Chatoyant

LIFE STORIES
Washing the Stones and As If The World Made Sense
Poems by Maude Meehan
Papier Mache Press, 1996 and Many Names Press, 2003
Review by Suki Wessling
Published in caesura

I've always been fond of reading a book of poetry as a book, one integral work. I like a book of poetry that has a narrative arc, even when the poetry itself isn't narrative. When I finish reading (and I always read from beginning to end without jumping around), I want to feel that I've gotten somewhere. For this reason, I tend not to like collections and anthologies. As great as the individual poems might be, I usually don't get that feeling of movement.

When I started to read Maude Meehan's Washing the Stones, aware that it was a collection of selected poems from previously published books along with a selection of new poems, I didn't expect to find the narrative arc of an individual work. I was surprised, however, at how well this book comes together as its own entity. And when read with Meehan's latest book, As if the World Made Sense, I come away with the sense that I have, in effect, "read a life." As if Meehan has graciously opened her door and allowed us to sit at her kitchen table, meet her family and friends, and listen to her concerns about the world, I feel like I have come to know her as we can only know poets. She is a stranger whose life has been revealed to me in an intimate yet respectful way. In letting the reader come to know her daily intimacies, she has created a foundation from which to teach us.

As Washing the Stones opens with selections from The Cord Between Us, her first poems that were published when she was over fifty years old, we can be under no illusion that Meehan is going to allow us a sanitized entry into her life. "The cord" is that binding, both sweet and painful, between mother and daughter. And while her daughters are grown and forging their own lives, Meehan is helping her own mother come to the end of hers. It's an end that Meehan doesn't mar with pity. She celebrates the myths of her mother's childhood, admiring her "rebellious hair," then shifts to the present and describes her mother's aged body as "emptied and clean as a cracked china cup." This section of the narrative ends after her mother's death, as Meehan stands at a window remembering her mother and linking the cord to her pregnant daughter.

Chipping Bone, from the book originally published in 1985, opens with the first poem in this collection that branches away from daily life as a mother and daughter. As if set free from one cord that bound her life, now Meehan breaks out with wider subject matter. She contemplates household objects, walks in the woods, attends lectures, listens to the blues, and nurtures a growing political consciousness. I have found that when people talk about a Meehan poem they love, often it reminds them of something in their own life, as if she creates generalizations from the particulars of her own experience. Many a middle-aged child, having helped a parent through her last years, might read this section and nod. We see a woman newly freed from daughterhood, whose children are now having children of their own. But though she is free of the daily chores of caring for her mother, her mother's blood lives on inside her and is being passed now to a new young generation. Fresh from a life of caring for others, it's not in her to ponder the self without some intrusion of concern for others.

The second section of Chipping Bone moves into darker subject matter -- the title of this section is "Harbinger" and the first word is death. Where the mother's passing was a part of the natural cycle of life, Meehan now considers deaths that she cannot explain. The death of one of her children as a baby: "It is too silent here / / Small as a toy / you lie so still". And then a woman -- Meehan's grandmother -- "older than her years, / lies waiting for release." And a grandfather who shot himself to death while Meehan was in her mother's womb. This dark section of the book ends with poems that point possibly to the experiences of Meehan or someone close to her in a mental hospital, and finally, another death, unexplained.

All lives, of course, cycle between happiness and despair, and as Meehan offers her life to us she gives respite from the darkness of "Harbinger" with "Out of Sync," a section of light, silly, and sometimes defiant short poems. "Ah brain," she writes, "you convoluted mouse / accept / what's done is done". She moves along the narrative of her life and we see her in her garden, listening to a neighbor's music, romancing her husband. In the very appealing poem entitled "Is There Life After Feminism" that ends this section, she is unapologetically a senior citizen, straight, white, liberal, and yes, a feminist.

It's a common theme lately for successful women to disavow any debt to feminism, as if all their achievements weren't resting on the efforts of feminists who paved the way. Meehan is no such a woman. So far in her life saga we have seen that she is who she is because of her family, her children, her neighbors, the places she's gone, the newspapers she's read. And in "Woman Tree," she proudly brings her feminist cohorts into that fold. "I see a landscape of women arriving," she tells us, "surging singing scaling the walls." Her brand of feminism celebrates women's strength and earthiness, but somehow doesn't embarrass me as this type of poetry can. And it exhorts us to look to the future, even as she ends Chipping Bone with "this knowing / it is time / for the next journey". Luckily for us, Meehan has stuck around a good while since 1985, as her ensuing poetry shows us.

Meehan collected six more years of poetry in her next book, Before the Snow, presented here with selections from the book's five sections. The themes are familiar but again advance like a life story unfolding. Meehan is now fully a grandmother, a matriarch, an old woman who remembers her past with new understanding. Many of these poems read as if she is trying to explain something that she missed the first time around: defending her sons, trying to understand her father, finally naming her stillborn child. But lest we relax into the comforting clichés of the white-haired grandmother, Meehan is off again, chasing her political passion to Nicaragua and reminding us that any life when examined closely cannot be fit into a standard design. She returns in the next section, "Answering the Questions," to more questions that cannot be answered. Her writing about the dead, whether eulogies or inquiries, is some of her most powerful work. From "Flight in Autumn":

We did not know then, nor did we dream
that a dark bird of death had nested
deep within you, rested and grown
and spread its wide grey wings.

But just the way life and death intertwine in our daily lives, Meehan saves us from the beauty of her sadness, despair, and anger with a section largely devoted to her friends. Suddenly we are transported out with her, and her friends are ours, or the ones we want to have or used to have. Taking their bows here are famous friends -- Lucille Clifton, Li-Young Lee -- alongside the anonymous. In "Paean" she announces, "This is a poem for the woman / who said she was tired." And we sigh. And now that I've got your attention again, she seems to say -- we are led into the final series of poems in this book, what I consider to be her strongest political work. Even the lightly written "Mollie's Restaurant" (where Meehan proves herself truly to be the baddest grandma around) feels straight from the gut.

It is a wrenching and moving change that this book of previously published poems is completed with a unexpected selection of new poems, as if Meehan meant this book to be an end to her writing. The title section of the book, "Washing the Stones," is indeed an end, but not her own. The book is dedicated to her children "in memory of our Ace," and in these last poems, she says goodbye to the husband who was a steady shadow in most of her previous work. The first poem, "For Acer and all the years," celebrates their time together by asking "Who else will remember?" She chronicles here their times together, some of them mentioned previously in the book but without Acer's presence. She walks us through their marriage, presenting a series of poems for him, many written before his death. She celebrates the innocence of their time together, as "newlyweds, / that now passé expression." The dramatic tension of this section is almost novelistic; we know what is coming even as we celebrate their life together.

The great power of Meehan's poetry is its ability to bring us into her life in vivid snapshots, so vivid that it brings us back into our own lives with greater clarity. When she refers to the day of her husband's death as "an unholy day," I find myself not only there with her and her children, but in one of my possible futures. When she takes us into "this room of stainless sinks, / strange instruments and acrid chemicals" in order to ready her husband's body for cremation, we are offered the knowledge that she has gained: "Now he is ready for this journey. We are not." She quotes her friend Lucille Clifton about widowhood, and then shows herself alone in her house with nothing left of her husband but his robe to wrap her in. And slowly she pulls us along on her own journey through grief, alternating between more lyric poetry of grief, often writing of herself in third person, and narratives about the more mundane tasks of getting on with life. We see her momentarily triumphant when she wears a nightgown Acer didn't like, doing taxes, speaking with a friend on the phone. And the ruminations on loss are like punctuation, reminding us of "Your absence / more tangible than my presence."

The end of Washing the Stones leaves us with a sense that Meehan has written what she needed to write, and that we might hear from her no more. I am pleased to report that not only do we hear more from her in As If the World Made Sense, but she continues to make sense of her past and present for us. To make sense, as I am using the term, is not to explain. Instead, as always, Meehan makes sense by example. In one of the most powerful poems in this collection, Meehan shows a grieving mother whose two boys were killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. "Somebody tell me / tell me / what to do," the mother sobs, and although Meehan cannot tell her, she certainly continues to offer an example of one life well-lived.

The poems in Meehan's latest book follow many familiar themes, but just as the poems themselves never become bland in their familiarity, her themes continue to surprise and inform. Much of the first part of the book, of course, continues to explore her life with and without her husband. We learn that although her life has gone on, she is never able, and perhaps doesn't want to, get past his death. She remembers him visiting her in the hospital long ago, sees his keys hanging in their usual place, and almost buys him his favorite cookies at Trader Joe's. She lets us see all this, and then lets us hear her anger. Written in a childish, singsong tone, "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire" accuses him: "just the same I get mad sometimes; / you shouldn't have died first, you promised."

The second section, Evolution, is comprised largely of poems about others. From ancestors to children to grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Meehan offers observation, encouragement, and advice. Returning to herself, she celebrates her life at eighty, and then later as a "Geriatric Diva" (her favorite self-description, which she used again recently at In Celebration of the Muse, a women's poetry gathering in Santa Cruz). Moving to 'assisted living,' she informs us, hasn't dulled her sense of fun.

In that deft sleight of hand that we're now familiar with, Meehan moves into What Endures, poems that again explore death and pain, and Going Through Arsenic, which intersperses celebrations of life with ruminations on some of our darkest recent events. Meehan shows that a person can respond to tragic events dulled into factual news stories in a way that can bring fresh tears to the reader. The events of September 11, 2001 are so seared into our national consciousness that poets can't help writing about the subject, but unfortunately many can't help, in the process, writing without a deep personal commitment to the people who were directly effected. Meehan has the sense not to bring herself into her poem; instead she relates a single person's experience and then offers him a paraphrase of prayer. Even more impressive, however, is Meehan's poem for James Bird Jr., a black man murdered in Jasper, Texas in 1998. "And how is it now / in the small town of Jasper?" she asks accusingly. The world, Meehan reminds us, doesn't make sense, but it is our absolute obligation as citizens of this world to remember and remind others of our mutual responsibilities.

The last two sections of As If the World Made Sense bring us back to Meehan's life and back to what seems to be the thesis of her life story: Life is only worth living if you can find the joy amidst the anger, pain, sadness, and despair. Meehan starts by hilariously skewering herself in "On My Own," as she contemplates picking up old men in the grocery store and taking care of them. Then she skips into her past, showing her middle-aged self at a raucous party, her child self at school and contemplating her brother's penis (which she worried might be bothering him), and remembering a conference speaker's words that took root in her growing feminist consciousness. She offers us a small number of prose pieces, as if to remind us that even at her age, experimentation continues. And finally, "First Mystery," a poem about death. Her last words in this book are "I am ready."

When I reflect on the long journey that these books took me on, I realize that Maude Meehan's work functions for me like a good relationship with an elderly relative. Not a parent, because her work lacks any sense that she feels obligated to care for us. More like a great-aunt who is wholly different from my mother, an aunt who has let me learn from the events of her life in a gentle but never protective way. By offering her life as example, she lets us compare and prepare. She offers the strength that she built through the events of her life, as she never backs away from experience or analysis.

One poem in her final collection sums up my feelings, and it is printed in its entirety below. I hope, for our sakes, that her last words of this book aren't omen, because we can all use more help as we navigate our own lives, which will never, we hope, make sense.

Rare Gift
1990

This man, not given to bringing flowers
unexpected gifts, or easy compliments
once asked if there was anything I wished
I could have been or done,
or had missed out on, in our long years together.

Yes, I answered, but don't laugh
I've always wished I could write music
the kind of songs that people would remember
Smiling, he shook his head and said
"But your whole life has been a song."

I wrapped his words in sudden warmth
and put them carefully away
against the day when I might need their comfort.

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