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Before, During, After:
A Triptych of Love &/As
Madness
by Julie Marie Wade
I. AMNESIA
In
the spring of 2002, I
was a first-year Master
of Arts student
at Western Washington
University, enrolled in
my first graduate poetry
workshop, reading Mary
Oliver for the first
time. I lived in a
tidy, one-bedroom
apartment within walking
distance to campus. I
taught undergraduate
composition courses for
which I was compensated
with a monthly paycheck
of $960.00, before
taxes. I was engaged to
be married to a man who
sold shoes in another
city, three hours away.
My life appeared
orderly, uncomplicated.
I knew what I would do
today, and the day
after, and the day after
that, and one day, I
would marry Charlie, and
we would rent a slightly
larger apartment, and my
life would go on in a
similarly focused and
uneventful way.
The poem “March”
presented a marked
diversion from Oliver’s
familiar images and
ethos. I had been
reading of foxes and
swans, field mice and
spiders, the tall moose
in the long twilight of
New Hampshire. These
poems were gentle,
insightful,
contemplative, and they
had absolutely nothing
to do with me. Then,
suddenly: There isn’t
anything in this world
but mad love. Not in
this world. No tame
love, calm love, mild
love, no so-so love.
And of course, no
reasonable love.
The voice that rose up
from the page was not
the sound of my own
mouth forming the
words. It was an
oracular voice, timeless
and urgent. Also
there are a hundred
paths through the world
that are easier than
loving. But, who wants
easier?
It was the first time I
had felt incriminated by
a poem. It was the
first time I had felt a
poem accuse me. Had I
not in fact claimed for
myself a reasonable
love? Had I not in fact
sought precisely this
tame, calm, mild, so-so
arrangement—a man
I could talk to but keep
at a distance, a man who
could provide, and had
provided, something akin
to an alibi?
The poet was speaking
for both of us now:
We dream of love, we
moon about, thinking of
Romeo and Juliet, or
Tristan, or the lost
queen rushing away over
the Irish sea, all doom
and splendor. I
recalled from these
stories, the same
stories I treasured as a
child, the sense of
immense love swooping
down on them, beyond
their control, capable
of possessing them
completely. Under this
spell, our heroes turned
rash, impassioned,
lacking in foresight and
fearless of consequence,
as if catapulted out of
the canvas chairs of
their minds and
deposited viscerally,
primordially, into the
charged hover-crafts of
their bodies.
Love had not
transplanted me thus.
What I had called love
was all method and no
madness, all fine-tuning
and no spontaneous
music. Something
touched me, lightly,
like a knife-blade. I
felt I was bleeding,
though just a little, a
hint. Oliver was
becoming personal,
disclosing. She spoke
like a woman coming out
of a coma, remembering
what she had thought
impossible to forget.
Inside I flared hot,
then cold. Inside I
flared hot, then cold.
I had suffered a
strange, self-inflicted
amnesia, a ghost writer
making fiction from my
own life.
The poem ends with
Oliver’s private
reflection: I thought
of you. Whom I love,
madly. I thought of
him, sadly, without
madness or mystery. Of
us, our future like a
snapshot overexposed, my
finger posed on
the—shutter or trigger.
And mine the only mind
to decide.
II. APHASIA
When I fell in love
thereafter, it was a
plummet, a careen, a
skittering, shivering,
accelerating descent
into madness. I did not
sleep. I could not
eat. All senses keened
toward the beloved.
What I remember is the
way memory returned just
as language abandoned
me. They must have
passed each other in a
doorway, or a corridor,
or crossing over some
bridge, Memory darting
toward me and Language
departing, secretive,
figurative, arcane. I
see now how love is only
a guide word—to bring
you close, to place you
on the nearest page.
What follows: the
maddening silence
imprecision has driven
you to.
For Angie’s birthday, I
gave her a collection of
poems by Sharon Olds, a
poet who once said, “To
me, the mind seems to be
spread out in the whole
body.” These poems are
about love between men
and women mostly,
sometimes between parent
and child. We don’t
mind. Love is only the
guide word. The poet
will bring us close,
closer, but there is a
gap always between the
last syllable of sound
and the first impression
of meaning. Given the
enormity of the
experience, pronouns are
hardly our problem.
When love is new, we
walk around clasping it
like an infant, cradling
the head, terrified we
are going to drop it.
No one has words, not
enough of them or the
right ones of them. Why
did the language never
feel inadequate before?
Olds begins: The mist
is blowing across the
yard like smoke from a
battle. When the
smoke clears, we will
have to stand up and
face ourselves and more
than ourselves. Maybe
this is what the
expression always meant,
but I never heard the
meaning in it before—when
the smoke clears.
We smoke cigarettes
together by Lake Samish
in the dark. The dark
is a tremendous comfort
to us. We exchange
smoke signals and
smile. Suddenly, we—the
poets—have found new
uses for our mouths.
Smoking. Kissing.
Sex.
The mist moves, over the
bushes bright with
poison ivy and black
berries like stones.
We often read to each
other, conceding that
someone else may say it
better: pronounce the
longing, enunciate the
lust. The fog pours
across the underbrush in
silence. We are sealed
in.
Of course there will
come a time for trying
to speak again, a time
for syntactical
maneuvers and innovative
diction—promises and
apologies. The world
will push us toward
naming, not only
ourselves but this thing
between us—first in its
general, then in its
particular, form. I
can’t say which is
harder: inventing the
language of us, or
borrowing from the
language that forgets
us, or has never known
us, or both of these
things, or neither. I
like to imagine, in her
own way, Olds
understands our
predicament. I like to
imagine her words are
scattered for us like
crumbs through a forest,
like shells in the sand,
even in the absence of
vows, the absence of
altars:
I see how you
go out beyond the words
out beyond the ends of
the lines
to hang in black
isolated space
alone and humiliated,
dangling there like a
star, a hero
I will learn my words
again, place them one by
one as arrows in a
quiver or feathers in a
pillow—this public life,
and also, our private
world:
I am out here now
with you
against the shard of the
broken
silence
III. APOSTASY
Every Sunday, instead of
church, we went to
breakfast at Skylark’s
Hidden Café. It was the
first place on earth we
were known, in our
mutual truth, not once
mistaken for sisters or
referred to simply as
friends. After the
meal, we drove the
length of Chuckanut
Drive, from Bellingham
south to Mount Vernon.
Above us, nothing but
crags. Below us,
nothing but sea. And
there, in that small
town at the toe of a
mountain, we browsed the
bookstore. We received
our blessing.
The book I loved there,
the book I was most
drawn to, was a white,
hard-bound volume
depicting a hand
reaching out for a
globe. It was called
Never by Jorie
Graham. In the poem
“Prayer,” the speaker
describes watching
minnows over a dock
railing, making of
themselves a visual
current. We are the
minnows, I think. We
are being swept up in
the real current,
comprised of customs
like this one: public
appearances, weekly
rituals. Our history
heralds our future, that
arrowing motion that
forces change.
In the midst of this
joy, sadness is
foreshadowed. Graham
withholds nothing. She
does not soft-soap…: Nobody
gets what they want.
Never again are you the
same. But there is
someone now I can think
of, of whom it is true
to say—You, whom I
love. Madly. I have
found my second
person…or sugar-coat:
The longing is to be
pure. What you get is
to be changed. All
right, yes, I am
changing. We are
changing. So? And? Here,
hands full of sand,
letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in
and say take this, this
is what I have saved,
take this, hurry.
It is a caveat of
course, but what is she
warning against? What
can she see that is
still lost to me,
wrapped in the soft,
blanketing fog of new
love?
Years later, at our home
in Pittsburgh,
twenty-five hundred
miles away, I lift the
square parcel from under
the tree, unwrap the
ribbons slowly. “You’ve
waited a long time for
this,” Angie says. “I
hope it’s as good as you
remember.”
And if I listen now?
Listen, I was not saying
anything. It was only
something I did. I
think of the losses,
like trees toppling: the
initial flowering of
hope, then the social
deforestation. My
parents first, then the
pastor of their church,
then my best friend from
college, and on, and
on—the people falling
away, calling only to
say repent, regret,
we’ll only take you back
the old way.
Graham’s words resound,
ancient, omniscient:
I am free to go. I
cannot of course come
back. Not to this.
Never. My face has
been cut out of all the
old photographs, my name
scratched from the
storybooks, my truth
erased from the record.
Stricken.
Never again will I be
welcome in the place
where I come from.
Gradually, I learn to
believe this. Never
again will I bring my
lover to the life I have
left. Gradually, I
learn to accept this.
But there is always a
ghost posed on my lips,
a whisper from that
old world, a shade.
To let go for good
is its own curse, that
loneliness its own kind
of madness.
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