The great divide

“POETRY may be done with me,” Grace Paley told the Los Angeles Times in an interview two months before her death last August, “but I’m not done with it.” Strange to think that even as she made the soup, greeted her friends, showed photographs of her grandchildren, talked about her writing, the poet was dying.

I have experienced the amputation

of my left breast I hate its absence.

“Fidelity,” posthumously (odd word, recalling dirt) published, is her fourth collection of poems. Clearly, she had death and its retinue -- illness, aging, memory, regret -- in mind. Clearly, she was angry at the prospect of death, unready to surrender.

In any event I am

already old and therefore a little ashamed

to have written this poem full

of complaints against mortality which

biological fact I have been constructed for

to hand on to my children and grand

children as I received it from my

dear mother and father and beloved

grandmother who all

ah if I remember it

were in great pain at leaving

and were furiously saying goodbye

These poems mark her passage (heels dug in, sure she should be more gracious about the whole thing) closer to death. “I had put my days behind me . . . ,” she writes: “future was my intention.” So she tries (still learning, still trying to get it right in her 80s) to savor the days. “Fidelity” is a record of that savoring: the familiar landscape around her home in Vermont, memories of friends, the sorrow of a woman she meets on a plane.

this eighty-year-old body is

a fairly old body what’s it

doing around the house these days

checking the laundry brooms

still work what’s for dinner

there are the windows look oh

beyond the river Smarts Mountain

with the sun’s help is recomposing all

its little hills never saw it that way

before windows the afternoon story

It’s what she does best: look down, look up, see things as they are. This is Paley’s great legacy: fidelity to things as they are: “Abandonment How could I have allowed myself / even thought of a half hour’s distraction / when life had pages or decades to go / so much was about to happen to people / I already know and nearly loved”

Daughter of exiles, youngest in a household of outspoken women, she believed in community. “Don’t ever do anything alone,” she warned me last summer. She writes from her experience, but not in the trapped, circular, cloying way of the narcissist. No stranger in her poetry or fiction to the first person, she’s the everyman/woman/child, the perplexed individual, even in this small poem of regret:

before I was nobody

I was me after

I was nobody I

was me I wish

I could have rested

in me a little longer

there was something

I was supposed to tell

but it isn’t allowed.

She’s always reaching outside herself, and in many of these poems she reaches out across the great divide, death. Parents, friends, children, war victims and especially her sister:

I needed to talk to my sister

talk to her on the telephone I mean

just as I used to every morning

in the evening too whenever the

grandchildren said a sentence that

clasped both our hearts

I called her phone rang four times

you can imagine my breath stopped then

there was a terrible telephone noise

a voice said this number is no

longer in use how wonderful I

thought I can

call again they have not yet assigned

her number to another person despite

two years of absence due to death.

Often, you feel Paley’s determination to take the self-serving drama out of the stories in her fiction and poems. Always, it creeps back in through some door she’s left open. In her short stories, the dialogue keeps things real; in her poems, it’s the fast flow of the lines and lack of punctuation, as if there were no locks or latches on her thoughts:

believe me I am

an unreliable

narrator no story

I’ve ever told

was true many people

have said this before

but they were lying

Paley began and ended with poetry. She studied with W.H. Auden at the New School for Social Research and wrote poetry into her 30s, before turning to short stories, which always (she said many times) began with a line. The stories have more “shoulds” (not many, but some) in them than the poems; after all, she was a listener, not a preacher. Something had to press on her hard before she felt the need to say it:

Just as I putting

my pen to paper am pretty sure that something

which has pressed upon my breath beyond bearing

will appear in words take shape and singing

let me go on with my life

--

susan.reynolds@latimes.com