She's the One

 

"My lady laughs, delighting in what is." Another Magician's Wife, Nusch Eluard, in 1934, 

the year she married Paul Eluard, back in the days when  poets and their muses were celebrities.

A recent query from a good friend of Cosmo's has reminded him that it is long past time for a Cosmological tribute to one of his prime mentors—indeed, one corner of an immortal triangular friendship without which Cosmo could not survive. Today I speak of my pal TED: Theodore Roethke, visionary nature and love poet, vivacious and voracious disciple of the Metaphysicals and the Neoplatonists, and the guy who, if he did not actually introduce me to Stanza, at least prepared me for the possibility of her existence.

This will not be an essay on Ted's life or his poetry—both are easy to find on the Web for those interested—but simply a brief reminiscence of our meeting and a catching up on some subsequent encounters. Ted was introduced to me by a Carswell co-worker, Monica Carter, at lunchtime on February 24, 1988. It was her birthday, and she'd got from her husband a copy of Roethke's collected poems. She leaned across the table in the lunchroom and asked me if I liked poetry. When I nodded, she presented the book to me, opened at perhaps his most famous love lyric, "I Knew a Woman." I had never seen it before, but I'll never forget the weird and intense feeling of discovery mixed with déjà vu as I read it. In terms of life events, it ranks right up there with hearing Keith and the Yardbirds doing "I'm a Man" for the first time, in the sense that I was never the same afterward. Tumblers clicked inside me, the leaden door of a long-locked vault creaked open, and for the next few weeks at least, I had access to parts of myself I had never known existed.

Come to think of it, that's a pretty elegant pairing of declarative and transformative lyrics—I'M A MAN and I KNEW A WOMAN. And it's no accident that they transformed me: they are both, after all, not merely lyrics but works of magic—magical incantations and invocations and initiations. As with the Yardbirds, I shortly immersed myself in Ted's life and poetry, and found myself in awe of his poetical growth from what he might call "the mire" of his origins to the apogee of perfection he reached in the 1950s with his love lyrics. I KNEW A WOMAN is famous already, so today we present another one that's been almost as magical for Cosmo:

She

I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? —

My lady laughs, delighting in what is.

If she but sighs, a bird puts out its tongue.

She makes space lonely with a lovely song.

 

She lilts a low, soft language, and I hear

Down long sea-chambers of the inner ear.

We sing together, we sing mouth to mouth

The garden is a river flowing south.

 

She cries out loud the soul's own secret joy;

She dances, and the ground bears her away.

She knows the speech of light, and makes it plain

A lively thing can come to life again.

 

I feel her presence in the common day,

In that slow dark that widens every eye.

She moves as water moves, and comes to me

Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.

 

People are often startled by that opening line—what can he mean by "the dead are tender"? Like Cosmo, Ted was both overawed and inspired by those he called the Dead and the Great Dead—his ancestors, personal and literary. In an early poem, he says, "The spirit starves/Until the dead have been subdued." But later in life, he transcends this sense of threat or competition and confers and communes with them almost shamanistically. A few months before his own death he would assert that "the extent to which the great dead can be evoked, or can come to us, can be eerie, and astonishing." Elsewhere in his poetry he affirms that this awareness can be awakened or amplified—even as our sense of being alive is amplified—by the transport of sexual love:

Incomprehensible gaiety and dread

Attended what we did. Behind, before,

Lay all the lonely pastures of the dead....

And in yet another alchemical masterpiece of his, "Words for the Wind," we hear:

Are flower and seed the same?

What do the great dead say?

Sweet Phoebe, she's my theme:

She sways whenever I sway.

So it's clear we're talking about timeless true love here, not the ravening, drooling zombies of contemporary culture.

Speaking of timeless true love, and of timeless true love speaking to Cosmo, we have to mention the recent proliferation of TEDs in the neighbourhood—meaning, of course, licence plates bearing that name. At first, they occurred paired, almost without fail, with a ZAP, recalling pretty much what Ted had done to us back in 1988. Then, one block away from Chez Cosmo, two obviously resident cars began to park themselves persistently: TED and SHE. One fateful day in February, a third appeared across the street for the first time (it would reappear many times, and still does): DED.

So, there we have it. Stanza the Unforgettable strikes again. But that's not all. In the evening of that day in February, Cosmo went to the symphony, and took home the Calgary Philharmonic magazine. On the back cover was a full-page ad  for a local graphics firm. The ad featured the massive image of the word SHE, written cursively. On closer examination, one could see that the letters actually consisted of countless iterations of the word HE. A SHE made up of HEs, as it were.

The centrefold featured the recent pops concert—a tribute to KISS (so roll over, Beethoven).

The magazine itself is called PRELUDE. I suppose the line "I think the dead are tender" could be construed as the PRELUDE to a KISS?

Cosmo did some Googling, and quickly discovered that the following week (February 23, to be exact) marked the North American (i.e., subtitled) DVD release of a 2007 French comedy called SHALL WE KISS? ("Un baiser s'il vous plait" in its original French release).

Well, true love IS a complicated affair. Even Stanza wouldn't argue with that. Check out the trailer: I love the line, "Before a kiss has been given, so no one knows if will be big or small." Pure Stanza. Pure TED.

 

Ted teaching poetry at the University of Washington