Читать книгу Psalms of the Dining Room - Lauren Schmidt - Страница 4

The poetry of Lauren Schmidt does what poetry should do: make the invisible visible, indelibly, unforgettably. If ever a collection of poems embodied Whitman’s dictum to speak for “the rights of them the others are down upon,” this is it.

The poet worked for several years as a volunteer at The Dining Room in Eugene, Oregon, a free meals program (what used to be called a “soup kitchen”) sponsored by Food for Lane County. Their motto was “Dining With Dignity,” and indeed those who dined there—the poor, the unemployed, the physically and mentally disabled, veterans, the homeless—suffer from an acute, and sometimes lethal, deprivation of dignity in their daily lives.

The poems inspired by the experience of working with this community—in The Dining Room and beyond—humanize the dehumanized, compelling us to see what we do not see and hear what we do not hear, to gaze upon the “ugly” until it becomes beautiful, to re-imagine, re-invent and repair the world.

These are poems of lament, praise, and thanksgiving; thus, they are truly psalms, and belong to that Biblical tradition. They also belong to the tradition of poets who have rolled up their sleeves to work to among the damned, and have written from that perspective. Think of Whitman, laboring in the Civil War hospitals of Washington, D.C., and his poem, “The Wound-Dresser;” or Theodore Deppe, employed as a psychiatric nurse working with adolescents in Willimantic, Connecticut, and his poem, “Admission, Children’s Unit,” or Rafael Campo, a doctor in the emergency rooms of Boston, and his sonnet cycle, “Ten Patients and Another.”

According to The Eugene Weekly, on the winter evening of January 25th, 2007, a survey of the homeless counted 2,296 souls in the shelters and on the streets of that city. The number is an abstraction, easily skipped by the mind’s eye; the poet must translate that abstraction into something tangibly human. The collective voice of the homeless rises from the gutter in, “The Men Who Grow From Curbs”:

Our spines are made of streetlights.

We sweat a stew of soot and grease.

Our Labradors starve in leaves.

We are the keepers of forgotten things:

coffee mugs from Christmas, Rudolph’s

shiny head, handle made of antlers.

The Marilyn Monroe candlestick.

The Yosemite bison magnet.

The badminton racket bent like a busted nose.

The poem remembers, in jeweled detail, “the keepers of forgotten things,” themselves forgotten. Treated like trash, they treat the trash like gold.

The poet does not impose the artificial light of dignity on the subject; rather, she finds the natural light of dignity within the subject, the luminosity of even the most wounded faces. Beneath the Jefferson Street Bridge in Eugene, we have this scene as rendered with delicate brush strokes of language in the poem, “One Week After Christmas”:

On a patch of grass, once green,

beneath an overpass of sky,

off a ramp of Interstate 105,

three men steady a tree. Dead

at its ends, branches angled

from rest on the side of the road

where it was discovered, then dragged

here to stand . . .

This ceremony subverts our expectations, stripping the Christmas scene of the usual mercantile sentimentality, demonstrating that human beings can create a home—and meaningful rituals—anywhere:

. . . Not

kids sleighing, mouths open

in glee; not mothers baking,

fathers praying near a manger;

not a snowman; not a choo-choo train;

but three men standing back

to admire their tree: its branches

looped with Caution tape,

foil fangled for its star.

A series of poems addresses the murder of a homeless man, Herbert “Pac-Man” Bishop, a patron of The Dining Room. “As I Roll Silverware” is dedicated to Bishop, who was beaten and left to die with twenty-three separate rib fractures:

there beneath the Jefferson Street Bridge,

where he lived, beneath the Jefferson Street Bridge,

trying to sleep beneath the bridge.

The poem recalls the names of the other nameless ones who pass through The Dining Room every day, too many of them as endangered as Herbert Bishop. There is a refrain that keeps the beat of lamentation and remembrance, based on the rhythm of rolling the silverware for the evening meal:

Wrap. Roll. Stack it.

Wrap. Roll. Stack it . . .

In the quietest hour, before the first meal is served,

I bundle the evening’s silverware,

and practice all their names.

Yet there are also hymns of celebration. “Far from Butter” praises, in language both tactile and lyrical at once, the labor that goes into the creation of an everyday object. That labor and its final product are not only unappreciated, but sacred, as this striking passage makes clear:

. . . I don’t have the shoulders

to churn that butter, or the hands to give it its texture.

It is only in feeling a bar begin to melt beneath

my warm grip, like a muscle grown weak,

that I realize how far I am from butter, the work

it takes to make that butter. The kind of work

that is holy like butter. Not water-into-wine work,

but real work, hard work, work we can be grateful exists

if for no other reason than the joy that comes

when it’s done. I want to taste that holiness,

so I pull a pat of nickel-thick butter stuck to the flat edge

of the blade and drop it on my tongue.

If there are poems in praise of work, there are poems in praise of simple communication as well. The denizens of The Dining Room are sealed off by silence from the wider world; how fitting, then, that “The Milk Rule” captures a moment of perfect communication, without a word being spoken:

As I reach over

a man to give him

one small cup of milk,

he grabs me

just above the elbow,

just below the wrist,

slips his drug-black gums

around my forearm.

A harmless beast

pretending to eat,

he snarls at my skin,

slimes me with a mixture

of spit and scraps

of half-chewed,

broiled meat.

Drawing laughter rather than blood, the beast “howls with delight,” breaking through his silence, and the wall that separates him from the rest of society. Some might read this as an example of dining with indignity, though any moment of shared humanity, however fleeting, has its grace.

Indeed, there is an abundance of grace and hope in these poems, even where despair would be the expected response. In the poem, “Manny,” the poet conjures a world where all things are possible, because something “impossible” has actually occurred:

Manny got a job today. After nine months

of pushing peas around his plate, eyes he could not

bear to lift, Manny got a job today.

Manny could be a character in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, burdened by the “pipe dream” of the life he once had, or could have again. Yet, in an in environment as full of human suffering as Harry Hope’s saloon, Manny—and the poet—refuse the sedative of despair. Instead, the poem invokes the logic of miracles. If Manny could get a job, then, it follows, this could be:

. . . the day the fear coiled in Doyle’s mind lifts

like smoke rings and fades, the day he forgets

his wife’s bones he put above a fire. This could be

the day Jay’s machine-gun gibberish becomes prayer

or poetry, praise or warning, the day the tank in his throat

cranks its belts into the soft pulses of a baritone,

the day he learns to sing. This could be

the day the scar that halves Marva’s face unzips,

the day her albino eye flushes its gray and glimmers,

warm with brown and sight again, the day the right side

of her face sits on the throne of her skull . . .

With this cascade of miraculous images, so vividly imagined, the poet moves from witness to visionary, expressing the sure knowledge that a vision of the impossible, expressed in the language of the possible, must precede any great change, personal or political, intimate or global. By poem’s end, she envisions a world, where, paradoxically, The Dining Room goes out of business, not due to government cutbacks or the myopic refusal to raise taxes, but because such “soup kitchens” are no longer necessary. The “silver stays in drawers.” This could be:

The day the doors are boarded up, the day the Closed sign is hung.

Manny got a job today. Yes, Manny got a job today.

Fittingly enough, Psalms of The Dining Room ends with a poem called, “Prayer.” This is a poem of thanksgiving, thankfully free of any reference to the gluttonous holiday of that name and, once again, a true psalm. Cleaning up tables, the poet discovers a scrap of paper left behind by a patron, promising to pray for her. The first reaction is incredulity: “Pray for me? Pray for me?”

Using this reaction as a point of departure, the poem takes flight. “Pray for me” becomes an incantatory phrase—the poet has a particular gift for anaphora—and a plea for compassion, not only in the world but within the self:

. . . Because the first thought of my day

is hunger, pray for me that I eat. But pray for me that I know

hunger, pray for me. Pray for me that I feel myself

in the growl of your belly, that I am more like you

than I remember, pray for me.

As the poem begins to soar, there is a remarkable synthesis: it speaks in the voice of both the suffering human being and the human being who provides relief from suffering, the compassionate one and the one in need of compassion:

. . . Pray for me that I am

the blind man because the room knows to make room for him.

People move tables, chairs, themselves, part a path for him as if

he were a king. But pray for me that I make way, pray for me.

( . . . )

. . . Pray for me that I am

the pregnant girl who is allowed a second plate. Pray that I know

the power I hold in my body, for a tiny king can grow eyes

in my body, please pray. Pray for me that I am the man

in this same room, seated at another table, the man

that gives the girl his milk. Pray for me that I remember

to give up my milk. Pray for me that I am the milk.

Here is a solidarity that goes beyond rhetoric. Here is a prayer that even an atheist (like me, or like the poet for that matter) can say out loud, for this prayer directs itself, not at God, but at the best in humanity, and the best in ourselves.

In that spirit, praise the poetry of Lauren Schmidt. Praise the Psalms of The Dining Room. Let us be thankful for this clear, strong voice, singing for all of us.

Martín Espada

July 2011