Looking into Poems

Poetry Column for Chips, Luther College Student Newspaper

Luther College, Decorah, Iowa

By Carol Gilbertson, Dennis M. Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities, 2002-04

October 31, 2002--"'All Hallows Evening' Honors Dead"

Joyce Sutphen, "Seeing Off the Dead" (Coming Back to the Body, Holy Cow! Press, 2000)

Billy Collins, "The Dead" (Questions About Angels, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999)

Marie Howe, "What the Living Do" (What the Living Do, W. W. Norton, 1998).

Sample Section:

. . . So my Halloween poems this week are about commemorating the dead, or perhaps about wondering what they do. Poet Joyce Sutphen, who teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College (and is one of my daughter's teachers), begins her poem "Seeing off the Dead" (Coming Back to the Body, Holy Cow! Press, 2000) with these straight-talking lines:

We are all dying to know what is going
to happen when we're dead. Even if we pretend
we're not, we are.

We all grow older, her speaker says bluntly: "The body seems bent / On decline," and "The brain gradually loses / interest . . . ."

Sutphen's speaker goes on to say that we've all seen "the truly ancient ones"--the very old who are ready to die. They are metaphorically "Waiting in their chairs at the last train stop," while the conductor nods to them, but they are not at all sad. In fact, they look back at us almost in benediction as they "salute us with their lucky tickets." The poem concludes wistfully:

They look so happy to be on their way;
we almost grow younger just watching them.

In "The Dead" (Questions about Angels, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), poet Billy Collins explores a similar motif, but his speaker imagines what those already dead are doing. As in Sutphen's poem where the dying board a train, Collins uses a travel metaphor:

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

Collins' speaker continues this engaging image, describing these rowing dead looking down on "the tops of our heads" as we go about our daily lives. He too suggests that they want to bless us, to hover protectively. "When we lie down in a field or on a couch" on a lazy afternoon, he says, they make metaphorical eye contact but also commune with us spiritually. He ends the poem with this tender revelation:

they think we are looking back at them
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

The poet Marie Howe focuses not on what the dead do, but, as her book's title suggests, on What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998). This powerful poetry collection moves the reader through Howe's experience of several deaths, including her friend Jane's death from breast cancer and her brother John's death in his 20s. Arising out of her grieving numbness, her title poem ponders how we go on after our loved ones die. She addresses her dead brother "Johnny," telling him how messed up her life is: "the kitchen sink has been clogged for days," the "Drano won't work," and the "crusty dishes have piled up." "This is the everyday we spoke of," she says, and recalls how, while doing the most ordinary things--driving, dropping a bag of groceries on the street, spilling coffee as she walks, "buying a hairbrush," "slamming the car door"--she keeps thinking to herself: "This is what the living do."

The living have a "yearning" for things to happen, a hope in the future--for the season's change, for a letter or a call, for an embrace: "we want more and more and then more of it." But the dead no longer yearn. Howe concludes with the realization that the living must go on yearning. But their living in the body in the midst of the world's mundane details is itself a way of remembering, of yearning for their dead ones. Howe's powerful final lines suggest that in their daily lives, the living look up toward their dead ones and, in a way, bless them, just as Collins' rowing dead looked lovingly down on the living:

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living, I remember you.

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