[Clive Watkins]

Opening the Vain

"I was beautiful once," she said to me
as she stood before the mirror.

She ran an index finger along the caesarian scar
below her navel, then pulled at the fat
running across her belly until the herringbone
of stretch marks disappeared.

She had her panties rolled down
below the caps of her hipbones.
I could see a few strands of curly red hair
poking above the fabric.

She posed and postured like it was 1945
and the men had just returned from the war.
After a time, she took her hands away.
The ripples came back, the scar coarse and milky.

She glanced at my reflection, small in the mirror,
and said, "My figure was lovely until I had you."

Fred Longworth


Regarded as a “machine of words”, the power of this poem springs in the main from two features. The first and most striking is the handling of the poetic plot. From the first line, the poem lures us into supposing that the woman is addressing a man, a lover perhaps. On this assumption and despite the title, to which I shall return, its opening words - “I was beautiful once” - invite us to feel sympathy, or at least understanding, for her, just as she seems to be inviting sympathy or understanding from her unseen addressee. It is not till the fourth section, which I discuss below, that doubt begins to fall on this view of matters. The final two lines, however, oblige us to reinterpret the whole incident. The person addressed is not a man, is not a lover: it is her small child. This moment, a species of peripeteia, focuses a number of conflicting emotions: the woman’s human regret at the loss of what she saw as her beauty, her vanity, a lingering sense of sexual yearning, her displacement of these feelings on to her child and the vindictiveness of actually declaring them in this way. In us as readers, the scene evokes pity for the child at having to carry the burden of his mother’s anger, pity for the woman herself and indignation at the cruelty of her remark and at what it perhaps implies about her wider feelings towards the child. The paragraphing of the poem quietly supports this effect. The first two lines are answered by the last two: across the space between, the emotion sparks. This is all well handled.

I used the term “poetic plot” above. I might perhaps have simply written “plot”. It is worth reflecting that the plot Fred uses here could be regarded as a sub-variant of a wider kind of plot, one in which at the end of the poem it becomes clear that the relationship between apparent speaker and apparent audience is rather different from what we had been lead to suppose. One accessible example might be Wilfred Owen’s celebrated “Strange Meeting”, in which we learn only six lines from the end that the speaker was the enemy the person addressed had killed the previous day. Another, subtler case might be Hardy’s touching poem “The Choirmaster’s Burial”. This appears to be a narrative of events which occurred only in the recent past, and we are drawn in on that assumption, but the last couplet – “Such the tenor man told When he had grown old” – abruptly pushes the story back perhaps three or four decades. As recounted by a man whom we now realize is approaching the end of his own life, the story suddenly and in retrospect (and is this not fitting?) takes on a wonderfully elegiac air, an effect which springs almost entirely from Hardy’s plotting. These are two well-known instances; I am sure members can supply others from their own reading. That similar plots can be used as armatures for quite different poems has interesting practical implications for poets.

The second important feature of this poem is that, with some telling exceptions, the language is colourless and markedly non-poetic, even, one might say, anti-poetic. The second and third sections, for instance, seem determinedly prosaic. Here they are, set as prose:

She ran an index finger along the caesarian scar below her navel, then pulled at the fat running across her belly until the herringbone of stretch marks disappeared. She had her panties rolled down below the caps of her hipbones. I could see a few strands of curly red hair poking above the fabric.

Apart from the slight flourish of “the herringbone of stretch marks”, there is nothing here that would stand out in a prose narrative of the most banal kind. The movement of the words is not obviously rhythmical. Though the first sentence is technically a compound-complex sentence, the sequence of ideas appears unforced and natural: it seems to have no special designs on our attention, something which is also true of the second and third sentences.

Setting the overall temperature of the language at this level and registering the scene in an almost affectless manner hints, perhaps, at the shock the child might be supposed to feel. It also allows small heightenings in diction to register strongly. So, in the fourth section, “posed” and “postured” – particularly “postured” – introduce a judgmental note. Two lines later, the description of the scar as “coarse and milky” comes forward as especially significant. The milkiness of the scar associates it with the fact that (as we shall shortly discover but do not yet know), the woman is the mother of the person addressed. Its coarseness suggests there is something coarse and unloving in this woman who postures before the mirror, regretting the loss of her sexual attractiveness. Perhaps, too, the child finds something slightly repugnant in this scar which his own birth occasioned. In the final section, the fact that she gives him through his reflection, distanced and “small in the mirror”, only a glance seems all the more telling because of the flatness of the language.

I referred to the title above. This strikes a false note. First, it immediately renders ironic the opening lines of the poem, prematurely inviting us to judge the woman, and so telegraphs the sting in the poem’s tail. Secondly, it appears to be a pun and in this respect is, by comparison with what follows, altogether too flashy, drawing attention to itself in a distracting way. What is more, the punning allusion to the expression “opening a vein” – that is, to the practice of bleeding patients which surgeons employed in time past – seems irrelevant here.

It is often said that it is a quality of good poetry to be memorable, and it occurs to me to wonder whether I shall find this poem memorable in times to come. The answer, I think, is “Yes”. In what way, then, will it prove memorable? Mainly in the situation it sets out and the particular cluster of emotions evoked by that situation, rather than in its words and phrases. I doubt that in a year from now I shall find myself able to quote lines by heart, as I can in the case of many other poems. Nor, as I inspect the way my memory works, do I think this a reflection of the fact that this poem is non-metrical: I can readily recall many passages of non-metrical verse and many passages of prose, too. So, it will be memorable but memorable in a way that reflects the dominant feature of its design, its startling plot.

Clive Watkins

[oliver murray]

Clive gives an excellent analysis of this poem. I agree with him about the title, which is very off-putting and does not do the piece justice. The poem seems to me to be more about cruelty than vanity, although the persistence of vanity is certainly part of it. If the poem is memorable for its plot, but unmemorable for its language/rhythm should this be worked on, or is it a suitable marriage of words and content? Raymond Carver, who wrote of similar situations, in a rather flat way, seems to distinguish his verse from his short stories mostly by using internal rhyme,as well, of course, as the line-breaks.

I was wondering at the mention of 1945, a year which, in Britain, allowed many relationships to be resumed, and caused others to be broken. I suppose the proportion of men in the armed forces in America was smaller than in Britain. I am assuming the narrator is remembering something that happened in the 1950s or thereabouts. It would be interesting to speculate the effect if the speaker was an adult at the time of the incident described.
Whatever you do, change the title, Fred. I enjoyed this.

Regards,

Oliver.

[Kate Benedict]

I remember seeing an early version of Fred's poem and was struck, even then, by the same thing that interests Clive, i.e, the content of it narrative. The mother's seductiveness is only surpassed by her cruelty. Ultimately, one can't help but identify with the child's confusion and guilt. The soul murder of children! Though based, one assumes, on an actual event, the poem has mythic resonance.

Clive's comments regarding the flatness of the diction is worth contemplating. I do think that the poem could still benefit from some tinkering, so that the understated tone is retained while the ultra-prosaic quality is tempered. One suggestion is to remove "to me" in L2 and "I could see" in S3. I.e., save the speaker's own pronoun for the final line. Another is to break up the long sentence in S2. Re the plotline, perhaps S2 and S3 need to change places.

I'd love it if this poem could be as memorable in its language as it is in its storyline! I'm thinking out loud here, but I also wonder, Fred, if you could add a little more atomosphere by clarifying the setting (bedroom, bathroom?) and/or adding some sensory detail from the speaker's POV, something besides just the visual.

[VictoriaGaile]

I am particularly struck by Clive's structural analysis of the poem: the manner in which the plot develops, and the way in which the paragraphed sections support the effect. This sort of "big picture" analysis is not something that we often discuss in critiques, that I can recall. (On it goes to my list! )

I didn't notice the "milky" scar as associated with the woman being the child's mother: now that I do see that, I also see that "ripples" suggests "nipples", subtly reinforcing the association.

While I am not crazy about the title either, in its defense I will say that it suggested to me re-opening a previously inflicted injury: as this one incident is hardly likely to be the first or only occasion on which the mother is so casually cruel to the child.

For me, the memorability of this poem lies in the image of the penultimate line, "She glanced at my reflection, small in the mirror". There's so much here. The fact that we do not see the child directly, and don't even get a hint of what he looks like, reinforces how utterly the mother is focused on herself: she doesn't see him as a person, but only in terms of how he has affected her life. "Small" is such a perfect word here, precisely because it is unpoetic and does not draw attention to itself - just like the child, whom I imagine with knees drawn up and arms wrapped around them, making himself as small as possible, would try not to draw attention to himself so as not to provoke a cruel response.

I think this is a terrific example of how to evoke a compelling portrait of an entire relationship by presenting one small interaction. Well done Fred.

[oliver murray]

Victoria is right about the penultimate line - but it is more important than that, even. Without it, the final line would not really be acceptable as it would be an unprepared for surprise. As it is, it comes rather late,
but a complete reversal of expectation, in the very end, in any form of narrative, risks making the reader feel he/she has not been fairly treated, and, if possible, I might like to see a further minor clue earlier on, though this is a risky strategy. As it is, I think Fred just gets away with it.

Regards,

Oliver.

[Elle Bruno]

Great comments on this piece.
This poem has many merits but, for me, its effectiveness lies in the fact that Fred has captured a specific moment in a specific life at a specific time and that one moment defines an entire relationship (and an entire sad lifetime of this relationship). This is one of the things that poetry as an art does best, allows us to percieve much more than we told.
Nice job Fred. Dee

[Fred Longworth]

Thank you all -- especially Clive -- for your comments.

I will have more to say later, for now I'm sandwiched into that small slice of time between the strident voice of alarm clock and the gun and squeal of car jetting off to work.

Okay: the title. I admit it -- I love puns. A favorite of my own invention . . .

[Q] What would the Chinese cellist Yo Yo Ma have been named had he been born African-American?

[A] Yo Mama!

Whether in a joke or in a poem, it's hard to resist! Yet here, it appears that the consensus is that it needs to be replaced. Therefore --

I am officially taking suggestions regarding an improved title. Please post them to this thread, or e-mail me privately.

Fred

[This message has been edited by Fred Longworth (edited February 05, 2004).]

[Shekhar Aiyar]

Clive's analysis is a real education in how to read a poem closely. Of particular interest to me in this poem are what may be called the "micro-macro linkages" that Clive points to. The fact that the poem is deliberately written using rather plain language - a "macro" trait - allows us to savour the smallest deviations from this mode at the level of individual words or phrases - the "micro" level. Hence the effectiveness of "herringbone of stretch marks" or "the scar coarse and milky".

The poem contains, I think, an essential temporal ambiguity. Is the mother speaking to a small child, or to a grown son/daughter? Both interpretations are defensible -all we know is that the narrator is the woman's son/daughter, but we don't know how old s/he is. Although "small in the mirror" (a quietly effective choice of words) causes us, at first reading, to imagine that the narrator is a child, the phrase would also work for an adult. In fact, it would work for an adult on two levels - as a literal description of a smaller-than-life reflection, and as a metaphor for inadequacy. But what I find most interesting is that the "vindictiveness" or "cruelty" of the woman noted by others is quite clearly diminished if the narrator is an adult. The words uttered become more wistful or perhaps even playful than harsh.

I add my vote to those clamouring for a title-change. How about a one-word title like "Perspective"?

Shekhar

[Elle Bruno]

how about "Reflection"

[Fred Longworth]

Excellent suggestion, Dee.

"Reflection" is also a double entendre! -- yet at the same time there's nothing "cute" or distractingly clever about the word. It has a drier quality, in keeping with the poem's overall tone until the last lines, and doesn't tip the poem's hand quite so much.

So . . . "Reflection" is leading the pack.

Fred