THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD

The other day I bought a dusty old book because a poem in it made me deliciously melancholy. I’m going to type out the poem, then tell you why I paid real money for the book ($12!). I have it right here beside me: the author’s monogram is embossed handkerchief-fashion

on chinese boxes on a tan cover, and the yellowing pages are uncut.

Here’s the poem that caught my eye:

POEM TO A TWENTIETH CENTURY BOY

You are nine now and will be ten when the leaves

have left trees bare.

This moment you are lean

and narrow hipped, your growing dreams are fair

and your words are honest as your dark clear eyes.

Planes you love,

and legendary horses and history-Indians

and fabulous kings and the smell of wind and your bike

and miniature armies from the five-and-ten.

Be not impatient:

in a few brief autumns you will learn to fly.

There will be no time for lazy dreaming then:

you will be trained to die,

but before you relinquish breath

you will be trained to be

deliverer of death.

I cannot even promise you seven years

of warm slow drowsy summer afternoons,

of grass to lie in while your bare brown knees

angle toward the argosies of cloud

drifting with innocent splendor on a sky

immaculate of war.

I cannot even promise you this small

fragment of time wherein to climb bent trees

and shake red apples down, to sniff the sharp

rime of frost on scarlet leaves at morning,

to bring your sled up from the shadowy cellar

and shine the runners against the first snow-fall.

Soon the clean

beauty of geometry will teach

discipline to your wandering mind and show

how accurate your aim must be to reach

the enemy below.

And chemistry will teach you something further:

how combining elements, you may

create a gas designed for magnificent murder,

and how with your mortal wits you may explode

the sun and extinguish day.

Therefore be not impatient: the time will come

and you will dream no more

of knights or music

nor struggle with a soft and foreign tongue.

I cannot even promise you seven years;

and I can give you nothing

save what I gave you first:

breath

and a certain thirst.

I found this poem in a book called Road to America, published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1936. The author is Frances Frost, who was Paul Blackburn’s mother. Obviously, the twentieth century boy is Paul. Also, I checked the dates: they match the ages of

the boy in the poem.

I remember hearing once that Paul’s mother was a Yale Younger Poet, and that he was raised by his grandparents. And that they beat him. There’s an angry poem in his Collected Poems about his grandmother’s death:

MY SAINTED

–God has taken your Grandmother,

             they told me

              when I was seven years old.

I wonder what the fuck he did with her?

And whatever it was, I

hope it was more satisfying

than anything ever happened in her life .

             How otherwise explain it? Good

             things and scenes

             happening ever since . then .

backyard full of vegetables, sweet corn, the

fence full of sweet peas, all

gone now, thank Grandmother .

………………………

What I find strange and unnerving about his mother’s poem is its quiet revelation that Frances fully expected Paul to become a killer. Think about that. Even though he was already a poet in spirit (a dreamer “of knights or music”), and already on his way to becoming a translator from Spanish (struggling with “a soft and foreign tongue”), she assumed that his “wandering mind” would weaken and lead him to become a murderer, a “deliverer of death” at his country’s command.

Frances was clearly concerned with the prospects of war in this book. The opening section is a long history poem called “Road to America,” which begins in 1500 with “The continent, nibbled by nations…dark in the east / with dried red streaks of death.” It ends in a speculative 1937 with “the proportions of infinite death” looming on the horizon. Another piece is called “Poem against War, 1936,” and there’s a “Poem to America” that ends:

              O lovely island

when will your people not deceive themselves?

When will

they grow to the stature of peace, and know

the worth of their breath in terms of root and salt?

But Frances wasn’t without hope, and that means that her poem to Paul wasn’t simply an expression of political anguish. For instance, she has a poem called “Enemy” that goes:

From slight new gold to storm

of sounding green, to dearth

of leaf, the planet turns,

is enemy of death.

Such repetition clothes

a valor hid and staunch,

intrinsic in the core

that births the avalanche

of breaking leaves. This faith,

this truth be man’s: the earth,

doom constantly endured,

defiant is of doom.

You would think, then, that Frances might have imagined her own poetry as giving “birth,” like the earth, to at least a TRICKLE of defiance, if not quite the “avalanche” that the earth musters. Why didn’t she? See Paul as, like herself, an “enemy of death”?

Unlike Gary, I’ve never been won over entirely by Blackburn’s work. I did like his troubador translations when I read them for Stephen Rodefer’s class at SF State, and I did grow to appreciate his (Paul’s) hipster observer thing after moving to Brooklyn. But even so, Blackburn is a poet, and a worldly one at that: a traveler, a translator, a maker of scenes. Definitely not a killer. And his mother’s misrecognition of his future saddens me. Rereading her poem, I feel as though I’m listening in on her as she tries to convince herself that was was right to abandon him when he was four. I don’t say this to judge her: I don’t know the facts and can easily imagine scenarios in which she would have been right. But what I can’t imagine is the state of mind that would have led her to project Paul’s future as one of obedient mass murder.

Here’s another poem by the twentieth century boy. I wonder what his mother would have thought?

FOREIGN POLICY COMMITMENTS OR

YOU GET INTO THE CATAMARAN FIRST, OLD BUDDY

y digamos que, pensamos que, like

it doesn’t work, you

talk of the war in Vietnam–only you don’t–

dear committee, you talk most about ways

of expressing your rage against it, only

you do not say it is rage, too

timid, baby, you are a beast in a trap,

              fierce but rational

              (maybe they’ll let me out?)

              You know they won’t

and there’s the persistent sense of animal rage, to

strike back, to strike out

at what hurts you, hurts them too, I mean the reality

the children who will grow up to hate us,

the Vietnamese girl blinded and burnt by our napalm and

        still / lives, has lost all her hair, is

       still pregnant

       and will bear the child if we leave any hospitals for them, if

not, whatever ditch or ricefield or building still standing, that

        10 Americans die

that’s her only wish

             I wonder why?

             here we are saving Southeast Asia, etc.

             And everyone knows this, every

             one feels it

             Bombs fall and are flowers

             the stamen is the whole village

             blossoming, the

             wood and tin and flesh flung outward

             are petals . Death

              is beautiful! Mussolini’s son-in-law, what

              was his name, Ciano? count Ciano

              has described it accurately . The

             image is true . That was 1937

How the villages explode under the blossoming bombs!

Lovely! the bodies thrown up like wheat from the threshing flail?

It sure as hell is poetic and this is 1966 and what shall we

do against it?

The dead horse

nibbles

dead grass

in a dead pasture     .     There

is no green anywhere, horse,

pasture, grass, it’s all

b   l   a   c   k .

              Whatsa matter with you?

              hasn’t anyone

              ever seen

              a black horse?