By Mary Karr
Sunday, May 11, 2008; BW11
Whether a child recklessly runs into traffic or clings until peeled off, every mother must balance keeping said child safe while urging him or her to self-reliance. Worrying that bone kept me up long after my wailing infant had gone to sleep.
The mother in Sarah Harwell's "Dead" recounts one of the small miseries of parenting: nightly wrestling a wakeful child toward sleep, which -- in mythological terms -- is within the kingdom of Hades.
The way my daughter sleeps it's as if she's talking
to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll
backwards in her head, her senses fold
one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat.
Every night she fights this silent way of being
with all the whining ammunition she has.
She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small
and willful links to life that carry her away.
Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She's gone to Hades
with her stuffed animals. When she wakes,
the sad circles disappeared, she blinks
before she knows me. I have listened
to one million breaths of her. And every night
my body seizes when she leaves to go
where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.
Harwell's frustration leads her to examine how she implanted the daughter's clinginess since her own body seizes when the child finally "leaves to go/where I am not."
The form of the poem replicates the paradox of the situation. The first stanza has two end rhymes: rOll/fOld -- a pattern of matching that devolves into deliberate half-matching and finally unmatching ends of lines: bEat/bEing; awAy/HAdes; waKes/blinKs. In the last stanza, there's a perfect twinning: "she leaves to GO"/"I urge her, GO."
On an unconscious level, this final replication exceeds the early rhyme but also thwarts it when the two sounds become identical (as the mother and daughter must not). The mother's relief at the child's departure ultimately prompts self-indictment for ordering the girl into Hell.
Without such boundless rivers of guilt, maternal love would be cheap stuff. Hardly worth celebrating.
(Sarah Harwell's poem "Dead" appears in "Three New Poets:Sarah C. Harwell, Farah Marklevits, Courtney Queeney." Sheep Meadow. Copyright 2006.)
Mary Karr's most recent book of poems is "Sinners Welcome."
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