Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, June 8, 2008

William Matthews beat brain cancer only to keel over from heart failure in 1997, the day after his 55th birthday. A Yale-educated WASP, Matthews mocked the tight-lipped stoicism that was his birthright, while elevating it into high style.

His poem "Wasps" begins with his father sprinting the golf course, "trailing a loud plume/of wasps, slapping himself, jockey and horse." But of course, the game goes on. . . .

while surly welts bloomed on his neck and arms.

"They're not individuals," he complained.

What was I to golf, or golf to me?

I played to keep my father's company.

"They're cells. The nest is the real animal."

That line about keeping his "father's company" pierces me: a sweet longing injected into a cool description of a cool man. In "Men at My Father's Funeral," Matthews opens with the keen fear of death that even the most restrained men exude at funerals.

The ones his age who shook my hand

on their way out sent fear along

my arm like heroin. These weren't

men mute about their feelings,

or what's a body's language for?

And I, the glib one, who'd stood

with my back to my father's body

and praised the heart that attacked him?

I'd made my stab at elegy,

the flesh made word: the very spit

in my mouth was sour with ruth

and eloquence. What could be worse?

Silence, the anthem of my father's

new country. And thus this babble

like a dial tone, from our bodies.

Silence and loneliness often plague Matthews's characters. In "Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959," a young man in a stadium's nosebleed seats is not -- as we first think -- engaged in festive male-bonding. He's hiding from a bad marriage. The poem's mutating half rhymes follow a barely noticeable Petrarchan sonnet form: "We saw the whole court from up there./Few girls/had come, few wives, numerous boys in molt/like me." By "in molt" he means old enough to be losing hair. The volta, or turn in the poem, comes before the last six lines, when fast-spun reversals wind down into agonized introspection:

Our heroes leapt and surged and looped

and two nights out of three, like us, they'd lose.

But "like us" is wrong: we had no result

three nights out of three: so we had heroes.

And "we" is wrong, for I knew none by name

among that hazy company unless

I brought her with me. This was loneliness

with noise, unlike the kind I had at home

with no clock running down, and mirrors.

The tagline plants a dagger as the speaker indicts himself for his own absence. William Matthews's death still rings loud in American letters.

("Wasps," "Men at My Father's Funeral," and "Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959" are from "Time & Money" by William Matthews. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. Copyright 1995 by William Matthews.)

Mary Karr's most recent book of poems is "Sinners Welcome."