Elaine Elizabeth Belz

40

Must this dark picture be my destiny?
In your penned note, I hear my own voice call…
The windows turn to mirrors at night-fall,
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 night-fall.
___________________________

This is from my 1998 book, When Midnight Comes Around, whose theme was identity. The poem itself was inspired by a scene in the opening pages of Linda Grey Sexton's biography of her mother, poet Anne Sexton, titled Looking For Mercy Street. That's where the title comes from (a fragment of a letter from the poet to her daughter), but it's also a significant number in the Bible, a symbol of trial or testing in which one proves one's mettle (think of the Israelites wandering for 40 years after the Exodus, or Noah on the ark 40 days & nights, according to one version of the story, or of Jesus in the wilderness 40 days).

I didn't know much about the formal style of a pantoum at the time; I'd only read (and memorized for my French Phonetics class) Baudelaire's poem, "Harmonie du Soir," which, it turns out, is a pantoum.

Sometimes in a pantoum (such as "Harmonie du Soir") the beginning and ending are a little different. I chose to close the circle, so to speak. I felt it would add to the claustrophobic feeling I was going for, while at the same time throwing into relief (I hope!) the transformation that's taken place as the persona has come to see herself and her surroundings differently: in the beginning of the poem, the windows changing to mirrors close the persona off into a prison of sorts; by the end of the poem, I hope, they represent insight she has gained about herself and her agency.

I highly recommend writing a pantoum. I've only written this one, but it was a blast. It's kinda like a crossword puzzle, since, any time you place a line, it pops up somewhere else and prescribes what you can do next (or where you can place your next line). Definitely a challenge but a really heady one!

***For collaborative purposes: As with all poems I put up here, feel free to re-record the voice if you want for any reason, and/or to edit the title off the front of my reading, or tweak the speed, etc. The recording as it stands is :55. Feel free to excerpt lines for other purposes (illustrations, tiny stories, setting to music, "remixing" your own poem, etc.).

From my Thanksgiving walk home. A branch up above me. I liked it in isolation against the sky.