~JUDITH MONTGOMERY~
DIANE
LOCKWARD: WHAT FEEDS US
Lockward’s words, whether
spicy radishes or bocconi dolci
on the lips, reveal timeless
themes and obsessions:
the punitive
father, the breakdown of a mother, the waiting
of the womb to fill, the
accidents that may or do befall our children.
The joyous celebration
of food, drink, love; the struggle
against the feared; the
bittersweet
meditations
on what is lost; the
metamorphosis of fire and passion.
Every taste the tongue seeks and
savors — salt, sour, bitter, sweet — even umami, the fifth taste,
itself the savory — is summoned forth for us in Diane Lockward’s rich
second book of poems, What Feeds Us
(Wind Publications, 2006). Mistress of diction, she relishes each
word, and so these poems ravish ear and eye, heart and mind. The
book’s epigraph is a line by the famed gastronome M.F.K. Fisher:
“. . . there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more
insistent hungers.” We are prepared for passion. Passions.
And what passions does Lockward explore? Not
merely the familiar hungers of tongue and belly, but also hungers for
the fiery lover’s touch; for courage before the sting of “King Bee”;
for forgiveness for her own seldom-wielded sting; for solace, and for
healing. Against her
meditative sense of loss, she balances the
bristle of irony and bad-girl delight in the wicked. She seduces
us with love and linguini, with split vanilla bean and sun-glorious
blooms that testify to the world’s abundance. “O taste and see”:
the Psalmist’s call rings from these pages as they celebrate pang and
pleasure, the butter on our fingers, the blood that feeds the body.
Because language infuses the book, I begin with an
antipasto of delight: the artichoke’s “small filet of delectable
heart” (“The First Artichoke”); the scorned tomato that “languish[es]”
between “stiff carrot and atrocious / onion” (“The Tomato Envies the
Peach”); the linguini, which “knew of the kisses, the smooches, / the molti baci” (“Linguini”), the slant
rhymes of her ghazal: “test on love / . . .chest. On love / . .
.mess of love / . . . ” that culminates in the wry “Diane, once again, you’ve received an F
in love” (“Love Test: A Ghazal”). She plays with
cliché in “Heart on the Unemployment Line,” making fresh a
fistful of old sayings: “It’s a good heart , / in the midst of the
matter, / not dangling on anyone’s sleeve ./ Previously left in San
Francisco. . . / Never taken a bullet though something like a
knife moved through it. . . .”
Even dueling with bee-fear, her language
soars: “Fat-assed insect! Perverse pedagogue!” she curses him in
assonance and alliteration. And in the poem “Fear” (“. . .
creaks / in dark stairwells, a rock stuck in your cheek, / I’m the bone
that won’t heal . . . ”), sound echoes ominously in repeated k’s that
creak through the line, the mourning o’s of “bone” and “won’t.”
As balance: “The Bee Charmer,” where a lover cajoles her in a current
of s’s and l’s: “He kissed my palm, sucked // out the poison, and
brewed me a cup / of jasmine tea, stirred with a dollop / of honey. . .
. // . . . rehearsed the necessity of bees, / then kissed me
until I surrendered— // . . . . For hours, he hovered / over me.
I felt the flutter of wings, / heard a buzz at my ear. I awoke /
in noontime sunlight, my body / covered with the dusty bloom of
pollen.”
Lockward’s words, whether spicy radishes or bocconi dolci on the lips, reveal
timeless themes and obsessions: the punitive father, the breakdown of a
mother, the waiting of the womb to fill, the accidents that may or do
befall our children. The joyous celebration of food, drink, love;
the struggle against the feared; the bittersweet meditations on what is
lost; the metamorphosis of fire and passion.
Many fine poems to choose among: I focus here on a
few that serve as touchstones. First, the seven-section title
poem that opens the book: “What Feeds Us” interweaves a poet’s
writing retreat, the dream story of love between two high-school
students, a celebration of forbidden foods, and two bitter incidents in
which her father serves as unjust punisher, withholder of food and
approval, before the poem ends with an invitation that echoes the
focuses of her first book (Eve’s Red
Dress, Wind Publications, 2003). Let us begin.
[I] On
retreat, the narrator brings what she “really” needs: an
abstemious two books, her laptop, “clean white” paper, a radio “in case
I get lonely,” “The Hungry Mind Review,”
“just enough clothes.” There is an economy of need and appetite
here. But she also brings “three almond croissants, / one of
which I have already eaten.” Four hungers already named: of the
body for food, the tongue for taste, the mind for stimulation.
The spirit for comfort.
[II and V]
A “white chocolate chip / macadamia nut cookie” jumps us to an
unrequited high-school love by her friend Joe, a classic misfit, for
the “luscious” Darlene who ignores him. He dreams she would hold
out “her cookie like a valentine.” He would “take that cookie,
and Darlene’s lips / would be all over it.” The two return in
section V, where the dream Darlene “looks at Joe / the way Bergman
looked at Bogart in Casablanca,”
and brings the cookie, “as if making an offering to a god.”
He accepts, and is transformed by love — love summed up in
sweets.
[III and IV]
Between these dreamy sections, Lockward introduces two radically
different subjects: first, another dream world where forbidden
foods — cheeseburgers, French fries, “just as much salt / as you
wanted” — are invoked as the perfect and guilt-free indulgence of
desire without rebuke. “Imagine this” she begins, and chants
“wanted . . .wanted. . . wanted,” but we know that this world, where
catsup comes out “with one quick tap” is not the world we live in.
In section IV, Lockward lures us in with a first
line end-cut for impact: “Saturday my father drives us to his
garden . . . “ she says, and we imagine The Garden, a place of
fruit and innocence. But it is not:
Saturday my father drives us to
his garden
out in the country because my
brother and I
have been bad. . . .
Here, the gladiolus rises in spikes, “row after row,” like soldiers
ranked for war. The children are cast out, sentenced to clear
“the rusty cans by the barn. / They reek of putrid water. / When we
move them, bees and wasps fly out.” Their punishment: to deal
with decay and fear. But “If we cry, we’ll be punished.”
Voiceless, they work in double jeopardy.
[VI]
Punishment is offset in Section V by Joe’s fulfilled dream of proffered
love. But now the father-punisher returns as the cheater who
assigns her name to flowers he has raised, and enters them to win a
blue ribbon in the “junior” competition. But the ruse is
transparent: “Her father grew
these gladiolus. / Who are they kidding” a bystander spits
out. She cries to her father, trying to find “the right words /
for shame.” His response is swift:
My father puts me in
the car, leaves me there all day.
On the way home, he won’t stop
for food,
though I haven’t eaten for hours.
He says crybabies don’t
eat.
No food, no companionship, no love. This is a tarnished garden,
an expelled Eve.
Section VII:
Lockward returns us, nonetheless, to the original garden, Eden, and to
the writer’s solitary journey onto the page: “In my story,” she
says
. . . Eve walked out of the
Garden,
unencumbered by Adam
and carrying only the apple.
She didn’t know where she was
going,
but knew she’d need something to
eat.
The poet — Everywoman — sets off alone to realize
what she wants, armed only with an apple and determination. We
enter the book.
***
Some say insomnia is “the poet’s disease” — that buzz of words and
images that banishes sleep. “Insomniac” begins with a
characteristic Lockward line break:
Because I could not sleep, I
counted
injustices. . . .
Not wooly sheep. Injustices. Framing the list is a
childhood incident: her brother breaks “bottles on concrete” and tells
her to walk “across glass, barefoot and bloodless, / like the Indian
holy man we’d seen in a film.” That image unresolved, she moves
to “1958, / Fourth of July, Father forcing me into bed / long before
dark — I had rolled down / the hill of his lawn.” Locked away,
she hears “explosions like dynamite, explosions like bombs.” Then
to the summer her mother leaves her alone with the father: the bathroom
door’s lock is broken, she goes without bathing for 60 days and nights,
“skin grown thick as a lizard’s with grime.” She is sent to
“sleepaway” camp that he says “would fix a girl like me”: this child is
cast as flawed.
But her insomnia is driven as well by her own guilty
participation in injustice:
I could not sleep because sin
entered the scene,
the evidence I planted against my
brother—
hot water bottle scrawled with
his name in black ink—
and when he denied the crime,
the sound of my father’s hand
pounding on skin,
the sound of my brother breaking.
No one is wholly innocent in this family: “sin” slowly leaks to every
member. Even when the poem returns us to the sidewalk’s broken
glass, where the father runs to scoop up the bleeding girl, his
apparent rescue is cast in telling Biblical terms:
. . . my father running toward
me, always in slow motion,
always carrying me home, how he
laid me
on the kitchen table as if I were
Abraham’s child,
how he sponged me in cool water,
and tweezed
shards of glass from my bloody
feet.
In the old story, Abraham’s child is not saved by Abraham, but bound
and readied for the sacrificial knife: it is not he who withholds his
hand, but God. This father’s still armed.
The sting of aggression links father and “King Bee”
throughout: the poet circles to cope repeatedly with fear, defiance,
and combat. Pivotal is the remarkable “Showdown with the King
Bee,” the last poem in section three. “Showdown” develops as
“What Feeds Us” does: in intertwined sections revealing images of
personal sin and nightmare; of betrayal and seduction; linked fears of
dogs, bees, the dark; a seemingly hopeless longing to be loved.
These funnel through the poet’s narrative confrontation with King Bee,
who appears “in nightmares, / huge and hairy, hanging over my bed, /
waiting for me to sleep”:
I could not tell my story to
anyone but the bees. . . .
Long before I saw you, I heard
you inside the walls.
Someday I will think about home,
the long ride back, who I’ll be
when I get there, and if I’ll
make
any wrong turns.
And the last, telling section, in its entirety:
When I finish spilling my guts,
the King Bee says: “I choose you
because you are afraid.
***
What Feeds Us
is also a silken tent of the senses, the sensual and redemptive
pleasures of kiss and calyx and cuisine. When the father leaves
home with his mistress, the poet celebrates blooms, even dandelions, as
“the whole world” turns yellow: “Sunflowers sprung up like born-again /
Christians — lemon lilies, goldenrod, / buttercups, and coreopsis”
among which the narrator dances
.
. . like some wild thing,
her straw-colored hair whirling
in circles,
the miller’s daughter at the
wheel,
all around her yellow spinning
out gold,
and more gold, not fool’s gold,
but real.
[“The Summer He Left”]
Salve to her mother’s brokenness is “Blueberry,” a
celebration of the “deep-blue hue of the body, silvery bloom / on its
skin . . . / . . . feasting on indigo.” Blueberries
are “the favorite fruit of my mother,” she tells us, and we rise to the
end of the poem where she and her mother eat blueberry pancakes in the
kitchen:
This is what I want to remember:
my mother
and me, in our quilted robes,
hair in curlers,
that kitchen, that table,
plates stacked with pancakes,
blueberries sparkling
like gemstones, blue stars in a
gold sky,
the universe in reverse,
the two of us eating blueberry
pancakes.
Lockward’s signature celebration ripens most
deliciously in “The History of Vanilla,” which weaves together the
luscious lure of food, sex, linguistics, sleep, and healing, while
dabbling in word origin and history:
The History of Vanilla
Need something to lull you to
sleep?
This could be the sedative you
long for,
hedge against loneliness, antidote
to grief, the bean of your desire.
Discrete at wrist and neck,
keepers
of the secrets of vanilla.
Listen and doze:
Totonacos, Aztecs, Hernando
Cortez.
Whisper his name. Precious
plunder
of Spain. With cacao,
elixir rich and noble.
Drift into dreamy exotica,
Madagascar,
Mexico, Tahiti. Picture the
orchid, hand-
pollinated, the dangling
fruit. Rootlets
attached to trees and
vines. You, unrooted,
rootless, uprooted, always on
snooze
alarm. Latin root: vagina. Diminutive
of vaina: sheath, vagina,
pod.
Pods bundled in blankets, laid in
the sun,
wrapped back up to sweat
overnight as you so often do.
Repeat and repeat until properly
cured,
until the slow, gentle
recirculation
of menstruum moves through your
beans,
until you’re pure. Pure
vanilla extract,
perfect for anything you crave,
savory
soups and sauces, vanilla-seared
scallops,
lamb peppered and roasted in
creamy
bourbon vanilla, ice cream
bean-pricked.
Soporific of your dreams. A
kitchen,
an island, a man, the two of you
making
crème brûlée,
the air laced with fragrant
oily liquid, the ripe pod in your
hand.
“ . . . always on snooze alarm” — Lockward also can
train a wry eye on what she most loves. She praises the lover who
brings her honey and roses, who makes crème brûlée.
But she can also turn a slant eye to desire, an Eve who’s no simpleton,
a Lilith who likes the taste of control. In “Meditation in
Green,” for example, she plays with revelation: “It comes to me as a
commandment: / Thou shalt meditate
on green.”
And at first, the poet is “obedient,” and turns her
thoughts to grass as would Isaiah: the grasses that fade away.
She slides, however, to other greens: lime, apple, emerald. Her
last lover’s eyes. Then “the sound / of some other woman’s
voice,” a note that swerves the poem to the (unnamed) green of wildly
creative jealousy:
. . . now I
conjure
potions to send my lover—to turn
him green,
the color of contagion, burn him
in bile, feed him
seedless green grapes, skin
peeled with the blade
of my Swiss Army knife, to offer
one gelatinous
globe—Here, eat this! Oh! To watch him
pluck
the head from its stake, swallow
it whole, fall and
fall, and choke on that green
grape of sorrow,
twist and shrivel with despair,
tongue
darting and hissing, unable to
speak.
Perhaps lizard, perhaps snake, darting and hissing, silenced.
This imagined revenge is deliciously summoned, deliciously
enjoyed. Life beyond the Garden is irresistible but not innocent,
not without pain. This Eve reaches out for love, but has learned
that the undefended, the unprepared, must see to their hearts.
***
“Sometimes / I’m so blue I don’t think I’ll ever see
green again” the narrator says in the prose poem, “Sometimes in
Dreams.” And in “Meditation in the Park,” she muses on “where
things . . . go when they go away.” Her unbrightenable list of
loss: the old boyfriend, Penny the Dachshund, kittens dying, “each /
stiffening as if stretching, then gone for good.” Her
father. Her mother, who’s become the “jackrabbit ready to
run.” And those things she’s found? Other people’s things,
other people who might have found hers: “To the finder it’s just
somebody’s junk. / To the loser it’s special, except it’s gone.”
The most poignant of these poems — because she
deftly controls the feeling through word choice, tone, and pace — are
those that center on loss and children: the failed pregnancy (“”Wren
House”), the damaged child (“The Gift”), the yearly reminder of loss
(“Anniversary”), the heart “grieving without tears”( “Virga”), and the
superbly constructed “A Boy’s Bike.”
“Wren House” takes as its vehicle the ritual
preparation of a birdhouse to tempt a wren pair to nest: the narrator
and her husband hang it, “eas[ing] the curve” over a branch, fill the
nearby feeder with seeds, and wait patiently while they imagine “the
bundle of grass and twigs, eggs / hatching, the fluttering of
wings.” But interleaved are lines, often set off by white space,
that shadow the surface action: the standalone “We could not bear the
possibility of loss”; and “A hinged door, tiny latch we could open / at
season’s end to scrape out the nest.” The pair “listen[s] for singing”
in the next-to-last stanza, but the shadow stanzas have fallen darkly
across the last lines, which draw the threads of failed pregnancy and
failed lure together in a heartbeat:
We had waited like this before,
wanting some soft creature to fly
in.
Lockward also achieves this control through irony,
an achieved tone that grips the heart in “The Gift.” The
poem appears to posit a marriage to which the woman brings a damaged
child, “a boy, seventeen. / He’s your new son.” The child is
presented as a gift waiting under a Christmas tree (“Remove bows, foil,
and lid”), one that “require[s] partial assembly.” The analogy to
a mechanical object permits a distancing from pain. The poet
provides directions (“Next, attach limbs to torso”) as though the child
were a ventriloquist’s dummy. The word choice here so carefully
remote, we know something is awry — but not apparent (“Quite a handsome
boy, don’t you think?”).
Then, in the next stanza, the parallel with
assembled toys grows clearer, and darker:
Of course, and wouldn’t you know
it,
though the attached certificate
asserts
Lila Watkins inspected the kit
at our Michigan plant prior to
shipment,
essential pieces are missing.
There’s no tongue. This boy
won’t speak.
And no brain will ever go where a
brain ought to be.
The heart (broken), the brain (missing), the “batteries” not included:
“This boy won’t run.”
Lockward could have ended here, with mere
heartbreak. But she pushes farther, proposing in the final stanza
“Maybe it’s better this way”: the boy sits “nicely” at table, can’t get
in trouble, “won’t ever turn / eighteen.” Words offered as
“comfort” but deepening the despair: “He’ll last forever. / This boy’s
durable. / This boy won’t break.” It is the mother speaking, her
heart broken and breaking, whose arms have ached in trying and trying
to make this damaged engine go. The poem lives out Chekhov’s
advice: to move your reader, write more coldly.
A literally breath-taking exploration of how feeling
attaches to incident comes in the one long run of a stanza that is “A
Boy’s Bike.” It begins with an almost casual recital:
One morning a bike appears in our
driveway,
at the end where we can’t not
notice it. . . .
In other hands, this incident might produce flyers,
the bike set aside on the lawn. But here it becomes an occasion
that rises line by line to a personal and existential cry. The
third line shadows where the poem might go: “ . . . Where /
someone who’s not being careful will crush it.” Not might crush
it, but will.
The poet describes the bike as “a wounded / animal,”
its chain is “rusty,” the kickstand, “broken.” It reeks of
disorder: “It’s not our bike, and / we don’t want it.” But
the police don’t either: “ . . . crimes to deal with. Things
disappearing, not / bikes appearing.” Now the boy, the bike’s
owner, “appears” in the poem: “we know that somewhere a boy is
missing / his bike.” But when “days go by and no boy / shows up,”
the couple moves up a notch:
. . . We begin to worry about the
missing
boy. And so it is that our
worries double. And then
triple for we are missing him,
and we don’t even
know him, but maybe we know a boy
like him . . .
This “missing” becomes increasingly personal: the
next “boy on a bike” who enters the skein of the poem is the imagined
“boy who once lived here, a boy who once took / his sister’s new
Schwinn without permission . . . ” and, flying downhill, falls,
badly cuts his foot, limping home to show his mother “a slice so clean
no blood yet, the bone inside white as cuttlefish, and later stitches /
and pain.”
The narrator tries to tie the worry up neatly with
an aphorism (“Lesson learned: If you take a bike without / permission,
you get hurt.”). But this is merely a temporary distraction,
because now the boy’s mother enters the poem and its tight net of
feeling: “Somewhere a mother hurts; she is missing her
boy.” Somewhere in the present of the poem, a boy continues to
“hurtle” down a hill, “out of control” and calling “Look, Mom!”
But in the last lines the boy shifts shape again, becomes “our boy”:
the missing boy is theirs, ours, as he blurs into our lives:
. . . so fast we can’t see him,
but we know this boy
is our boy, and we are there
waiting for him to hit
the point of impact, longing for
him to find his way
home, to come to us with his
bloodless wounds.
***
On the last pages of What Feeds Us, Lockward begins “The
heart wants what the heart wants, / and what it wants is
fire.” Fire flares up in each section of this book:
“Reconstruction” begins “I am a house he would move into . . . ” and,
so sheltered, she exults in the last line “I am two-storied
now. He builds a fire in me.” In “Metamorphoses,” a
sequence of three unrhymed sonnets that celebrates teenage love and the
poet-teacher’s role in aiding and abetting it (via Dante and
Shakespeare’s Juliet who “teach(es) the torches to burn bright”), she
watches “the boy in my class fall in love” and so she herself
“sizzle[s] and “burn[s]” with remembered heat. The longer the
ardor and seduction continue, the more she is herself affected: she
begins to turn into Cupid:
I fold the cumbersome
wings under a sweater
hide bow and arrows in my
briefcase.
But when she sees the pair “strolling the hallway,” as Astrophel and
Stella, she herself ignites:
. . . I close the door, hold in
all that light.
Once more, I read from Amoretti,
stunned
by my own remarkable power, my
entire
body electric, my hands carrying
fire.
In “Pyromania,” the fierce and fiery poem that
closes this satisfying book, she multiplies the fires that blaze within
us: from Grucci, the famed fireworks company, to the woman forest
ranger, who burns letters “a firestorm in her heart” and sets thousands
of acres ablaze, “trees surrendering to fire,” and then to the
scientific peculiarities of modern cremation: silicone breast implants
must be removed because they will explode, “destroying the
crematorium.” These, she says, are the breasts she wants, the
kind that “ignite and explode,” that spread like wildfire, like
“tongues of scarlet licking the walls.” This is not a woman who
can ever be locked in a room again.
“Feast on your life” says Derek Walcott, in “Love
after Love.” And so Lockward does: prepares a feast of her words
and images, fire and fruits of her life, real and dreamed. She
nourishes our hearts and minds, and nowhere more wonderfully than in
“The Best Words,” from section four. Those “best words” are the
ones “that put a finger to the flame but don’t burn.” “Wild
words” she says, “that shake their hips, / thrust out their genitalia,
/ and say Feast on this. Sexagesima — my God! / what a word for
the second Sunday before Lent.” The poem riffs ecstatically at
the end, channeling Jerry Lee Lewis as her words pound with his fingers
on the keyboard:
Cockatiel, cockatoo—words with
wings.
the hoarfrost of winter, lure of
a crappie,
handful of nuts, kumquat,
lavender crystal of kunzite,
the titillation of shiftless and
schist, the bark and bite
of shittimwood, music of
sextillion and cockleshells.
And always somewhere in the
distance, Jerry Lee Lewis,
blond curls flapping, groin
pumping, fingers pounding
the keyboard, his throat belting
out Great balls of fire!—
words like fat radishes burning
my tongue.
Lockward, Diane. What Feeds Us.
Nicholasville, KY: Wind Publications, 2006. ISBN:
1-893239-57-8 $15.00
© by Judith
Montgomery
