Readings: more Sandra Agricola

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I think I’m in love. I’m not certain whether it’s what she says—the tough abundance of her revealed intelligence—or how she says it. Or, maybe, it’s the larger context—the vast world of her gift’s creation—the place in which her word-constructed visions are made manifest. Whatever it is that grasps me (the poet as I imagine her, gazing my way with bedroom eyes), I sit at her feet disarmed, enthralled. I have excerpted her at Rodak Riffs before; below I offer a few more passages that have had their way with me:

from “The Origin of Evening”

[…]

Ah Eve, the origin and cause of evening,
tonight you are forgiven for coming on too strong
and leaving all of us, both
the quick and the dead,
in bed alone.

[…]

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx …. Meanwhile,
God and the Devil are having their own problems.
One is bored and considers divorce,
the other is married to his job.

from “Body and Soul”

[…]

All my life I’ve tried to exchange this life
for another,
I’ve tried to inherit the Good Society—
fat lab growing old by the fire,
cypress wood and fieldstone,
Charles Dickens and lobster tails,
John Crowe Ransom with Grand Marnier.
But that’s beyond my time,
beyond my time.

from “Nocturnes: The Gift of Suicide”

[…]

Someone who once knew me said I didn’t have many friends
Because I didn’t know how to be a friend. I guess that’s right.
He's gone now, too. Maybe to prove his point, maybe coincidence.
[…]
I’m telling you all this not so you’ll go away feeling kind-hearted
and rush to the aid of some lonely bastard outside the grocery
store when his sack breaks and fifteen cans of Vienna sausage
go rolling across the parking lot. I’m telling you so you’ll understand,
when it happens to you, that time spent trying to remember
what you said or did, time spent improving your communication
skills and general attitude toward man is time wasted. Hamlet
said, ‘you would pluck out the heart of my mystery.”
What he meant was you will try to get at the bottom of a problem
by the killing the subject. The mystery, the problem, remains.
The best thing is to wait.

[...]

Ah, Sandy…I’m waiting. I’m waiting.
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Reflections: Some Free Advice

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Before People Magazine and reality television, children, just about all we had, by way of socially licit voyeurism and church sanctioned schadenfreude, was Abigail Van Buren: “Dear Abby.”

Distraught, confused Americans, trying so hard to be good, but needing a wise word, blown like a kiss from the palm of a helping hand, scribbled their angst on drugstore stationary and mailed it off to Abby, each tortured soul hoping against hope that Abby would post their shame and anxiety for syndication in her daily column: instant, though anonymous, celebrity (signed “Porked in Pittsburgh” or “Hosed in Harrisburg”); posterity’s stamp of authentic existence.

By way of example, Abby once famously advised a gum-snapping adolescent female—plagued by panty-drenching lust and agonizing over whether or not she should resort to “the Pill” and submit to her boyfriend’s frantically urgent probing— that she should hold the Pill between her knees; she should preserve all that heat for a husband-to-come.

Never mind that enterprising chicks from coast-to-coast immediately launched practical experiments proving that defloration would be quite possible although one’s knees were welded together; Abby’s sardonic meme, once launched, lived on and on.

Consider, for instance, these lines from Sandra Agricola’s poem, “Nocturnes: The Gift of Suicide” included in her 1988 collection, White Mercedes:

Xxxxx We rarely give in to beauty.
Xxxxx As if we held aspirin between our legs, saving ourselves
Xxxxx for that special Beauty.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxx_______

Xxxxx Yet how quickly we spread our legs for grief.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxx_______

And that, children, is the meaning of life.

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