Summary:

This is a poem of acceptance and personal strength. The narrator has given up the effort to NOT be like her father, a self-pitying, "defeated" failure. She accepts him, she becomes him, she is transformed: "I /myself, he, I shined." She understands that fate planted her, like a tulip bulb, in that family, and she is now "sure of [her]rightful place."

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The poem is narrated by Fra Lippo Lippi, a Florentine painter and friar of the fifteenth century. Lippi is stopped by watchmen just as he drunkenly leaves a bordello. They tell him that he ought not be on the streets at night and are surprised to find a friar in such a state. Drunkenly, Lippi tells them his story. He was orphaned and taken to a monastery where the monks set him to work painting on the walls of the church.

The friars are amazed by his skill, but insist that he remove his work for it is a representation of bodies, not of souls. It does not teach a moral lesson, either. So Lippi sarcastically paints a gruesome picture of the martyred Saint Lawrence. When a group of nuns enlist his help, he paints a cloudy collection of saints surrounding Mary but in the corner is an image of himself. He enters their presence in all his fleshy glory.

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After a face lift operation, the protagonist tells the poet, "I’m all right." She describes her voyage into anesthesia, where "Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard . . . . " Afterward, after the dressings come off, she sees that she has grown backwards, "I’m twenty, / Broody and in long skirts on my first husband’s sofa . . . . " "Old sock-face" is gone--no loss! She wakes, "swaddled in gauze, / Pink and smooth as a baby."

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You went out with the turning tide --Addressing her dead husband, the poet mourns the fact that he has thrown out "the bound volumes of our years . . . . " She asks why did he end his own life, "What dark eye smiled from the bore?" But no answer is forthcoming; she must simply live with the loss and endure it.

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This poem takes the form of a guided imagery, one woman talking to another about sexual love between two women. She urges the listener Barbara to picture this, nuzzle, touch, or imagine that, selecting sights and scents found in the natural world to guide this sensory projection from the known to the unknown (lilacs wet with rain, ocean foam, the feel of poppies, the smell of wild mint). The entire guided imagery is achieved without explicit sexual imagery, yet the poem is deeply sensual.

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A young woman with chronic pain associated with menses seeks sterilization, but the doctors refuse, saying it would be unethical to sterilize someone so young. Yet, this woman has known from a young age that she would not be a good parent, has little interest in ever being a parent, and feels that a parent should have ample time to be wonderful with children all the time. She simply feels she cannot take on this level of responsibility. Even though the doctor says she would have to live with her sterilization decision forever, she knows that the converse is true: having children is something she would have to live with forever, too.

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This poem by physician-poet Mukand transforms what might be unobserved and ordinary into the visible and extraordinary. A frail old woman with a disease of "no cure," probably cancer, is in the waiting room at a hospital or clinic. The narrator, whom we suspect is the second character, as well, a medical student, spins with delicacy a thoughtfully real and imaginative description of the waiting patient.

Readers see her "blue gauze scarf," "her gnarled, polished walking stick," and her pained body, but are provided with, additionally, an imaginary account of the effects of the disease on the woman as she struggles with pain through her final months. When the student enters the waiting room, the woman extends her "brittle" hand, then pulls from her black bag a sealed envelope. When instructed to open it, the student finds a fifty-dollar bill "to help with school." Caught by surprise, he smiles, but leaves the bill in her palm: "It lies in her palm like a / handful of earth picked up, raised / to the sky / as an offering to the spring wind."

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This extraordinary anthology of 65 poems examines the relationship of parents to their grown children from the parents’ point of view. The poets are well known (among these, Grace Paley, Ruth Stone, Kumin, Maxine , Marilyn Hacker, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Linda Pastan), and lesser known, female and male ( Dick Allen, Raymond Carver, Hayden Carruth, and Robert Creeley), but all poems deal head on with situations that often confront parents.

Situations examined are: the addiction of grown children ("To My Daughter"), their illnesses ("Pittsburgh," "Anorexia"), their own visible aging ("The Ways of Our Daughters"), the frustration of poor communication ("Lowater Bridge," "Harmonies for the Alienation of My Daughter," "Listen," "Potentially Fatal Toes," "Letter to a Son I Once Knew"), the way parents aren’t really the people their children think they are ("The Children"), and the joy when, even for a moment, love and safety reign ("Time, Place, and Parenthood," "Visual Ritual").

In these poems parents stand at the doorway and watch their children caring for their own children ("Sometimes," "Practicing") and they invoke family histories ("The Blessing," "Girl Children," "On an Old Photograph of My Son"). They dread the ringing of the phone ("Hours After Her Phone Call," "Long Distance Call from the Alone & Lonely") and they worry over children’s marriages, physical pains, and the disasters in their lives that parents cannot fix but feel they might have caused ("What I Need to Tell You," ""Letter: Thursday, 16 September," "Love is Not Love").

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Levertov structures this poem in many ways like a Biblical psalm: repetition, irregular rhythms, direct address. The poem is also reminiscent of a Catholic litany in which saints are invoked in repetitive phrases. It moves forward by piling particularity upon particularity. The movement of the first part of the poem corresponds to the process of aging, preparing to die, letting go of the world, a natural flow or rhythm. However, this natural process is aborted: "She did not die."

The second part of the poem invokes the unnatural state in which she "lies half-speechless, incontinent, / aching in body, wandering in mind . . ." and describes the tubes and sores. "She is not whole." While the psalmist praises "O Lord of mysteries" for the beauty of sudden death, she cries "how baffling, how clueless / is laggard death . . . ." Death "that steals / insignificant patches of flesh" is a mystery.

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The gashed hand of a factory worker is bandaged by the factory owner’s son. The worker is at first embarrassed, then compliant. As his fingers work, the owner’s son begins to notice the details of the other hand and to conjure images--"wings of butterflies" and "the marks of wild ponies’ play"--in the worker’s rough hand. Somehow this establishes a brief bond that transcends the class barrier between the two in an act of healing.

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