now (part two)

[note 2.9]

[Barbara Ess, Untitled, 1986 (pinhole photograph)]

A few months ago I got this letter (I mentioned this in note 43 and promised to give my response):

Dear Nick,

I’ve long admired your work. I run a poetry read and critique and we were discussing your poems last night. We came to “Now” and there was a lot of confusion about the last two couplets. In the first part of the poem, the narrator seems to have such a closeness and an acceptance for the person with the scar, but in the last couplet, it almost feels like there’s an element of dominance. I didn’t have a good explanation, so I told the students I’d write to you.

We would love to know more about this poem.

Warmly,

Anna DiMartino (Anna graciously said it was okay to use her name)

~~~

Here’s the poem (from my book I Will Destroy You):

NOW

Tomorrow, or

the day after, I’ll press my

mouth to your scar & run
my tongue along it

so I can taste how you were once
opened, so I can know where

you never closed. Each

scar’s a door, we know
that—I want to whisper into

yours, I want my hands

to hover over it, I want you
to whisper please

I want you (please please please)
to beg for it.

~~~

Here’s my response:

Hi Anna,

First off, thanks for reading my poems—a book is a dead thing until someone opens it.

As for the meaning of “Now”, especially of the last couplet, I am unsure if I can come up with one interpretation. but I can say a few things, as long as you don’t take any of it as “the final word.”

That you and your group were confused, or perhaps disturbed, by the last couplet, somehow pleases me, in that if the poem ended in the same register where it began then we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. When I first wrote it, I do vaguely remember also being somewhat disturbed by the ending, which for me was a signal that I had found something.

I can tell you this: I have a long scar on my body, sternum to navel, which for many years I tried to ignore, for it brought me back to a time of near-death. I know the book “Now” is in has many scars, for part of the years of working on those poems I was also working on reentering that difficult near-death moment in my earlier life. I did this first through a massage therapist, who was the first to ask me if anyone had ever massaged it (no one ever had). Then I brought it to my acupuncturist, and she used needles to release some strange energies. The scar, for me, was a portal into another time in my life.

The body keeps the score, as van de Kolk says.

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