On Naming
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”
—Emily Dickinson
Dear Readers,
What did Emily Dickinson mean by the above quote? Poet Jay Parini said, “Anyone can understand this feeling, which is a need as well. When a loved one dies, for example, a funeral or memorial service follows: a formal event that mirrors the urge toward form that comes in the wake of tragedy. The ceremony is useful in helping those in grief to assuage their feelings, to organize their thoughts and recollections, to imagine themselves in relation to the loss that has caused the pain. There is something about the ceremony itself that assists in making the pain endurable by, in obvious ways, naming it. Without the ceremony, those in grief would experience a mess of unnamed, even unrecognized, feelings.”
A huge part of poetry’s value is recognizing and naming pain and loss and, possibly, providing healing. A poem can articulate something a reader can’t quite say and hasn’t found the words for. Much of our lives can seem chaotic, disorderly, fragmented. A poem can give us order and wholeness, even if it is transitory. A poem has a form, a shape. It is a constructed thing. The words are ordered and arranged in a certain way. I believe Poet Robert Frost is correct when he said that poetry offers a “momentary stay against confusion.”
I wrote the following poem for my father’s funeral.
Accounting
He can figure percentages in a flash:
exact, errorless, without a calculator.
I can too, without wanting,
without trying.
One afternoon in late September
showing my tax return
my father’s old math-mind-magic returns;
he leans toward the numbers.
Some men lean together
in beer-stained armchairs toward games
on Sunday afternoons, the TV commentators
doing the talking, others against rifles
in drafty deer blinds. At times we had leaned
those ways, but accounting is closer
to home. He spots a charitable donation
I haven’t claimed. Talking taxes
is not what I wanted as a young man.
I pushed him to lean
as the winds of my requests shifted.
He pushed back. I moved away
not calling to endure
gaps of silence on the phone
until I found my way as he found
when, leaving his father’s farm,
he opened his accounting firm.
Anger drained, I met him where he was
and now, taking a break from Schedule A
we walk outside on a brilliant New Mexico day,
admiring over a thousand tomatoes in my garden.
You’ve got a green thumb
like my father had, he says with a bounce.
We stand together in silence
watching fruit ripening.
My wife joins us.
Rubbing her belly, I feel the boy inside
kick toward my hand or, I wonder, is he pushing
and I think I understand: my father pushed
like his father pushed
and my son will push, and I
pray before the final accounting
we will lean together.
Writing the poem was healing. Reading it during the funeral was healing. At its most basic level, when we accurately match words with feelings, it can be healing. Twenty-five years after my father’s funeral, when I read “Accounting,” it still feels accurate.
David
