Review by Martin Abramson
ONLY, NOT ONLY
By Francine Witte
Finishing Line Press, KY
$12.00, 28pp, Paper
Except for Sylvia Plath, I
can’t remember when a woman poet communicated so poignantly her love for the
wrong man. Poem after poem expresses the loneliness and hopelessness of
desertion. Yet, in the subtlety and artistry of Ms. Witte’s literary handiwork,
the total effect is not sorrow but a kind of pleasure: the pleasure of
discovery. Organized into free verse stanzas, these poems, while feeling
conversational, have the sure rhythm and strong meter of iambic pentameter
sonnets. The poem, Dream Lover, is
tensed between opposite poles of desire and renunciation:
All those nights I wanted
John
to call. See how good? See
how really good I can quit you?
But he didn’t listen. Or call.
Just shows up in a dream last week
with the past slung over his shoulder,
Sinatra-style.
This time I’ll be
different.
No fists.
She notes in The room wants to know:
The Room Wants to Know
where you go every night…
and why the mirror takes
you
back every chance it gets.
In Moment, her despair enlarges:
One day, you’re alone,
and a moment opens up
wide as a white beach
where anything can happen
only nothing does.
In Not Only:
I
deserve better, she said,
as she billowed a blanket
above the bed that was only
half-slept in.
And in Woman and Silence:
Now Woman
eats alone, and when
Silence shows up,
faithful, like it does every night,
Woman offers it a chair.
In Still in the Laundromat, thinking about laundry and her first love:
I
must loosen the cling
one
sleeve has around another,
and as I do, I think how tangling
and untangling involve the same motions.
A Flood offers a metaphor for her predicament, as she sits on the
roof, her house completely submerged:
All her
belongings
clean now, and silent
beneath her.
All she has left
is to wait for her man
to come sailing home
on the back of a door.
In, Party, 1991, we first meet John:
…John
struts in,
new face, eyelids sloped
like a suicide run. He
fires
up a Marlboro, blows
out steam, not smoke.
Soon, we’re dancing a foxtrot…
God, it’s a sin
to
want a man
I
don’t even know.
But I’m breathing Marllboro
Fumes…
John’s all man-sweat
and leather. Insanity
perfume.
The author, in Only, believes herself finally free of
him:
Today, I watched your outline
blurring against the
landscape
as you were painted back
into the world.
…I heard
the sound of a
wound
beginning to knit.
But It Could Happen suggests a relapse:
…I thought
this was over, this
universe where
you are the
weather…
…But running from you
is a strange
direction, like the moon
spinning into the
velvet dark.
The last poem, Now That You’re Gone, suggests a final
cure: “I am practicing/ living without you.”
Once,
last week
I wiped your face
from the early morning
glass. By then,
you were nothing
but a thin frost,
easy as dew to remove.
“Or maybe,” she
adds, “that too was a dream.” The poems
are not dated, so I can’t tell you whether the author’s feeling of emptiness in
Moment is a result of her
renunciation in Now That You’re Gone. But
whatever the chronology, Ms. Witte certainly wears her rue with a difference.
Ms. Witte is acutely aware of
the supernatural forces behind natural phenomena as well. “There’s a thunder to
everyday events/ that rolls so steadily, we block it out.” She sees her man
engulfed in a tornado with her in Twister,
and creates an ironic synthesis: “We started circling until centrifugal force/
pinned us up against opposite sides.
…we must have
past (sic)
each other a
thousand times as
we spun round and
round and round…
In One Night the Moon Runs Out of Patience, the moon humorously announces
that she doesn’t care “how you pine away by her light” or “the tides or Chinese
calendars”. She’s tired of “earth tilt, and sun/ pushing her out of the sky.”
She wants to “make the crops grow’ and “…do the circuit,/ Oprah, Larry, Jay.”
In a sort of ode
to the sun, I seen you, Sun, the
author portrays the sun’s shifting roles in her life: when fugitive rays find
her in the subway, or slick through a Venetian blind; when her mother “…left us
like a pile/ of clothes she was giving away…” Even in a country setting, the
sun curving “around the back/ of a mountain”, she suspects treachery: “…I know
how you/ could shine on me and stretch/ me flat against the field;” but
succumbs, letting the sun “stroke/ me sweet and bleach my brain/ till all I
know is/ warm, so warm, so warm…”
Ms.Witte ties it all up
with in evocation of time in Clock.
I am watching the clock
As it stretches its
hands to a future that waves
from the back of a
truck.
…
…then
there’s this
minute unable to stand
still long enough and a clock
steady in the sky of
my kitchen wall
keeping time as if
anything really could.
Francine Witte has
certainly frozen some poignant moments for us, given us a deeply affecting gaze
into the workings of her mind and delighted us even as she tolled the bells of
sadness. It’s been a pleasure reviewing the work of such a gifted poet and I
look forward to following her promising career in future.
