Alice at Seventeen: Like a Blind Child
One summer afternoon, I learned my body
like a blind child leaving a walled
school for the first time, stumbling
from cool hallways to a world
dense with scent and sound,
pines roaring in the sudden wind
like a huge chorus of insects.
I felt the damp socket of flowers,
touched weeds riding the crest
of a stony ridge, and the scrubby
ground cover on low hills.
Haystacks began to burn,
smoke rose like sheets of
translucent mica. The thick air
hummed over the stretched wires
of wheat as I lay in the overgrown field
listening to the shrieks of small rabbits
bounding beneath my skin.
-- Darcy Cummings, from The Artist as Alice: a Photographer's Life, Bright Hill Press
How is it that the poet can say she learns her body in summer? That she learns it like a blind child? I think this is what summer is for (and interestingly, what poems are for. I'll get to that). Some of us were lucky as children, not scheduled out of all our freedom. I used to lie in the field behind my house in Arkansas and stare at the sky, sucking on a grass stem, watching grasshoppers wildly lurch out of nowhere and take off again. As Darcy Cummings did, I felt the damp sockets of flowers. I ran my hands over things like a blind person. I learned the world as part of me. And in Cummings' poem, when the haystacks begin to burn and the rabbits begin to run, that, too, is part of the speaker. It's what's under her skin -- the adolescent's first anxious presentiment of having to grow up. The air is thick with it.
Here's what this has to do with poetry. A poem, if it's working well, if it's good poem, is able to take us inside someone else's skin so convincingly that it turns out we're not really separate from the speaker at all. It becomes our own experience. Not in the sense that we appropriate it and turn it into a poem about us. That's not good reading; that's narcissism. A good reader allows the poem to speak for itself, and tries to fully live inside the experience of the poem. When we're able to do that, we expand our own selves. We take in a wider world. All reading can do this for us, but a poem is sneaky in how it can get under our skin without warning.
Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to record-eagle.com/onpoetry.
