Old Roses
by Kate Barnes
When my father met my mother
at a dinner party in a garden of very old roses
on Beacon Hill one hot evening
in early June, he said to his friend, F. Morton
Smith, that night, “Morton, I have met
the girl I’m going to marry!”
(We have Uncle Morton's
testimony for that, the certified word
of a Boston lawyer.)
My mother
said my father had looked handsome, yes,
and talked delightfully, but what she remembered
were the mosquitoes. “If you stopped slapping at them,
even for a second, you were eaten up
alive.”
My father courted her
for the next ten years, whenever they found themselves
in the same place. It was the twenties then,
heyday of ocean liners, and she might be
in Paris, or maybe off getting
run away with by a hairy, two-humped camel
in the Gobi Desert, while he was crossing
the Pyrenees on foot; but, at last, on another
steamy hot day in Massachusetts, as she,
still wet from the bath, lay naked upstairs
on her sister’s bed, she heard the wedding march
start up on the grand piano
directly below her. She sprang to her feet,
threw on her cream-colored dress with a dipping hemline,
and flung herself down the narrow old staircase
straight into the arms of matrimony—which were wearing
an English jacket of dark blue wool for the occasion,
splendid, but unendurable.
Would anyone say
the marriage was a happy one? I don’t think
I know. Sometimes. Perhaps. I can’t imagine
either of them with anyone else. Years later, I,
a greedy child, crouched in the dark cabinet
under the attic stairs, and wolfed down
the last slice of their wedding cake, dried out fruitcake
in a little box covered with silver paper
and lined with paper lace, a keepsake
for wedding guests to slip under their pillows
that night so that they, too, would dream the bright moon
rolling her way through silver light, singing stars
clustering under the clouds.
Those crumbs
became the bones in my seven-year-old body—
and they’re in there yet—while the dreams
sing on in my head forever, like mosquitoes
whining among the leaves of thorny old roses.
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Kate Barnes was Maine’s first Poet Laureate. And rightfully so. There is an incandescence to her work -- a delicacy of touch, utter clarity, and lightness that you carry it home with you and think about it for a while. Often, Kate writes about the natural world as a metaphor for the human experience of intimacy and loss. She is greatly influenced by the Chinese poets she admires. And, there is a humor in her writing, not a belly laugh but a chuckle of recognition.
She spent much of her youth in Maine at Chimney Farm in Nobleboro, a farm that she says “only grew words” – her parents were writers. Her father, Henry Beston, was a naturalist. Her mother, Elizabeth Coatsworth wrote poetry and many children’s books.
Selected Publications:
Talking in Your Sleep, Blackberry Books, 1986
Crossing the Field, Blackberry Books, 1992
Where the Deer Were, Godine, 1994
Kneeling Orion, Godine, 2004
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Excerpts from an interview with Kate Barnes at her home in Appleton, Maine, October, 2007
Kate –Very often you get a first line and you can keep it for half a year or more. And the time comes when it is right and the rest of the poem comes out. It’s not a completely, in NO WAY, is this a completely conscious process. I remember being in my late teens thinking “Gee, the ones I like of my own poetry are the ones that tell me something that I didn’t know.” And that is still true.
Rob – But if they came from you, how could they tell you something you didn’t know?
Kate – Because we all have a big unconscious in there. Laughs… I remember being in my late teens and getting the line “In the February sliver of our lives” and I went around with that for about six months. And then I got the poem. That’s the only one I remember but it’s happened many times.
Rob – What is it that happens during those six months.
Kate – You live! [Laughs] You live along. And when the right time comes it comes of itself. I don’t think I’m going to make a poem out of that line today. You maybe you are just feeling good that day, you’ve had a good cup of coffee and away you go.
Who was it who said “The first version doesn’t matter. What you first write down is like the froth on the lips of a medium.” Then in time, you work and work and work and you make it right. I would often have 40 or more revisions.
I will say one other thing about me in poetry. I’ve had a great luxury in my life. I was brought hearing a great deal of poetry thanks to my mother who read aloud an enormous amount. And read lots of story poems to the children, exciting ones. Then when I went off to boarding school at 13, I was very lonely. I just read poetry all the time. I had a copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse. I was such a dolt that I didn’t even notice that it was done in terms of time. For me they were all existing at the same time. All my life poetry has been my – sigh – I don’t know, the thing that I turned to and read all the time. That’s still true. That’s a great luxury in somebody’s life. I’ve been very lucky about that.
Children like being frightened by fairy tales. They have an inborn need to experience powerful emotions. Andersen scared children, but I’m certain that none of them held it against him, not even after they grew up. His marvelous tales abound in indubitably supernatural beings, not to mention talking animals and loquacious buckets. Not everyone in this brotherhood is harmless and well-disposed. The character who turns up most often is death, an implacable individual who steals unexpectedly into the very heart of happiness and carries off the best, the most beloved. Andersen took children seriously. He speaks to them not only about life’s joyous adventures, but about its woes, its miseries, its often undeserved defeats. His fairy tales, peopled with fantastic creatures, are more realistic than whole tons of today’s stories for children, which fret about verisimilitude and avoid wonders like the plague. Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays (as today’s moral tales insistently advertise, though it doesn’t necessarily turn out that way in real life), but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.
