The New York School Diaspora: New Series (Part Two) Maureen Bloomfield [by Angela Ball]

Anchises

It was far away, not long ago,
As if time were a concurrent series of durations.
Pick the one you want; the others will be dragged
By the cursor to the space beyond the outlined page.
It was planned, like a book design,
The templates were in order.
“Don’t mess with the boxes,” the designer said.
“I forget what I did and then I have to redo it.”
O.K., I said. I understand.

Allegory was a legitimate vehicle
For the recovery of ancient images, the art book said.
Pallas Athena, goddess as Madonna,
Encounters the centaur who recoils. Unrebuffed,
She winds around her finger a lock of his unruly hair.
In the dark wood there are mists that descend and
Rise again and the creatures seen there are slow-witted
And wend among the vapors slowly
So mortals can follow the pan shots of the dream.

My father does pretty well on his Alzheimer’s test.
He gets the month but not the year.
When he has to write a sentence, it’s one of praise
Of his doctor’s delicate beauty, ethereal and gold
In the style of Fra Lippo Lippi or Sandro Botticelli.
In the car on the way home, he tells a story
Then folds his hands, becomes animated,
And tells it, altering the emphasis, again.
They’re characters, the characters in all his stories.

From the Angle, Cleveland’s West Side Irish ghetto
Where his Achill-Island mother Lizzie made a bootlegger
Of his High-Church-from-Plymouth pa. Home was a business:
The lower floor a restaurant; the upper floor
A bar. Hale fellow, well met, the designated greeter,
A snappy dresser promenading along Lorain street
Hailing High Pockets, Shimmy Patton, Spuds Malloy, all
Right-off-the-boat greenhorns whose mothers, in the winter,
Walked the streets with blankets—searching for their sons.

On the eve of Saint Nick’s Day, the Salvation Army Lady
Is peeling the rind of a pomegranate with her teeth.
Her latticed fingers are stained red on the bell.
In one of Botticelli’s variations on a theme, the virgin
Holds a pomegranate, or is it the son, though cherries
Are the fruit of paradise, I’d have to tell you,
If this were a quiz. I remembered the father but not
The eponymous son. I remembered that he held his father,
Once a goddess’s lover, bundled like a packet on his back.

The land of the dead is reached by water.
They are restless, queuing on the miasmic shore.
From the kitchen window my five-year-old father
Watched as his favorite uncle, Johnny Mancuso, was gunned down.
What is this life but the intersection of two texts.
“Ain’t this the biggest mix-up that ye have ever seen:
Mi father he was Orange and mi mither she was Green.”
The swamp is foul; the sky plain; the neo-Platonic verdure,
Intricate and artful, for Reason illumines and casts away,

Allowing for precision in a context that’s barbaric.
He chose the ivory gate of sleep, forsaking false shadows.
He chose to wend backward through the gate of horn.
He was singing, the father, the true vision,
The one that he made up. From Lake Erie’s poisoned banks
The flaming city, oracular and perishing,
Kept vanishing. The time had come to wander.
Irish Sea, English Channel, Atlantic Ocean, Ohio River—
The hero’s task is always to find home.
                                                                --Maureen Bloomfield

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Maureen Bloomfield grew up in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida.  Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Paris Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, The Nation, Southern Review, and many other journals.  Her poem, "The Catholic Encyclopedia," was selected by Paul Muldoon for the Best American Poetry volume in 2005; her book Error and Angels was published by the University of South Carolina Press in the James Dickey Poetry Series.  She was for many years the editor of The Artist Magazine; her art reviews and essays have appeared in artforum, Art News, New Art Examiner, and Sculpture, among other venues.   She edited and wrote the introductory essay for Daniel E. Green Studios and Subways: An American Master His Life and Art (North Light Books, 2017).  Ms. Bloomfield has two daughters and three grandchildren; she lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Maureen Bloomfield’s “Anchises” performs an audacious feat: it deftly and resonantly joins her personal origins with Western civilization’s. More crucially, it demonstrates and celebrates how ancient stories inform ordinary life, joining the exalted and the quotidian—certainly an aesthetic priority of the New York school of poets as a whole and particularly of Frank O’Hara, for whom construction workers’ silver helmets were objects of desire and a casual louse was not only worthy of a name but of its own poem.

This poem is informally formal, its blank verse a coat not buttoned but casually thrown over the shoulders; its rhymes serendipitous. Its beginning is a case in point, at first impersonating a stock story-telling set-up, but immediately confounding any such easy invocation of the primordial: “It was far away, not long ago, / As if time were a concurrent series of durations.” In our cyber world, it turns out, where we are depends on the whereabouts of a blink. Patterns are pre-determined, “templates . . .in order,” and we shouldn’t mess with them. We rely on format the way the designer relies on her boxes.

But the second stanza tells us we may still resort to ancient shaping devices, like allegory, to reconstitute experience. No less an authority than “an art book” tells us so. And gives us a deathless scene in which the cerebral Pallas Athena encounters the instinctual centaur—who, though he recoils, finds himself attached as she “winds around her finger a lock of his unruly hair”—the line’s deliberateness mirroring the action as it’s performed. Stanzas enact scenes, and this stanza’s scene is completed in mists, its “slow-witted creatures” “wending slowly” so we dense mortals can follow the “pan shots of the dream.”

The poem we are inside is pan-ekphrastic, collaging painting and film, legend and family story.

The third stanza cuts to a vignette as ordinary as the second is extraordinary. A father is being tested for cognitive impairment. Neither completely in his time or out of it, he does “pretty well,” but is a genius at associating his doctor’s “delicate beauty” with that of women painted by “Fra Lippo Lippi or Sandro Botticelli.”  In fact, the painting referred to in the preceding stanza might well be Pallas and the Centaur, painted by Sandro Botticelli in 1452 and dramatizing the eternal struggle between intellect and instinct.

Like the great Tony Bennett, who in his final years returned to his classic self when singing, the poet’s father, a true Irishman, returns to vitality by telling stories: “They’re characters, the characters in all his stories.” This line reminds us of the link between the meanings of the word “character,” variously denoting liveliness, the possession of definite qualities; and, at its root, a mark conveying meaning.

The fourth stanza tells us the father’s (the allegorical Anchises) story in everyday, demotic speech. He’s “from the Angle, Cleveland’s West Side Irish ghetto / Where his Achill-Island mother Lizzie made a bootlegger / Of his High-Church-from Plymouth pa.” In this marriage, disparate, warring cultures collide and join. Intellect meets instinct again. The characters in this world have names that pronounce them unforgettable: “High pockets, Shimmy Patton, Spuds Malloy.” Though presumably tough guys, their mothers must seek them at night (possibly passed out on the streets) with blankets to keep them from freezing.

In the poem’s next vignette, a very unPersephone-like Salvation Army lady peels “the rind of a pomegranate with her teeth. She’s juxtaposed directly with “the virgin / In one of Botticelli’s variations on a theme,” and the poet jokily seems to confuse the fruit with her son.  They seem engaged in a cognitive quiz: “I remembered the father but not / The eponymous son. I remembered that he held his father, / Once a goddess’s lover, bundled like a packet on his back.” The ancient tale remembered is Anchises’ rescue from the burning Troy. His rescuer is Aeneus, his son with Aphrodite.

As we know, Anchises fathered Aeneus, founder of Rome, after Aphrodite saw Anchises grazing cows on the slopes of Mount Ida; seduced him; and bore a child.

Here I’d like to mention someone who has nothing to do with the poem except that he is another Ohioan: a comedian popular in the 50’s and 60’s named Cliff Arquette. His success came with the formulation of a cornpone character, “Charlie Weaver,” who became his permanent public face, a personification of a disappearing character, the down-to-earth country bumpkin who loves telling stories. Weaver’s stories came from a mythical “Mount Idy”—perhaps named for the Mount Ida where Aphrodite and Aeneus fell in love. Whatever the case, this town produced the ideal that gave dimension to Arquette’s character, the myth he needed to contrast with his here and now. Like “Anchises,” Weaver was a story that told stories—both a satisfier and a mystifier.

The poem’s next stanza fuses the Land of the Dead with the Angle, as the poet’s “five-year-old father / Watched as his favorite uncle, Johnny Mancuso, was gunned down.” Here the poem asks the rhetorical question that characterizes all experience: “What is life but the intersection of two texts.” This breathtaking statement is followed directly by dialogue showing Anchises/father as the character he is: “Mi father he was Orange and my mither she was Green.”  Orange, of course, is Protestant and British; Green, Catholic and Irish—the marriage a microcosm of the whole of Ireland. The stanza’s last two lines seem to revert, like the end of stanza two, to unsolvable mystery made of two texts in conflict: the real and the ideal.

Cleveland, with its once-burning river celebrated in a Randy Newman lyric, is an apt place for life to meet death and the underworld to meet remnants of heaven. It’s the father’s time to sing “the true vision, / the one that he made up.” But, like this poem and its story that encompasses the eternity of art and the constant vanishing of human life, the father finds himself through wandering. All waters the same: “Irish Sea, English Channel, Atlantic Ocean, Ohio River.” Maureen Bloomfield’s masterfully storied and immediate amalgam resolves itself in a simple statement that endows her father and all heroes with a straightforward, impossible purpose that transcends all others: “The hero’s task is always to find home.” -Angela Ball

Comments

[Robert McDowell]

I enjoyed this poem so much as it shadows my own family history. It also comforts me to learn that Ms. Bloomfield lives in Ohio, where I moved to (Akron) six weeks ago.

[Rick Stull]

What an enthralling and complex poem, which I will enjoy rereading again and again.

[Angela Ball]

Dear Robert,
I'm so pleased to get this comment. I grew up in Athens, part of Appalachia. I'm always entranced by the huge differences between northern and southern Ohio--that partly have to do with where a glacier stopped. -Angela

Thank you for this fine comment, Rick!
-Angela