☀ What Sparks Poetry: Diane Seuss on "Ballad"

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November 11, 2024

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In Reading Prose, poets write about how the experience of reading prose, fiction, non-fiction, criticism, and theory, has sparked the writing of poetry or affected how they read poetry. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.

Ballad

Diane Seuss

Oh dream, why do you do me this way?
Again, with the digging, again with the digging up.
Once more with the shovels.
Once more, the shovels full of dirt.
The vault lid. The prying. The damp boards.
Mother beside me.
Like she’s an old hat at this.
Like all she’s got left is curiosity.
Like curiosity didn’t kill the red cat.
Such a sweet, gentle cat it was.
Here we go again, dream.
Mother, wearing her take-out-the-garbage coat.
I haven’t seen that coat in years.
The coat she wore to pick me up from school early.
She appeared at the back of the classroom, early.
Go with your mother, teacher said.
Diane, you are excused.
I was a little girl. Already a famous actress.
I looked at the other kids. I acted lucky.
Though everyone knows what an early pick-up means.
An early pick-up, dream.
What’s wrong, I asked my mother. It is early spring.
Bright sunlight. The usual birds.
Air, teetering between bearable and unbearable.
Cold, but not cold enough to shiver.
Still, dream, I shiver.
You know, my mother said.
Her long garbage coat flying.
There was a wind, that day.
A wind like a scurrying grandmother, dusting.
Look inside yourself, my mother said.
You know why I have come for you.
And still I acted lucky. Lucky to be out.
Lucky to be out in the cold world with my mother.
I’m innocent, I wanted to say.
A little white girl, trying out her innocence.
A white lamb, born into a cold field.
Frozen almost solid. Brought into the house.
Warmed all night with hair dryers.
Death? I said. Smiling. Lucky.
We’re barely to the parking lot.
Barely to the car ride home.
But the classroom already feels like the distant past.
Long ago, my classmates pitying me.
Arriving at this car full of uncles.
Were they wearing suits? Death such a formal occasion.
My sister, angry-crying next to me.
Me, encountering a fragment of evil in myself.
Evilly wanting my mother to say it.
What? I asked, smiling. My lamb on full display at the fair.
He’s dead! my sister said. Hit me in the gut with her flute.
Her flute case. Her rental flute. He’s dead!
Our father.
Our father, who we were not supposed to know had been dying.
He’s dead! The flute gleaming in its red case.
Here, my mother said at home.
She’d poured us each a small glass of Pepsi
We normally couldn’t afford Pepsi.
Lucky, I acted.
He’s no longer suffering, my mother said.
Here, she said. Drink this.
The little bubbles flew. They bit my tongue.
My evil persisted. What is death? I asked.
And now, dream, once more you bring me my answer.
Dig, my mother says. Pry, she says.
I don’t want to see, dream.
The lid so damp it crumbles under my hands.
The casket just a drawerful of bones.
A drawerful. Just bones and teeth.
That one tooth he had. Crooked like mine.

from the book MODERN POETRY / Graywolf Press

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Forward

What Sparks Poetry:
Diane Seuss on Reading Prose
"Keats’s ballad opens with three stanzas in the voice of a questioner, after which the knight-at-arms takes over, answering the questioner through storytelling. Likewise, set at the center of Lorca’s poem is a dialogue between the older and younger man. As the green girl teeters on the balcony, suspended between dream and reality, life and death, so Keats’s knight occupies the in-between, stranded by the faery 'On the cold hill’s side.' And each poem, in its way, serves as an allegory for the container itself, the ballad form, which inhabits the liminal space between narrative and lyric, story and song."

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

Marcus Iwama On Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa
"As a hybrid Japanese-American text, Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa lives in this same strange light. It reads like a diary under the sun, bleeding into itself, full of holes and riddled by slippage. Poems become prose, become dreams, become memories, become the waking life pressed between your teeth. Each page is a welter of color and shadow. In simpler terms, Hydra Medusa is haunted."
viaCLEVELAND REVIEW OF BOOKS

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