Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Epithalamium Are we married? There are no bells. No banquets. The mailman has no messages for us. We keep our names. The law of the land says no. Yet there has been a shift, the air is brighter, or darker, in the morning, and it is not entirely due to the changing seasons. The seasons changed in us. You get up in the cold and make the same Sunday brunch, egg and avocado on a bed of spinach and whole wheat toast, and it is a banquet. The alarm that wakes me to write, leaving you asleep in bed, calls like church bells. Why do I then wander round our apartment, questioning, looking out the windows, reading the women poets who passed this way? Anne Carson says, I found myself thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon at a man who no longer cherishes me. Louise Glück says, Then begins the terrible charity of marriage. Marie Howe asks, Who shoved this bayonet into the man’s head? answers, His wife. They all speak the truth, and it is not beautiful....

I read Carson's long poem "The Glass Essay" again yesterday, and enjoyed it immensely for its narrative maneuvers and literary musings, although Guy Davenport, in his introduction, exaggerates when he says that it is a poem "richer than most novels nowadays." His comment either means something, in which case it is patently false since Carson's poem does not aim at novelistic detail, or it means nothing, playing it safe with that qualifier "most." "The Glass Essay" tells two intertwined stories: the abandonment by a lover, and the suffering of a father from Alzheimer's. Presiding over the stories is the tutelary spirit of Emily Bronte, loveless, unloved. The language of the poem is deliberately unlyrical; some may even call it prosy. Here's the opening of the section titled "Three": Three silent women at the kitchen table. My mother's kitchen is dark and small but out the window there is the moor, paralyzed wi...