The Heart's Pangaea

Susan Neale

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612774886
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"'Everywhere we have been since beginning/Is Mapped in the memory somewhere, ' writes Susan Neale at the outset of this ambitiously conceived and enormously satisfying collection of poems. Here is a poet who wants nothing less than to know the past. Her fields of study are the history of light and darkness, of language and other ways of saying, of reality and dream, and, especially, of women and men as they move toward one another and away in their seismic, often cataclysmic dancing, a continental rift and drift originating in a long-ago state of innocence and wholeness Neal calls 'the heart's Pangaea.' In this debut collection sure to attract wide attention, Susan Neale gives us richly detailed maps leading to discoveries about where we human beings have been, where we are, and where in the world, together and apart, we're bound."—David Citino

THE SATISFACTION OF A
WOMAN COMBING

… It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman

Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

—Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry”

Such a swift action, I barely think of it,

Imprinted in my catalogue of movements,

Automatic as pouring water in a glass,

Catching a baseball, easing out the clutch,

Lifting a baby, typing. When I was five

I stood in line, unwavering from my place,

On the wooden stage of the empty auditorium

Behind Talitha’s plastic-clipped braids.

Mrs. Parker stooped to dispense,

In a movement as careful as the placing of eggs

Or scissors into the hands of children,

Black combs, from a black-painted coffee can.

I almost thought I wouldn’t get one, but

Sure as the hurricane that took out our town

She delivered it, pressed the Unbreakable

Into my palm, and I did not drop it.

The tip of one tooth was clear, from a swirl

Of clear plastic somehow mixed in. Lucky.

Strummed, it sang of bamboo; it bent

But so far in an arch of teeth, then snapped back.

In angular strokes that abraded my ears,

I pulled it through cornsilk, again and again,

Approaching the painted backdrop of books,

And the flash of the silver umbrella,

To make a lasting impression.

Now it is action immersed in memory,

Noticed only when snagging,

Just as I only notice the hammer’s slow swing

When the nail bends. What imperceptible

Mental revision goes on then?

Always, I stop for an instant,

Let that trajectory correct itself,

To be ready next time, at perfect pitch,

Just as my lips contract, my fingers arch,

For the right low note on the flute:

Satisfaction, a thousand corrections,

Weaving an action to absolute.

BODILY REPAIRS

I’m all the way back in the tilting chair,

The taste of nickels in my mouth,

And a stranger’s clamps and fingers: Mr. Fix-it

Is patching disasters again, poking at potholes,

Tamping tar in the cracks of this bowling ball

Where I keep my good sense, my home.

It never looks better when he’s done.

On my forehead he plasters the warning:

More work will be needed soon.

I’ll chuck the bills in a drawer full of things:

Old glasses with lenses thinner than I can wear,

Old photographs of lovers, old wedding rings.

The broken limb heals with a little twist,

A slight limp, an ache for rainy days,

A scar where the rupture closed itself—

Knitting overtime to patch the leak—

But still, the patch is there, unsightly, numb.

Unlined, it cuts a gash across your palm.

Unhaired, it weaves its way across your leg.

Pink as a newborn, untanned pockmark,

Careless zigzag seam.

Softer than skin, it ripples against the grain.

Snakes shed their skins; perhaps that’s wise,

Scrapping the entire enterprise,

Writing off the old life for the new.

The message shucks its envelope,

A papery miss...