l'intrigue

Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage
—based on a scroll painting attributed to Tang Yin (1470-1523)

Tang Yin’s scholar sleeps
among conifers. His head is pillowed
by the books layered on his desk—
perhaps he hopes knowledge will come
fluttering up, like the Painted Ladies
who visit him every year
at Changan.

Until late in the moon’s cycle across the sky,
he puzzled over Zhuangzhi’s ancient question,
wondering, “Am I a man dreaming he is a butterfly,
or am I a butterfly dreaming he is a man?”

But he found no solution in his books.
So, in a moment of leisure, he naps.
And far away, in the sky between faint hills,
something’s traveling—
so swift and tiny
no bird’s claws
can capture him.

This poem, which seems so simple at first reading, is typical of many of Rogers’ poems with their subtle complexities in image, setting, and perspective. It is instructive to recognize how these elements undergo metamorphoses from stanza to stanza. The poem’s central image—the butterfly—changes its meaning as the scholar’s state of mind is altered. It begins in medias res; chronologically, the second stanza gives us the original description of the scholar’s prevalent mental process, a conscious, rational probing to understand the essentially irrational (and paradoxical) mystery of being and the nature of reality. Of course, this probing, though an obsession, is always fruitless and wearying. The butterfly here is a dream figure the scholar analyzes consciously, and, as occurs often with dream figures, poses the problem of self-identity. The ultimate question we can ask is, “Who, what, and why am I?”, since the mind is capable, at least theoretically, of understanding everything but its own existence and nature. An interesting technique the poet employs in this stanza is to lengthen the cadences of the lines. Compared with the short, syntactically-clipped lines of the other stanzas which mimic the action of dreams, these longer lines of unbroken syntactical units create a sense of the effort of conscious, rational searching.

As the scholar, weary with his mental wrestling, lays his head on his pile of books to sleep, the butterfly changes into a symbol of the knowledge he seeks from these books. But this knowledge appears in a form far from rational—knowledge as symbol rather than as abstract proposition. And symbolic knowledge never solves mysteries; it always deepens them.

Finally, in the realm of sleep in stanza three, the scholar and the butterfly unite into a single entity that is, paradoxically, both and neither. The butterfly becomes the archetypal symbol of the soul, the true Self that is eternal and invulnerable. Though rationality can obliterate it from consciousness, people seem to possess an innate awareness of its existence, as can be attested by millennia of cross-cultural dream experiences.. At this level, existence no longer questions itself; it simply is itself. I have spent a lot of time on this poem not only because of its excellence but also to demonstrate some of the complex depth encountered throughout the book.

Another poem using the motif of Oriental art is:

The Scholar's Daughter

In the garden, as she copies out her father’s
poem about a scholar’s daughter who meets
her princely lover in a dream, Onogaro
notices just how much the bristles
of her brush are like the morning’s
growth of beard along the jawline
of her father’s acolyte. How much the bristles
splaying on the page are like the hairs
that tease the collar of his yellow quilted coat!
At that moment, Onogaro cannot bear
to copy out her father’s stanzas.

The smooth stones pressing open the scroll
are the two hands pressing on Onogaro’s heart.

Here we are presented with a complex point of view that evolves within the consciousness of the speaker (not Onogaro herself, but an observer who telling her story). This complexity operates on three ascending levels that interact through the poem. First, there is the awareness of the physical implements to be used on the task of copying—the brushes, their bristles, the paper, and the stones. Second, there an emerging awareness of the content of the story written by her father, which becomes the catalyst that changes the implements into metaphor, the third level. Her father’s story becomes her story, and the implements are transformed into objects of imagination. The three long o sounds in the penultimate line, and the three consecutive rhythmical stresses of “smooth stones pressing” and “two hands pressing” create an almost unbearable sense of the weight on Onogaro’s heart, and an equally profound sense of Rogers’ technical skill. In addition to its literal story, the poem can be viewed as an allegory on how great art affects the sensitive mind and heart.

One of the most intriguing complexities in perspective occurs in:

The Demon Explains to his Companions Why They Cannot Stop at the City of Arezzo

Arezzo was that city where for hours
we listened to those landlocked gibbons’ sons
shriek at us, hurl curses like flint-edged stones
as we watched from the city’s crayon towers.

We should have left then, but the honeybees
in the valley chose to sing a sad refrain
to the butterflies, making us insane
for a while with longing. Who would believe

that we, too, were looking for warm beds?
The next morning, we found our wings frost-charred.
Below, St. Monkey prayed to exorcise

us from our airy perches, so we fled
across their rooftops though we were not birds—
three leagues later, we were meteorites.

Though the preponderance of her work is in free verse, this exquisite sonnet, based on a famous painting by Giotto, demonstrates that Rogers is also adept in traditional form. In line 4, “crayon” give us our first clue that things are not what we perceive them to be. This word, in addition to mocking the pompous seriousness with which the populace view their architectural splendor (a “crayon” is primarily a child’s art medium, and is more often than not used inaccurately and clumsily), also gives us the sense that what we think of as real and solid is actually illusion, that these demons can see beyond surfaces into the heart of things in a way that the humans in the poem can’t.

But an astonishing transformation happens in the last line, which can be interpreted in at least three ways (and there may be some I haven’t thought of). The first interpretation is that they actually were meteorites all along, and the superstitious onlookers took them for demons and created this myth to explain the phenomenon. The second plausible reading is that they were in fact demons who were, in mid-flight, changed into meteorites by the intervening hand of God. The third possibility is that they were actually demons, and the story about them is true, but the modern rational mind, unable to accept their truth, creates a reasonable explanation by surmising that the spectators misinterpreted meteorites as demons, In this regard, “three leagues later” connotes the passage of time (centuries?) as well as distance. Which interpretation you accept depends on how you unravel the poem’s point of view: in whose mind does the narrative originate, the demon, an imaginative spectator who makes up the story because it seems real to him, or the modern rationalist? The poet does not resolve the enigma.

Another sonnet based on a famous artwork is:

Ars Poetica
After Death Stepping from a Coffin
By Georges Trubert (1467-1499)

—for Jim Whitehead (1935-2003)

Look at Death’s skinny legs, his under bite,
his bony hands like a comedian’s
as he stands upon a stage, telling one
bad joke after another. One foot’s
impossibly long; the other’s too short.
His skull is too big, too; a toss of his head
could send it toppling off his scrawny chicken neck.

The immaculate shroud that drapes his buttocks
is just for show; Death has no modesty.
The sky above him sparkles with lapis lazuli,
its harmonious blueness encircling the globe.
He is the ringmaster of these days of glory,
grinning as he gloats. We are his patrons,
loitering around life’s edges, taking notes.

The first aspect of this poem I notice is its wildly irregular structure, particularly the thyme scheme. The rhymes occur randomly, and are of a variety of types. There are no “true” rhymes, but patterns of sound based on assonance, consonance, and even one “slant” rhyme with what is called a “feminine” ending (modesty, lazuli, glory). This jumbled effect becomes cumulatively comical, replicating in sound the visual effect of the speaker’s perception of the painting and its subject. This reveals the poet’s highly sophisticated technical awareness and skill.

This poem is another example of Rogers’ complex layering of point of view. Perception is the theme of this sonnet. First, there is the painter’s personification of Death as a grotesquely comical mask for perhaps the most grimly serious fact of our lives. Second, there is the speaker’s interpretation of the painting, which adds a uniquely personal commentary in such declarations as “Death has no modesty.” Finally, the audience is manipulated by the interjection of the first person pronoun “we” into reacting to the spectacle. The poet craftily shifts the speaker’s voice from impersonal third person description to becoming a member of the audience at the end.

The formal structure creates another interesting perspective puzzle. Is the poet suggesting that there is an objective form, or “meaning”, to death, that death is subject to some form of control underlying its incoherence? Or does the form suggest wishful thinking on the part of the speaker, an attempt to patch together some rational sense to be made of death? Or does this formality apply only to the painting itself, an attempt on the part of the speaker to organize into coherent form its incoherent elements? Again, the poet does not resolve the matter.

Finally, there is the disturbing question raised by the title. It is often easy to overlook the light a title can shed on a poem. As “the ringmaster of these days of glory,” in this poem Death occupies an uncomfortable position within the realm of art and creativity. Those who inhabit “life’s edges” are specifically the world’s artists, who are by nature more often observers and recorders (“taking notes”) than participants in the pageantry of life and death. And it is the presence of Death that gives necessity and urgency to art. One does not have to share this view of the relationship between art and death to enjoy the poet’s skill in rendering the scene.

The personal poems have an entirely different “feel” to them. For example:

Looking at a Photograph of My Grandparents at Twenty

You’ll understand the slyness of his smile.
he seems rangy and wild, and you could sense
the redness of his hair. If you could se the negative,
you’d glimpse their fire, the way their edges radiate with heat
though we’ve cropped the danger from them.
We loved them, after all. We are still afraid not to.

What can we expose of their lives? He drank away
each workday night, fought with strangers
when not too far gone. His diaphragm surged with jealousy;
it was the inheritance he left his sons. He never knew
his folks: she knew she’d have to parent him.
We learned the reflex to indifference is not indifference;
it is anger and unrequited love.

This photo shows their smiles, not the grimaces of
my grandmother, not fifty, wracked with cancer,
nor those of the grief my grandfather assuaged
one afternoon by killing every dove he could find.
It does not tell you she died in my parents’ bed
as he waited in another room or hid in a bar
or sometimes at the quarry, anywhere
noise kept him from knowing death too soon.

When she went, he wasn’t beside her;
you wouldn’t know that, seeing them here together.
But she wouldn’t blame him, and he knew
she wouldn’t have wanted him there.
It was God’s name she called, as she had so many nights
during that last year, asking the questions Jesus had:
the one that wasn’t answered, and the one that was.

By looking at a photograph rather than into their real faces, the speaker is removed to a safe enough distance where she can vocalize the thoughts and feelings she has kept inside because they are difficult to admit. Not only did the actual people pose psychic dangers to the speaker, but even the memories can be dangerous (“you’d glimpse their fire”). At this distance, she can begin to understand them objectively. As a young girl in their presence, there were insurmountable barriers—her terror when confronted with the grandfather’s unpredictable anger and violence, and her discomfort with the grandmother’s obsessive religiosity, which could make even family members feel left out of her concern. But in the end, her sympathies lie more with the grandmother, who asks the questions the speaker would ask, which in fact each of us who believes in a God constantly asks..

Though Rogers is a supremely serious poet, who raises the most serious questions, she is capable of utilizing satiric humor in the service of seriousness, as in:

You're Not Alone

—based on a CD of the same name, which provides ambient sounds of a roommate for those who live alone

The subtlest is track fourteen:
the paper rustles; a lighter clicks,
a body shifts back in a creaky chair.
He clears his throat, expels
a soft and raspy cough.

You’re not alone. You’re with
the no one who is not there.

Track eleven runs the vacuum
in the hall when you neglect to,
Play this long track at inconvenient times.
like when you’re trying to nap
or read a poem or magazine.
It seems to know when you
have given up on peace; it stops and starts
the instant you rise from your seat.

A favorite track of some
is “Putting Up the Shopping.”
Cabinets open; drawers
are stubborn in their beds.
Cans of soup scrape paint
from all the slots they don’t belong in.
A package crackles, a gentle thud
announces something’s hit the floor.
The fridge runs on and on:
the door’s left open much too long.
Resist the urge to chide
the no one who is not there.

The sound of brushing teeth,
of shaving, or of combing back
a head of thinning hair
stirs the empty air of tracks three,
five, and nine. These are not perfect
tracks: the toilet seat
stays down just where you left it.
Towels are folded on the rack;
the shower curtain has been snapped
back into place.

Track six will put the kettle on,
track four will rifle through your mail,
and ten will doze off on the couch
with measured snores. Just
pretend it’s him making that noise,
the him that made you feel alone.
You might convince yourself,
in time, that the him on the soundtrack
is as much not there
as the him that used to be.

This poem would be hilarious were it not such a devastating description of how too many men function in relationships with women. One can sense a controlled fury just beneath the tongue-in-cheek humor. Some readers may find the poem prolix, but I want to defend its length. Like a prosecutor, the speaker patiently builds a thorough case against the one “who is not there” by offering exhibit after exhibit of evidence. And though the poem is about loneliness and boredom, the language is never boring.

The poems I have cited should give the reader a comprehensive idea of what is to be found in The Scholar’s Daughter. Denise Rogers’ poems reveal a fascinating depth of intellect, culture, and imagination, driven by a mind that penetrates into the heart of what it contemplates. She also has a gift for structuring experiences, whether in traditional form or free verse, with precision. I eagerly look forward to her future books of poetry.

Reprinted by permission of The Magnolia Quarterly. Copyright John Freeman.