JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews
“Dark Card” from Dark Card by Rebecca Foust
(Texas Review Press, Huntsville, 2008)
Dark Card
When they look at my son like that
at the grocery store check out
or at school assemblies,
I wait for the right moment, til they move
through laughter, raised eyebrows, clamped lips
- but before fear. Then I switch gears,
go into my tap dance-and-shuffle routine.
Yes, he’s different, all kids are different, him
just a little bit more – oh, he’s knocked down
the applesauce pyramid? So sorry, here,
my sleeves conceal napkins for messes like this,
and I can make them disappear. But, before I do,
make sure how you marvel at how the jars
made an algorithm when he pulled that one free.
Oh, he was standing on his desk again, crowing
like a rooster in your third-period class?
Yes, bad manners, and worse luck
that he noticed how’s today’s date and the clock
matched the hour of what you taught
last week in a footnote – the exact pivotal
second of the Chinese Year of the Cock.
Before they get angry, I pull out my deck,
deal out what they want. Yes, he’s different,
but look at this IQ score, his Math SAT!
I’ve figured out that difference pays freight
when linked with intelligence, genius trumps odd,
alchemizes bizarre into merely eccentric.
So I play the dark card of the idiot savant,
trotting out parlor tricks in physics and math:
he sees solutions the way you might breathe!
Or perceive! The color green! It’s my ploy
to exorcise their pitchforks and torches,
to conjure Bill Gates when they see him,
or Einstein, not Kaczynski or Columbine;
perhaps they’ll think him delightfully odd
or oddly delightful, dark Anime eyes,
brow arc calligraphy on rice paper skin,
his question mark flowerstalk spine.
But it’s a swindle, a flimflam, a lie,
a not-celebration of what he sees
with his inward-turned eye:
the patterns in everything – traffic, dirt piles,
bare branches of trees, matrices in jar stacks,
Shang Dynasty history in tick of school clock,
music in color and math, the way shoppers
shuffle their feet while waiting on line;
how he tastes minute differences between brands –
even batches-within-brands – of pickles and cheese;
how he sees the moonlit vole
on the freeway’s blurred berm.
*
When I decided to undertake this project (28 poems in 29 days, which later became 50 poems in about 50 days), I chose an epigraph:
From the discussion of the Greek genius to mesmerism; from Giotto’s painting of inter-facial space to Magritte’s tree of infinite recognition; from Odysseus and the Siren’s Song to the idea that, “as soon as breath exists, there are two breathing,” “the limits of my capacity for transference are the limits of my world.”
-JBR, In the House of the Hangman 806 (out of: fragilekeys, and Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles, as quoted in fragilekeys, “An introduction to a medial poetics of existence”, at fragilekeys, 6 Jan 011)
Some poems are more (straightforwardly) dependent on transference than others. This is one of them. I find it slightly humorous to admit that this is the kind of poem I’m most afraid to write about: a poem that (almost) means what it says and says what it means.
This is a poem about “raising a special child”, to quote Barry Spacks’ blurb on the back cover. I’m happy to have the phrase “special child”, but I think it begs the entire question, or problematic of this poem, which is: how is one to relate to this child, who is both gifted in ways unimaginable to most of us, and who must pay a tremendous price for such gifts? It is not only my (the reader’s) problem, or the society in which this child must live’s problem; I think I can show that it’s the mother’s problem as well (without throwing into question her fierce love for him). I think that Foust herself shows it (I’m not doing any psychoanalyzing here; it’s structured into the poem).
One of the great strengths of this poem is the mother/narrator’s attention to detail. (Note: I don’t think it’s ever made explicit that the narrator’s the mother, but I think that the lines
So sorry, here,
my sleeves conceal napkins for messes like this,
and I can make them disappear
substantiate this notion; at least, I think that if the narrator were a guy the napkins would be jammed into the pockets, not the sleeves). In any case, that’s one example of the attention to detail. But there are more important examples. I think the most important fall into two categories: first, there’s the sharply tuned sense of the way the world is relating to the boy:
I wait for the right moment, til they move
through laughter, raised eyebrows, clamped lips
- but before fear. Then I switch gears, […]
Then there’s the way the mother must interpret the boy’s behavior, and I suspect that this has honed her eagle eye:
Oh, he was standing on his desk again, crowing
like a rooster in your third-period class?
Yes, bad manners, and worse luck
that he noticed how’s today’s date and the clock
matched the hour of what you taught
last week in a footnote – the exact pivotal
second of the Chinese Year of the Cock.
It’s never stated in the poem, or even implied, but it is incredibly exhausting to have to focus so much of one’s attention in both of these directions, not to mention on oneself. As someone who has had personal experience of serious mental and physical illness within my family, I can testify to it. Another great strength of this poem is that there is no wallowing, there is no self-pity.
Self pity might lead to loss of control of the material. There is no loss of control here, in fact there are effects that testify to the opposite. Take, for instance some obvious examples from the stanza just quoted: “luck, clock, taught, Cock.” Or just so you won’t think it’s all just end-rhymes, how about:
I wait for the right moment, til they move
through laughter, raised eyebrows, clamped lips
- but before fear. Then I switch gears,
go into my tap dance-and-shuffle routine.
Yes, he’s different, all kids are different, him
just a little bit more – oh, he’s knocked down
the applesauce pyramid? So sorry, here,
my sleeves conceal napkins for messes like this,
and I can make them disappear.
These are all admirable strengths. But it’s in the last two stanzas that the poem really gets interesting, and complicated. Through the first four she (and I mean the mother, not the narrator) maintains her composure, she runs through her bag of tricks. But this composure is difficult to maintain:
perhaps they’ll think him delightfully odd
or oddly delightful, dark Anime eyes,
brow are calligraphy on rice paper skin,
his question mark flowerstalk spine.
But it’s a swindle, a flimflam, a lie,
a not-celebration of what he sees
with his inward-turned eye:
the patterns in everything – traffic, dirt piles,
bare branches of trees, matrices in jar stacks,
Shang Dynasty history in tick of school clock,
music in color and math, the way shoppers
shuffle their feet while waiting on line;
how he tastes minute differences between brands –
even batches-within-brands – of pickles and cheese;
how he sees the moonlit vole
on the freeway’s blurred berm.
I think she begins to “lose it” with
dark Anime eyes,
brow arc calligraphy on rice paper skin,
his question mark flowerstalk spine.
These are not perceptions that would occur to anyone who hasn’t studied (and loved) him; neither are they the kinds of perceptions that generally lead to delight.
I think the real problems show up beginning with the following lines:
But it’s a swindle, a flimflam, a lie,
a not-celebration of what he sees
with his inward-turned eye:
I think she feels that she betrays him by trotting him out as some sort of Einstein. She notes that all her tricks are a “not–celebration”. And yet, and yet … how does
she herself celebrate him? By “trotting out” the way he sees
the patterns in everything – traffic, dirt piles,
bare branches of trees, matrices in jar stacks,
Shang Dynasty history in tick of school clock,
music in color and math, the way shoppers
shuffle their feet while waiting on line;
how he tastes minute differences between brands –
She resorts to the very same flim-flam at first. This is very powerful. Even his loving, adoring, protective mother has to “explain” him. Has to enumerate his special mathematical and sensory abilities. As if she needs to justify him. To herself, even. What a subtle way of indicating her grief and pain.
Note I said “at first”. Something else happens in the last two lines.
how he sees the moonlit vole
on the freeway’s blurred berm.
Something inexplicable, given the rest of the poem: his perception of the “moonlit vole / on the freeway’s blurred berm.” I assume that the “blurred” has something to do with his vision problems, but those are something he overcomes. He sees the vole. It’s not part of a pattern. It’s not some math thing. It’s just a vole. He sees the vole. Just like you or I might. As if he weren’t a “special child.” As if he were a human being.
*****
[Editor’s Note: This is one of 50 reviews written, mas o menos, in 50 days. While each engagement can be read on a stand-alone basis, there’s a layer of watching the critic’s subjectivity arise in a fulsome manner if the reviews are read one after another. So if you have insomnia and/or are curious about this layer, I suggest you read the 50 reviews right after each other and, to facilitate this type of reading, I will put at the bottom of each review a “NEXT” button that will take you to the next review. To wit: NEXT. And an Afterword on John's reading process is also available HERE!]
John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards middle of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch painting over the Sistine Chapel) The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. He is also deep into two important collaborations, one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick. By important he means "important to him". Anyone else want to collaborate? He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.
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