258
PARTISAN REVIEW
Permanent in memory, sealed by the pain
That childhood ends, and we can't go home again.
Psychoanalysis and the arts teach us that we're compelled to repeat
our traumas, losses, and disappointments as a means of helping us find
a form for what's hurt us, for making what's passively experienced
active. So this theme about loss of home would repeat itself under the
impact of
9/II,
and I would be compelled to write not only to help
myself to stay alive emotionally but also to bring some aesthetic plea–
sure and what Aristotle called catharsis to others.
Two-thirds of the way into the sequence, "Half the Office" describes
half of my psychoanalytic office in which are a vase from my mother's
house and a painting of a house reminiscent of the house we had to sell .
The poem now moves the theme of loss into one of reattachment and
reconciliation:
... A store-bought painting of a farm house door,
Blue like our Dutch Colonial, and land
With its luscious fruit trees-apple, peach, and plum,
Its grape arbor with its ancient moss-stained swing,
Its violet beds and staked delphiniums,
Its bluebirds, and its bluejays bickering.
Below the door, irises in profusion,
Stuffed in a basket colored copper, tin.
We bought our house in Time for its seclusion.
Our road once faced the Berkshires' oldest inn
Where then only haystacks stood, their lights the stars
Our son would reach on tiptoe, trying to snatch
Fireflies, one hand Venus, one hand Mars.
It vanished as if Time blew out a match.
What is the meaning in this Chinese vase
Mom left, four scenes of mother and child
In daily tasks made fabulous as Oz?
The child is earnest, Mom is gracious, mild.
For me the meaning's green and porcelain white
And red and green and black with flecks of gold,
And I am seven captive to delight
Though I am nearly sixty-two years old
