The Buck
When I was ten,
Grandmother told me to get her
stuffed when she died
like the buck by the door
catching evil in his antlers.
She was to be seated in the
parlor,
on the sofa (or chair, our
choice),
facing the piano where I would
play
Brahms and Liszt and Chopin.
Her eyes were to be open
(maybe a little touch of glass,
for sparkle) and looking upwards
(slightly to the right)
like St. Theresa
or Sebastian pierced with arrows.
Her hands would be demurely gloved
in white lace fingerless gloves,
reaching up to heaven,
Her lips would be slightly parted
to show
silently parted pearlized teeth—
guardian angel, mouth of God—
telling us what to hear and speak.
We would never be alone at home.
When I went shopping for perfume,
or oil to treat her skin,
or maybe a new pair of gloves,
or a lightbulb for her
ever-burning lamp,
she and the buck
would wait for our return.
I’m four times the ten I was,
but still banging at the keyboard
all day:
dust floats up into my eyes, ears,
mouth, my nose and
many pores—
shadow fingers reach across this
page.
She listens:
I sing.
History
Practically
in its first draft (1989), my poem "The Buck" received an Honorable
Mention in the South Coast Poetry Journal annual contest, and was
published in June, 1993. In 1995,
"The Buck"—placed in the company of such poets that include Margaret
Atwood, Isabel Allende, Leslie Silko, and Sharon Olds—was reissued in a
hardbound volume from Conari Press entitled For She is the Tree of Life. That
the poem was so fully received so early in its development was both encouraging
and, to me, misleading. While inventorying for a full-volume collection of my
poems, I started, again, to edit "The Buck" and found confusions and missed
opportunities. Although I will not attempt to fully digest all of what I have
learned through this example of revision, I offer here some of my central concerns
in crafting a poem: clarity of image, measures,
the dismount. My main strategy for
managing these concerns is anticipating alternate readings. Although in process my concerns are not
always distinct, and I certainly don’t revise in a linear, mechanical fashion,
I distinguish them here.
Images
Because my work is
so visual, journals often choose to illustrate my poems. The South Coast
Poetry Journal woodcut or hands in prayer both pleased and jarred me. In stanza four, the grandmother’s hands are
“reaching up to heaven.” I had meant for
the grandmother's arms and hands to be propped up and open, as if holding up an
enormous bowl (popular religious iconography). The accompanying woodcut is a
pair of gloved hands templed in prayer. Obviously, reaching in line 18
was vague. I hadn't fully anticipated variant readings of it—one of the
constant and crucial challenges of writing.
The poem went through many revisions, here's one of the anthologized versions, as published in Conari Press's For She is the Tree of Life:
The Buck
When I was ten,
Grandmother told me
to get her stuffed when she died,
like the buck head by the door
catching cobwebs of evil
in his antlers.
She was to be seated
in the living room
on the sofa
(or chair, our choice),
facing the piano where I would
play
Brahms, Liszt and Chopin.
Her eyes were to be open
(maybe a little touch of glass,
for sparkle) and looking upwards
(slightly to the right)
like St. Theresa
or Sebastian pierced with arrows,
her hands—demurely covered
in white lace fingerless gloves—
propped holding the dome of
heaven.
Her lips would be slightly parted
to show
silently parted pearlized teeth,
our guardian angel, mouth of God.
When I went shopping for perfume,
or oil to treat her skin,
or maybe a new pair of gloves
or a bulb for her ever-burning
lamp
she and the buck would wait for my
return.
Four times the ten I was,
I bang a keyboard all day;
dust floats up into my eyes, ears,
mouth, my nose and
many pores—
shadow fingers reach
like antlers across my page.
She listens: I sing.
In the Conari
publication, the line reads propped holding the dome of heaven,
which makes it a more resonant, Atlasian burden. But some readers might object—How does
that look? How do you hold a dome? A too obvious way of visualizing holding
is placing hands on top of a domed structure. Since dome is
almost a cliché of sacred architecture—a word too easily glossed over in this context—I
changed the word to bowl—propped holding the bowl of heaven. This is clearer. If we imagine a bowl inscribing a
half-circle, most people will hold it with two open hands placed at 4:00 and
8:00. The bottom of a bowl is more like
a grandmotherly breast. In addition,
this image more clearly evokes statues of saints with hands open to catch
heavenly blessings.
Measures
Stanzas.
In
the South Coast draft, the stanza lengths vary from 4, 4, 6, 7, and 7 lines
to the sprawl of the last stanza, 8 lines. In a poem about evil, it would be
much more effective to
trade on the
regular rhythms and repetitions of magic. It is through the focus on just such
elements the ancient Greeks believed the poet is able to receive inspiration.
I often count lines to discern if any pattern is emerging. Intuitively, I
had end-stopped all of the first draft stanzas (periods and one enjambment on a
comma), thus reflecting an unconscious need to contain a threatening idea. I
knew I had to standardize stanza lengths, as well. But how?
One clue was that
the South Coast draft had six stanzas. Was that number significant?
Another clue came from Revelations: the devil's number is 666. I adopted the number 6 as a formal
device, to explore and enhance the feeling of evil in the poem. For the Conari
version of "The Buck," I recast all but the last two of six stanzas into
six lines. I had faltered in the penultimate and final stanzas, which had five
and seven lines, respectively. There was
something tacked on, overmanaged in that last stanza, even in revision. If, as in a crossword puzzle, there is a right
answer; if a verse interprets itself—it might distance the reader. She listens: I sing is a too obvious
reflection back onto the poem: Look I'm singing by writing this poem. The
device of making the poem be about the poem has been overused. That kind of interpretation must be subtle, or
a Billy Collins tweak, but not facile. Also, She listens: I sing lay the poem
to rest, so to speak—condonable in the context of writing this
poem, but not, perhaps, in realizing Federico Garcia Lorca 's duende—that
quality of great art which
embraces danger,
which is power and not a construct...struggle and not a concept. Most
recently, I lopped that safe last line, and earned the poem its sixes and some
of its dangers. In the draft that precedes the current draft (Figure 3), there
were six stanzas with six lines each.
Pronouns.
I
made another shift toward danger. In the previous drafts, the fifth stanzas
include reference to a we: We would never be alone./ When we went shopping. This
late introduction of an unspecified we
is confusing—up to this point it had been just grandma and narrator. We
would never be alone raises questions: Who is the we? It can’t be
the grandmother—she can't shop. Nor can the buck or God. Has someone else
entered the poem? Who? Does the we include, without
the reader's acquiescence, the reader her or himself? Maybe. But the surface
reading must imply a particular. In retrospect, it seems that the we was
creating a proverbial safety in numbers (just as manipulating numbers, during
writing, is a way to steady the psyche).
From the first person
plural, I shifted to the first person singular—I would never be alone—and
was rewarded with a chilling ambiguity. In the current draft, although the
enjambment between the last line of stanza 4 and the first of stanza 5 means
that the grandmother's mouth would channel God, syntactically my very own
mouth collapses the grandmother's mouth into the narrator's. The stanza
break on my very own mouth creates a syntactic tension that propels the
reader on. No longer is there the relative
security of the first three end-stopped stanzas—the last three each are
unpunctuated cliffs precipitating the next stanza. No period ends the last.
Metrics.
In the current
draft, I scanned the poem's metrics, and was pleased to see that many of the
lines move in trochees, the stressed/unstressed rhythm that governs, to use a
popular example, the song from The Phantom of the Opera, "The Music
of the Night." In the English language, in the human heartbeat, in the
left/right of walking the standard beat is the iamb—unstressed,
stressed. To characterize it from a
rightist perspective—start out weak, end up strong. Both "The Music of the Night" and
"The Buck" reverses that tendency, as evil does, to the start out
strong, end up weak metaphysics of the trochee and the dactyl. I was
pleased, as well, to find that in the first stanza there were two terminal
anapests—unstressed, unstressed, stressed—a skipping, exuberant, comic metric,
a relief in the context of this poem. The Music of the Night also
counterpoints trochees with terminal anapests. Humor and energy provide
aesthetic relief and entertainment to enchant the reader much as the beauty of
"The Music of the Night" might disarm, allure not only the character
Christine, in The Phantom of the Opera, but also the audience.
Another important
metrical move for "The Buck" was the four comforting iambs in the
exact central line of the poem: “Her hands would be demurely gloved.” This is a
resting place and launching point into the darkness of the last three stanzas.
"The Buck" had early found its music and its tone—which might explain
its early acceptances. So, there weren't as many changes to make metrically by
the current draft. Nonetheless, I did drop the St. before Sebastian. Rhythmically,
the extra unstressed syllable was more like a hiccup. Note also, the last line
of stanza 4. The caesura (pause within a line) is flanked by two identical
metric patterns: trochee/
iamb; trochee/iamb. If I hadn't changed the line for the reasons mentioned
above—to create a horrible collapsing of boundaries—this metrical pattern
might, in the
context of this poem,
have inspired me to question this line. Two identical metrics haunt each other
across the break between stanzas 5 and 6, much as the grandmother and narrator
do across that line between life and death.
The Dismount
I think of the end
of the poem, especially the last line, much as a gymnast’s dismount. This is where the reader is forever lost or,
at least temporarily, won: Will the poem linger beyond this reading? To
paraphrase Robert Frost: anyone can get into a poem. It takes a
poet— (or, I might
add, a poetic reader, for it is the reader who ultimately brings the poem to
life)—to get out of the poem.
I had introduced
the first drafts of “The Buck” with the information that the narrator is ten
years old. Rethinking it, it seemed to
cast a political pall over the poem—How could the
grandmother ask
that a ten-year-old get her stuffed when she died? The line—at the
outset of the poem, when the tabula rasa of the reader is being imprinted—might
invite righteous indignation and not a deeper, more resonant reading. I
transferred the line to the last stanza, compressing it with mention of the
narrator's current age—to establish that time had passed. It is more chilling
to discover, late in the poem—when the reader has become absorbed in the logic
of it—that a ten-year-old had been told to have taxidermy performed on her
grandmother. And since the knowledge
comes so late—when the drive toward the poem's end should be most intense—it
doesn't invite mere moralizing as it might have earlier on.
This made me
rethink the number of lines in the first stanza. Why not start the poem with five lines, a
more comforting number—the number of digits on a healthy hand? Then the shift to six-line stanzas would feel
more dissonant and disturbing.
The last stanza of
a poem can also be thought of as runway—can't have guy wires dragging the
accelerating plane. The eyes, ears,
nose of the earlier drafts were too many things up into
which the dust was to float. Also, eyes,
ears, nose is a list of clichés seen on doctors’ signs. To edit down to eyes, hands, and mouth
creates a direct parallel to the stuffed grandmother: stanzas three and four
focus on her eyes, hands, and mouth. This enriches the poem, implicates the
narrator, and forgives the grandmother: we are no different. Realized
poetry seeks to embody universals: what we bear in common.
I gnawed through
several prepositions for the last line—above, into, over—before settling
on across that page. First, the embedded cross is a religious
symbol. But more important is what can be gleaned from a deconstructive reading
of across the page: (a cross, the page) = (the page is a cross). This
satisfies the need to contain, and through writing, to defend
against/manage the evil. Read thus, the reader is asked to note, or note again,
that the grandmother in the story who, although asking for something bizarre
and unnatural, is using religious imagery, is defending against the unnatural,
as well. I considered how I might anticipate page—with my or that.
To state that the
shadow fingers are reaching antlers across the page is to tell the
reader how to interpret the image—again, the over-managing. It is too large of a knowing wink, and robs
the reader of the pleasure of getting it. To allow the specific image
to linger, is to invite the reader not only to ask the questions Whose? How?
How long? but to answer them for her or himself—to be co-creator of the
poem—to find resonances and depths I couldn't have anticipated. For the reader casts shadows on the page, as
the narrator does. And those fingers reaching?
Perhaps they are the shadows of the reviser. Perhaps they are also…well—the poem is
entitled "The Buck." I pass "The Buck" to you.
Here is my current draft, as published in my book Beware the House.
The Buck
When
I am six years old,
Grandmother
tells me to
get
her stuffed when she dies—
like
the front door buck head,
catching
webs of evil
between
six-point antlers.
The
living room, of course,
is
where we’re to seat her—
on
the sofa (or chair),
behind
the piano
where
I will play Chopin,
Brahms,
Schumann, Beethoven.
And
sew her eyes open
(maybe
a touch of glass),
looking
up to the right—
like
sweet Saint Theresa,
clasping
her red roses;
or
holey Sebastian.
Her
hands are to be sheathed—
white
lace fingerless gloves—
propped
wide for heaven’s bowl;
her
lips slightly parted
to
show her pearly teeth—
her
mouth channeling God.
Never
to be alone—
while
I shop for perfume
or
oil for her skin,
or
a bulb for her lamp—
she
and the buck will wait
for
my timely return.
Times
and times my six years,
I
bang at my keyboards
—webs
worry my eyes, mouth,
my
hands, my many pores—
shadow
antlers quiver
fingers across my scores.
Works Cited:
Cover Art:
Shadow Fingers
Text:
Rich,
Susanna. Beware the House. Pittsburgh: The Poet's Press, 2018.
---. “Shadow Fingers
Across the Page: Revising ‘The Buck’.”
Poem, Revised. Ed. Robert
Hartwell Fiske. Rockport: Marion Street P, 2008. First publication of this post.
---. For She is the Tree of Life. Ed. Valerie Kack-Brice. Berkeley: Conari, 1994.
165-6.
---. “The Buck.” South Coast Poetry Journal 13 (June
1993): 26-7.
Shadow Fingers
