A Living Grief: reading Arlene Ang's The 23rd Secret Love Poem
by Lia Lynch
| Poem: | The 23rd Secret Love Poem | |
| Poet: | Arlene Ang | |
| Published in: | The Frogmore Papers, #68 |
Usually too harsh when considering contemporary poetry, I tend to automatically devalue a poem if the title is in any way lazy; titles such as “Depression” or “For My Mother” earn my scorn and subsequent readings of the work are always colored by that initial assumption of poetic indolence. As I began my journey through The 23rd Secret Love Poem, having read the title and laughingly assumed I'd be perusing the psychology of a stalker, I was immediately confused by the subtle imagery of the first stanza – what love, what secret (to my mind, unrequited) love, can possibly be sustained while wearing ecru anything and feeding goldfish?
By the end of my first reading, I'd realized this was a poem of loss, a small slice of anticipatory grief that was marked by the image of shriveled, forgetful lips. Sweet and sad, but nothing of real note… until I found myself wondering about the identity of the speaker, the secret of the title, and the third presence in the poem, introduced in the last stanza. I'd assumed the speaker was the wife, or some other close family member, lamenting the slow decline of her husband. If, however, this was a person close to the subject, why is it that only “on rare / days [they] hold hands”(13-14)? I imagined my husband dying, my mother dying, and there was no place in the picture for reluctance to touch, not to the point of rarity. Then there is the final, tantalizing image offered, a veritable fishhook that remains imbedded in the mind no matter how much you shake your head, the “woman next door / peering behind aquamarine blinds”(17-18) for whose kiss the subject is waiting, of whom the dying man dreams. After four seemingly simple stanzas, straightforward and relatively clean, the last stanza is jarring in its potential complications.
So I read the poem again, this time clearly envisioning a nurse, in the stereotypical beige jumper, entering a sickroom and feeding the expectant goldfish, a subtle metaphor for the entrapment and dependence of a sick body. The third time I read the poem the second stanza demanded my attention, the mermaid – a lovely morph from the fish metaphor in the first stanza – subtly indicating a long-standing relationship between speaker and subject while simultaneously providing the image of slowly blinded, wasting flesh (7). The “plastic seaweed sways with fins” (8) became the jangle of paraphernalia present in a sickroom, making the image pretty while emphasizing its artificiality. The transition from fish tank to sick bed is made smoothly in the first line of the third stanza, but the clunky, “unread book and / sauce stains on pages 5-9, IV bags / that shrivel” (10-12) breaks the softly reminiscent poem over the knee of numbers, acronyms, and impossible scenarios, jarring the reader into a dissonant, incredulous awareness of approaching death. This awareness is not dampened by the whispered prayers of a forgotten, touch-starved caregiver in the fourth stanza, but rather is given depth – her grief is complex, painful, with hints of dark anger. He may dub her sometimes “Sylvia , sometimes Rosemary ”(16), but she can “carry his name” (15) in her whispers, wielding a compromised, but living, feminized power over a deteriorating patriarchy.
Regardless of the number of times I read the poem, I cannot puzzle out the woman in the window. Could she be merely a figment of the dreaming man's imagination? Is she a nosy-parker neighbor, symbolizing the unyielding impossibility of reconciling oneself with death, à la Derrida? Or is she the wife in the next room, a wife who needs to perform that final Freudian infidelity of bidding her love-object goodbye? Perhaps she is simply the speaker, whoever she is, nurse or daughter, lover or friend, who is ideally remembered in the dying man's dreams, and whose loving care is less a solace than a soft shackle to a man ready to pass on?
Of course, that woman is all of us – every reader who must bid this poem farewell, time and again, as we do our dead, knowing it is not quite enough for a sense of closure but yet must suffice. Winner of the Frogmore Poetry Prize in 2006, Arlene Ang's The 23rd Secret Love Poem offers a profoundly poignant window through which I highly recommend a reader step and participate in the bittersweet process of mourning the living.
And I'll never judge a poem by its title again.
Lia Lynch is, in varying order and to varying degrees: a mother,
a bartender, homeless, a bookkeeper, a doctoral candidate, tattooed,
a wife, a poet, a native New Yorker, a thief... but never a beggarman.
Soon relocating to the U.K. by way of Berkeley, California,
she hopes to be pleasantly discombobulated
for a very, very long time.