Welcome to the new iteration of my blog! I’ve decided the next few posts will be poems of mine that have been published in some form elsewhere (with links, where possible, to the elsewhere) along with a little discussion about the poem. Today’s poem is “40.” It’s “published” as a song, actually, by Optimist Park (click to listen).

Elaine Elizabeth Belz
40
(a pantoum)

Must this dark picture be my destiny?
In your penned note, I hear my own voice call…
The windows turn to mirrors at nightfall,
As I act scenes from your blind prophecy.

In your penned note, I hear my own voice call –
The woman you were, I will one day be.
As I act scenes from your blind prophecy,
I watch my life drip slowly down the wall:

The woman you were, I will one day be.
Here, in your last words, you describe it all –
I watch my life drip slowly down the wall;
I grope to salvage what is left of me.

Here, in your last words, you describe it all.
Must this dark picture be my destiny?
I grope to salvage what is left of me…
The windows turn to mirrors at nightfall.

ABOUT THIS POEM

This poem, “40,” a pantoum, was written fairly quickly in (I think) 1997. I remember sitting at the dining room table in the Ferndale, MI apartment I was sharing with a friend, puzzling this one together. I enjoyed it because it really is a lot like doing a crossword. The thing about the pantoum form is that you pick a simple rhyme scheme – here, abba – and plug lines in where they go: the second and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and third of the next. You can use an abab rhyme scheme, and I think it has a different effect. Here, the recycling of lines gives a bit of a dizzy feeling (to me, anyway), while the abba scheme makes it turn back on itself while spinning, so to speak.

But I didn’t know about pantoums when I wrote this. OK, it’s not so miraculous as I just made it sound. I had memorized Baudelaire’s poem, “Harmonie du soir“ for a French phonetics class, and it nestled down somewhere in my soul. I loved the musicality of it – and his lines really do sing, although the song is melancholy and nostalgic.

I decided to try to copy the form I didn’t know was a form, per se, but Baudelaire had used it and now I was going to. However, I have this perfectionist inside me – one that thinks I can’t possibly be a perfectionist because I don’t seem to ever get anything right – so I thought, Why don’t I wrap those ends up? I did that, but as the failure of a perfectionist I’ve always been, I fell short of my next idea: I tried to get as close to a spondaic meter as I could (“Slow spondee stalks, strong foot yet ill able…”) and, alas, that didn’t quite work out. (Part of me is saying right now, Shh! Don’t admit that!)

The image which to me is the central image (although it appears only in one line, which appears twice) is the windows that turn to mirrors at night-fall. I grew up in the country (Hamburg, if you know Southeastern Michigan) in a ranch on a hill with a partially-buried basement. The living room and dining room/kitchen were on one end of the house, and had picture windows wrapping around them. Because we were in the country, and fairly high up (for Southeastern Michigan), we didn’t pull the shades down when it got dark. Literally, the windows turned to mirrors, and that phenomenon stuck with me. I think on some level, it always felt symbolic.

The poem is titled “40” because it began with a scene in the memoir of a famous poet’s daughter (I’m a little nervous to name names, as the daughter’s still alive, but you might figure it out). The poet died shortly after age 40, and the scene involved a letter she had written to her daughter a few years before.

I enjoy reading memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies about creative people, and often wind up getting a poem or three out of them, but I always write out of the mood and images I’m left with after reading. I am not writing about the subject of the book, or anyone in it. That’s another reason I hesitate to name names – I may have written something influenced by what I read about them, but I am not writing about them. Well, not usually.

The line, “I watch my life drip slowly down the wall,” however, is a nod to a different poet, Sylvia Plath. It alludes to these lines from “Contusion” (click to read the full poem):

The size of a fly,
the doom mark
crawls down the wall

I hope the poem feels a bit like the experience of finding oneself in those moments when all our efforts to look out at the world get turned around and we feel trapped in introspection. While I firmly believe a poem takes on a life of its own and can mean different things to different people at different times, I don’t mind sharing some of what I see in it – as long as you agree not to force the poem to stay inside that mold.

For me, the plaintive question in the first stanza, “Must this dark picture be my destiny?” has been reclaimed by the persona, who now asks it rhetorically: her answer is a firm “no.” In the third stanza – again, for me – there’s a bit of despair in groping “to salvage what is left of me.” (Emphasis added, of course.) In the fourth stanza, it is – to me – a declaration of intent “to salvage what is left of me.” Now the windows-turned-mirrors are less claustrophobia-inducing. They have provided insight, and the persona can claim the very self that will again look out onto the world through the windows, once day arrives.

I’m bipolar, and I’ve been through that sort of night many, many times.

However, this poem can mean whatever it means to you.

Thank you for reading!
—Elaine

Listen to a song by Optimist Park that puts this poem to music! I dared him to do it, to be honest.