"This heat still underfoot"

Posting by Leon Wing

Poem by Simon Perchik 

This heat still underfoot
reminds you how the sun
would come to your grave's edge

with flowers, with a sky
whose season now is lost
and the listening

that goes on forever.
You can tell from the silence
I'm standing close, my footmarks

stopped—for a while we are both dead.
Who but you would think about daylight
how colors tire so easily here

biding their time, listening
to one foot beside the other
never letting go and the warmth.

taken from Poetry Kanto No. 23, 2007
Copyright © 2007 by Kanto Poetry Center. Yokohama, Japan.
All rights reserved.

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Recently the world of poetry has seen the passing of quite a number of poets: Harold Pinter, Adrian Mitchell, Pulitzer winner Hayden Carruth, Australian Dorothy Porter, at a not so old age of just 54; including those writing in languages other than English, like Pakistani  Ahmed Faraz and Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish. 

The most recent deaths are WD Snodgrass and Mick Imlah, just this month.

The poet of this poem, Simon Perchik, is still with us. But he is very old, born in 1923, in New Jersey, the US. He used to work as an attorney, before retiring in 1980. He has published more than 20 books already. His poetry has appeared in print and online magazines, including The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Poetry magazine, The Nation, North American Review, Beloit, and CLUTCH; and jacketmagazine.com.

Perchik writes the first line as though the departed in question is not dead at all, if warmth, or heat, in this case, is any indication. We find out that “this heat” is not from a warm (and living) body. It is from the sun, the celestial source of warmth and energy blanketing every manner of being, living or dead.

In line two of stanza one, this heat is not putting the poet in mind of the sun, but “you”, the one buried (“underfoot”), that he is visiting. The poet hasn’t brought any flowers, the sun has.

There is a very unusual linguistic construction at the end of stanza two. It runs on towards the start of stanza three. “and the listening/ that goes on forever” is so much a non sequitur, after this buried one is reminded of the heat and flowers, and a season that has passed.

This probably indicates the stasis of listening from someone who is dead. This is underpinned in the next line when the poet stands close to the grave, in a silence so utter that for an instance the visitor could well be dead, too.  And, probably the poet is wishing this, so deep is the grief.

Now, who’s the pessimist here? Not the dead one, who, buried, should not be able to see light anyway but is able to think about light, and about how colours (probably of the flowers from the sun) fade in time.

Though dead and buried this one is listening to silent footfalls or “footmarks”.  The motif of "foot" is all over this poem: underfoot, footmarks, foot.  We are actually seeing the visitor from the point of view of the one whose grave he's visiting - at foot level, or beneath.  From this level or POV this buried one cannot hear the visitor's footfall upon her - we presume it's a her, for convenience's sake - grave.  But she could tell there are "footmarks" above her.

In the last two stanzas, Perchik deliberately omitted commas in three places: at the ends of "daylight", "here" and "other".  This has the effect of turning the end-stopping of those words into run-ons or enjambements.  The only time he uses that punctuation is between "time" and "listening", when he wants the reader to observe a silence in the listening to the shifting of the visitor's foot from one to the other.   Without the comma after "other", now, who is not letting go?

The last three words of the last line parallel the non sequitor we observe earlier with “and the listening/that goes on forever.” ; so that the reader is reminded of this “dead” listening, again. Now we realise the reason for this unsual syntax in both the non sequitors.

"A Cortege of Daughters"

I haven’t been reading much poetry lately, and have instead immersed myself completely in dry, heavy but very thought-provoking literary criticism and philosophical treatise for my Masters research, so putting up this write-up is sort of a welcome break and relief.

A Cortege of Daughters

A quite ordinary funeral; the corpse
unknown to the priest. The twenty-third psalm.
The readings by serious businessmen
one who nearly tripped on the unaccustomed pew.
The kneelers and the sitters like sheep and goats.

But by some prior determination a row
of daughters and daughters-in-law rose
to act as pallbearers instead of men
all of even height and beautiful.
One wore in her hair a black and white stripped bow.

And in the midst of their queenliness
one in dark flowered silk, the corpse
had become a man before they reached the porch
so loved he had his own dark barge
which their slow moving steps rowed
as a dark lake is sometimes surrounded by irises.

by Elizabeth Smither

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New Zealand poet Elizabeth Smither visited Malaysia for the KL Lit Fest earlier this year, and I was very fortunate to have sat in on her session together with Nic and Machinist. We were actually a little late that day, but the reading, having moved to the cosier and more intimate book room at Silverfish, helped us settle in easily. The crowd was small, as all poetry readings are, but it was quite lively, with a number of questions being posed. I made a remark them, of how the poems she read, evince a kind of lightness of touch, yet pa controlled measure. Indeed, this is evident in the poem today.

The poem starts out simply, describing the scene of a funeral in a church. The usual rites of the funeral performed, with the reading of a favourite passage from the Bible, and eulogies by friends, and people being led in prayer (as indicated by kneelers), but the quiet respectfulness or (perhaps) grief in the poem is disturbed by the starkness of the word “corpse” (instead of the name of the deceased) sticking out quite uncomfortably at the end of the first line. This cold distance of the funeral is also signalled by the priest not knowing the deceased personally, the awkward “serious” reading by businessmen, one of whom stumbled at the pew. The mention of kneelers and sitters suggests a further emotional or spiritual separation among those gathered there; those who are Catholics praying and participating, and those who are just attending the funeral. (The sheep and goats is a biblical reference to a similar condition.) All in all, the whole funeral seem rather ‘empty’ in a way, ritualistically lifeless as the person lying in the coffin.

But…. this first word of second paragraph, marks a change in the funeral. Daughters and daughters-in-law of the deceased form the procession of pallbearers, with their dear father and father-in-laws’ weight upon their shoulders, carrying and accompanying him in love and respect down the aisle of the church. Traditionally, it is the men who are bound to shoulder this duty, which makes this gesture all the more beautiful. The unobvious ‘rose’ as verb in the seconf line refers to the roses these women form as a part of his cortege,

One may feel the soft rhythm and smoother flow of the run-ons in the lines of this secondd paragraph, compared to the shorter, staccato-like (?) lines with caesura breaks (breaks in the middle of lines) in the first. Moreover, the gentle and unobtrusive rhyme of ‘row’ and ‘bow’ in the first and last line also completes it aesthetically, just as the third and last paragraph completes a beautiful turn in the funeral.

With his ladies-of-honour accompanying him, “the corpse/ had become a man”, no longer just a dead body, but a person and a man whose life is being cherished for all that he was. Indeed, I think I won’t explicate more, but ask you to re-read and appreciate the beauty of the final imagery that humanises death and makes it beautiful and meaningful.

Elizabeth Smither is New Zealand's Te Mata Poet Laureate. She has published thirteen collections of poems: Here Come the Clouds (1975); You’re Very Seductive William Carlos Williams (1978); The Sarah Train (1980); The Legend of Marcello Mastroianni’s wife (1981); Casanova’s Ankle (1981); Shakespeare Virgins (1983); Professor Musgrove’s Canary (1986); Gorilla/ Guerilla (1986); Animaux (1988); A Pattern of Marching (1989); A Cortège of Daughters (1993); The Tudor Style: Poems New and Selected (1993); The Lark Quartet (1999)..There have also been four novels, First Blood (1983) , Brother-love Sister-love (1986), The Sea Between us (2002), Different Kinds of Pleasure (2006); three collections of short stories, Nights at the Embassy (1990), Mr Fish (1994), The Mathematics of Jane Austen (1997); a book for children, Tug Brothers (1983); an edition of her journals, The Journal Box (1996); and co-edited with David Hill The Seventies Connection (1987)