Growing Up
Poem of Seven A.M.
The tireless & endless rubbish on & against the curb
looks to have been the product of a bilious regime
unknown to human motives, & too big for human hands:
these cylinders like fuselages, paper-bag tombstones
with trails like moths, like flak, began their arduous crawls
to death & transfiguration the day before yesterday,
awaiting the local recycling, which has not yet come.
They dwarf us, although we have carried them out; they build,
indifferently, our tombs, & yet as we work behind
them we can take pride in their confounding extent,
since they claim that we pick up after ourselves. The stacks
of cardboard we folded up, then split with Exacto knives
into a kind of dismembered Northern Renaissance altarpiece;
horseradish; a hash of shredded paper; dregs
of cooking lessons; crushed acrylic cylinders and tubes;
a box that a kitten could sleep in; three gunmetal wheels
that roll nowhere: all come together in hasty concert
to make of their parts a demented harmonium, where
the wind is no longer opposed to our presence, but sings
loud etudes as we pump the footpedals and watch
our block become an auditorium, whose broad
countermelodies carrying low tones the pigeons may hear
above their gutters' chatter, & then again attend
to such repeated anthems for our neighborhood, our home.
The Grown-Up
after Rilke
None of it let her sit down. None of it was the work
she thought she had known, and of course it made her afraid,
scowl-prone or grave and graceless, easy to find
yet nearly invisible, one among all other creatures
bent over in line as if to enter the ark
of Noah: a rickety novelty, made by hand.
Boards under her moved. She moved slowly. The sea looked rough,
and close to her, and hard, and very loud.
Above her sat her judges: high school teachers.
She felt as if she had taken off
prescription sunglasses, then stepped on them, so that each day
seemed all too sharp, a glare that never clears.
The evening has no time for Q&A.
One child arrives: another disappears.
"The Grown-Up" uses a decadent form I invented, inspired I think by the other mis- translations and metaphrastic forms invented by the superb Australian poet John Tranter: it is a reverse translation, or antonymic, translation, in which the most important words in the source text get replaced by their opposites. Rilke's "The Grown-Up" begins, in Stephen Mitchell's translation, "All this stood upon her and was the world/ and stood upon her with all its fear and grace," which is wonderful but rather dignified for the part of grown-up-ness that comes when you have children, especially when you have children (as my mom did) in a milieu that does not make it easy to find much help or high-quality day care, so that the children will not often let you alone. The reverse translation turned out to get, if I did it right, some of the practical, harassed, undignified, un-solemn (the grown-up in Mitchell's Rilke is "solemn" too) qualities that adults have to assume. Some of the other elements of the poem are not so much antonymns as flipped homonyms, where I take the meaning that in the original, or in the Mitchell, you have to ignore: not the Ark of the Covenant, but Noah's Ark. My mom was a junior high English teacher before she became a mom (now that my youngest brother has himself grown up and left home, she does a radio show and writes books designed to help parents raise kids): the sonnet is also an homage to her. All poems, like all children, are in some wide sense mis-translations, altered or incorrect adaptations, based on earlier generations of people or poems; you can get that idea from Harold Bloom, or by analogy from E. H. Gombrich on making and modeling (in Gombrich's Art and Illusion), or just from watching how kids try to resemble, and then try not to resemble, mom and dad.
Stephen Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. His books include The Art of the Sonnet, with David Mikics; Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry; and Parallel Play. A new book of poems, Belmont, will appear from Graywolf Press in 2013.