Different Life/Different Poems [by Ellen Steinbaum]

It’s one of those clubs you don’t want to join, but since I didn’t get a choice, I am proud to be among the voices--brave, diverse, honest--in The Widows’ Handbook. Some of the writers were widowed only recently, while others, like me, write from a loss much farther behind us. In fact, my husband Carl died in 1996 and my contributions to the anthology are all in the section called “A Different Life. “ And that’s what I have, a different life. Different poems, too. 

A few years ago I was invited to write an essay on “why I write.” It was one of those moments writers know so well of writing to see what it is you think. I’m not sure I had recognized it specifically before, but what I realized was that I write to notice. I have always felt that one of the pleasures of writing was its demand that you pay attention in the world. I had even written about noticing as an act of consecration. One poem in which I write about tending plants, says, “apply attention--plainest form of love” Another ends, “what is holy in this life/is noticing.” 

So it came as a shock to realize that despite all that noticing I had missed a kind of big thing--mortality. Looking back I am stunned by my innocence. I was left alone after 33 years of marriage and what shocks me now is how I didn’t see it coming. Not just Carl’s death, but Death. 

I had lived a fortunate life in which several beloved people had died, but not really before their time or out of generational sequence.  When they died, I felt sadness and I missed them, but I wasn’t railing against fate. And, although I had certainly read and written poems that dealt with mortality, what I find hard to believe now is how I had never really gotten it before, never thought about how death is the most real thing about life. Somehow that had escaped my notice. I had never thought about how death is not waiting somewhere out there, distant, but is, rather, something we live side by side with every day, every minute, intertwined. Never thought about the ending rules our lives and elevates them. Never thought about how it is the dirty secret and the sacred gift. 

But now it really had my attention. It became my subject, my muse.  My poetry had usually been grounded in the details of my life and I couldn’t stop writing about this. My first book, Afterwords, is specifically about Carl’s illness and death.  I wrote the poems in real time, as I was going through the experience, from the early days of diagnosis through to a point a year or so after he died.  

Sometimes people said to me, “That must have been therapeutic for you to write.”  It was never poets who said that, of course. Poets know that, while it may be “therapeutic” to get down a first draft, the next step is to make it poetry, to take a dispassionate look at it and revise it into something more. I was definitely aware that I wanted to put together a collection that might speak to others thinking about loss.  But the goal I had in mind was for the book as companion, but also--maybe primarily--as poetry, without compromise. The reason I am so pleased to be part of The Widows’ Handbook is that I think it, too, holds both those objectives.

I may not have given much thought to mortality before Carl’s illness but the shadows were there all along. In both of my subsequent books there is at least one older poem--written before my life changed and before his ended--that fits right in. Just as we make discoveries in other poets’ work with each reading, we see new things in our own. I may not have noticed, but, yes, the shadows were there all along. 

“Of course,” my husband, Jim, would say: he is a psychoanalyst. My life is different now and part of that is my new marriage.  Jim was also widowed, and he and I are, every day, aware of our good fortune in finding each other and sharing a life that is a blurred mix of past and present. And so my poems are in the “Different Life” section of the anthology. This poem of mine is one I think of as symbolic of what that looks like:

Last night his late wife

came to him in a dream
then slid away, kept
slipping out of reach
down foreign streets
while I slept beside him
in our bed where my husband,
gone more than a decade now,
calls to me from time
to time, wants help
finding his cufflinks, keys.

 I see mortality as a more explicit presence in my work now. It creeps in no matter what else I think I am writing about. In my most recent book, Brightness Falls, I have a poem called “Getting the Picture,” which began as kind of a silly musing on how, when Jim and I were dating, we couldn’t find good words to refer to each other. (Boyfriend/girlfriend? Lover? Partner? Um...no.) But then, at the poem’s end, what presented itself was:

know this: it will
not last. Best not to hesitate. Hurry.
Don’t waste the time before
the light runs out.

 It could be simply part of getting older, this difference in my writing. I find myself drawn most often these days to work by older poets. There is energy and insouciance in youthful writing that I love, but I really treasure the perspective that age and experience bring. For those of us whose lives have been shattered, it is heartening to see, for ourselves and through the words of others, that there is more. 

At readings from the anthology, we read our own entries and also work by other contributors. It’s a privilege and a delight to read their words. It’s also a reminder that, though we have each been through very different experiences with a single common core, we all have survived and we continue. We go forth and live our lives. It’s not the same life. It’s a different life.  New and different work grows out of it.

 Ellen Steinbaum is the author of three poetry collections, Afterwords, Container Gardening, and Brightness Falls. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is included in Garrison Keillor’s anthology, Good Poems, American Places, and The Widows’ Handbook. She has also written and performed a one-person play, “CenterPiece.”  A former literary columnist for The Boston Globe,  she writes a blog, “Reading and Writing and the Occasional Recipe,” which can be found at her web site, ellensteinbaum.com.

Comments

[Sandee Storey]

So insightful and inspiring, even for those of us who are not widows.

[Fran putnoi]

You inform me with each word you scribe. Thank you