I am afraid of poetry. I was never bitten by an iambic pentameter or terrorized by a sonnet. However, I am as bad at identifying good poetry as I am at filling out my brackets for March Madness. (This year I was out of teams before the Sweet Sixteen.)
So, I mostly wait for someone else to recommend something to me. There are exceptions.
I discovered Rilke on my own. I stumbled into Dan Pagis, Yehudah Amichai, and Abba Kovner. And Stanley Kunitz.
I really like Kunitz’s poems, especially those from later in his life. I was enchanted and intrigued by the verse that begins his poem “The Quarrel.”
“The word I spoke in anger weighs less than a parsley seed, but a road runs through it that leads to my grave.”
I will admit to spending a long time unpacking it before I even got to the rest of this very short work. The images are exquisite, yet they do not fit together.
A word has no weight. A road cannot run through a seed, which is a container for life, but somehow leads to death.
Here, then, is an illustration of why I am afraid of poetry. So little of it begins with the easily understood Man from Nantucket.
Kunitz’s quarrel is with his beloved. He picked the fight as an old man, frightened of his approaching death and too old to cry.
I feel him trying to muster the strength to rage against the dying of the light, but instead exploiting the nearest person to him, body and soul. Because it is a known and reliable target.
Is his lament unique to old age? Those people long-lived enough to see their social circle contract and their mobility slow to a crawl likely feel his pain more acutely than the young.
Yet when I think about it—a long way (I hope) from the poet’s circumstance—I know the power of that word spoken in anger to disorient me as it hurts someone else. If I am going to be honest, I probably always have.
Parsley seeds are everywhere these days, cast to the wind with careless abandon. Anger is so common in public discourse that I worry we feel compelled to practice it gratuitously in private. I understand it, sort of.
The power of anger can pierce through the callouses we have developed over our more vulnerable and gentler (and more satisfying) emotions. Better to feel the sting of anger than to feel nothing at all.
Any time a contemporary poet uses the image of a road in a poem it is a shout out to Robert Frost. (Okay, I read him a little bit, too.) If you ever wondered where the road more traveled from that point of divergence went, you can get some sense of it from Kunitz.
It runs through a parsley seed thrown off by anger. It leads to your grave, though perhaps not as quickly. But it certainly feels that way.
The other road also leads to your grave, I am sorry to say. There’s no avoiding it.
However (and now I am about to exhaust my supply of literary references), at least it is not a hell of other people of your own making. It is the choice instead to find heaven in each other.
Technically, no word weighs more than a parsley seed, whether spoken in anger, love or indifference. But I have tried harder in my advancing years to reflect on the symbolic weight my words carry before I deploy them. I have been on this journey for a while, and I am not looking to arrive at the destination too soon.
Meanwhile, I will continue my tentative admiration of poetry. I just noticed that roses are red.
