From Rasa by Joanne Dominique Dwyer, winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. It's terrific!
Chaperone
To keep watch. Not my indigo eye on the ball
nor in the blacklight peephole.
Not on the blisters dappling my feet.
Nor on the beauty or the ugly in the mirror.
But on the children in the playground and on the fur-matted squirrels.
From a wooden tower, the running herds.
From the leaning alabaster lighthouse, a one-armed mermaid
out-swimming the divers, with tanks on their backs –
chasing her, like erasers of magic.
Eye on the bird, that its head does not hit glass.
On the sky, for the sun’s second coming, though she
might have been inebriated when she swore to return.
My small room smelling like canned tuna fish in oil.
My dry cough keeping both of us awake.
Chaperone: The supervision of vulnerable women in public spaces.
A shepherd is a chaperone.
Neruda asking What do they call the sadness of a solitary sheep?
Derived from the French word for a hood or a cape.
Covering the eyes of a prisoner.
And the children sinking in the winter mud needed rescue.
I was a child sinking in winter mud and needed rescue.
And someone did come and grab my wrists.
Ars Poetica of “Chaperone” by Joanne Dominique Dwyer
The conception of the poem Chaperone was hatched from the word itself. I am enamored with the geneses and meanings of words. In the act of making poems, I often find myself going down the yellow brick roads and the snow-covered paths of etymology. A treasure hunt that feeds my propensity for leaping imagistic associations in my poems.
The existence of oral and written language is proof enough for me that life, in all its marvels and mysteries, is worthy of digging one’s heart and heels into. And so goes the poet, heave-ho, not deterred by the glob of purple Jell-O or virescent leek aioli on her chin, into the fecund snake pit, into the scalding sea of lava, into the sunbaked salt flats of the imagination with only a canteen of water and a quill. And what gets pulled out of the hat of the poet’s mind is sometimes preordained through careful plodding and other times is an unexpected dinner guest. And on rare occasions a bedfellow or a take-to-the-grave beacon of light.
What excites me about Chaperone is that sans a premeditated intention or conceit, other than exploring its etymology, the poem, without forced entry, unveils a communiqué. It’s as if the poet gets out of the way and the poem writes itself. The poem is no longer mine. I do not possess it; it possesses me.
And what uncoils is a suggested hierarchy of what to keep our eyes on, what to care for and be custodial towards, and what not to. The poem advises us not be concerned with the mundane, the lurid, or the beauty and the ugly of our individual bodies. Instead, to focus on beings with less agency, like children and animals. A one-armed mermaid and an anthropomorphized sun extends the girth of the poem into the mythic – an area of great psychic and cultural importance. Asking for custodial attention there as well, less there be an extinction of the mythological as well as the natural world.
The poem drops in register with two confessional lines about the ordinary and faulted life of the speaker – her cough and her room smelling like tuna. From there, several imagistic pit stops or fueling stations caravan in a powerful line from Neruda’s “Book of Questions.” Pablo becomes a guest star.
The poem culminates in narrative – at first global or collective: And the children sinking in the winter mud needed rescue. Then ends with the autobiographical singular: I was a child sinking in winter mud and needed rescue. /And someone did come and grab my wrists.
The unexpected surfacing of the mud memory, in the act of writing Chaperone, was a raptured surprise.
Distinguished poem and commentary upon it by an interesting poet new to me. Thanks.
Posted by: David Schloss | May 21, 2022 at 12:04 PM