Poetry by the Numbers: (5) Shadow Fingers and Revision

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