that future coat--sometimes arranging and rearranging it, sometimes even basting pieces of it together to see how they might convey Donald's story and spirit at some future point. It's something, even if it's not a coat or a poem.

 

* The National Sailors Home Cemetery sits at the end of one of the wooded points of land   around which Black's Creek winds in Merrymount Park in Quincy, MA.

** Scott Ketcham did the drawing behind the John Berryman quotation: scottketcham.com

*** The inclusive use of "them" as a singular pronoun.

**** Photo accompanying Mendel, Emily S. Review of At BAMPFA: A dazzling retrospective of celebrated quilt maker Rosie Lee Tompkins, Review of Art Exhibit Berkeleyside, https://www.berkeleyside.org/2020/02/24/at-bampfa-a-dazzling-retrospective-of-celebrated-quilt-maker-rosie-lee-tompkins Accessed 8 Nov. 2021.