#195

[p. 124: https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=history's+two-legs+was+a+heartless+dream&source=bl&ots=so5wHaIZP4&sig=Ag21QtmQMll2NtpcFYvmxbnXmEw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAWoVChMI4oX0g_baxgIViy6ICh1GFwPa#v=onepage&q=history's%20two-legs%20was%20a%20heartless%20dream&f=false]

 I think this is what I expected out of a confessional poem, the kind of treatment of the self that Sylvia Plath was so good at—there is depth to it, and it raises a serious question. The opening begins with a statement that Oklahoma, the poet’s boyhood home, has left him, sore from his great loss. Oklahoma, as a concept, a metaphor, is gone. That in itself is a huge statement. I can compare my own conception of myself and I can tell you that the Ohio will never leave me. Ohio, bland and Midwestern and rusty, doesn’t have the obvious cultural richness and pungent savor of a place like Kentucky, Texas, Virginia. Others. Even Michigan. Oregon. But there’s also much to it. “Ohio” is just more subtle, less flamboyant, but whatever it is has left its imprint on me. It would take much change, pain and loss for me to say that anything of Ohio has left me. So the opening of this poem is something to take seriously. There is a deep and subtle sadness about it. The self who has experienced this loss is already fragmented by it. The mirror reflects disarticulated pieces.

“All my pieces kneel and we all scream:”—Plath would approve.

“History’s Two-legs was a heartless dream”—whatever it is that “Two-legs” stands for—obviously the human condition, but is it more particular? I don’t think so. The point: History, as a metaphor for life, living, the world of the living, is not so real as we want to think it is. A rejection of it is implied here, maybe, but if it’s a dream, it’s a nightmare of a dream.

So what is reality, then? Here’s a list: “reskinned knuckles & forgiveness & toys / unbreakable & thunder that excites & annoys / but’s powerless to harm.” Here it is, a heaven of healing and not-harm. “The growing again of the right arm / (which we so missed in our misleading days) / & the popping back in of eyes.” I love the strangeness of it. The poem is more conventional underneath than its twisted and fragmented surface might imply, though, but it’s written from the twisted, fragmented present in this world. Beyond, in heaven or the life beyond, in reality, there waits healing and salvation—and a renewed vision. This is where, when, we’ll come to understand. It’s a hope and a prayer for that, even an assertion of it. And it’s also an abandonment of hope that this life will lead to understanding, because life on this plane is fragmented, which is to say, broken. It’s both a personal statement from a man who was broken early in his life, or who at least claims as much, but it’s also a much broader existential statement. He’s broken all right, but he’s broken because his world is broken. It’s a postmodern statement, developed before postmodern as a concept was even articulated. All the things we clung to, that modernism clung to, that modernism watched helplessly or joyfully( depending on your view) being wrecked—are now wrecked. What we have left is wreckage. But there is healing, a reskinning of knuckles, to come. Our eyes will pop back in and reopen. The wonder of childhood, wrecked, is latent in the wreckage and only waits for reassembly to awaken again to viability. It’s a personal statement but it arises out of an orthodox Judeo-Christian notion, and one of the first times so far that I trust it as genuine from this artist. He doesn’t have to mention God here—but he’s looking this time. He’s not speaking out of a superficial narcissism at all. This whole poem strikes me as a fragmented but frank appraisal of one persona’s place in the grand existential context, a context of ruination and shattering, but ultimately latent with salvation.