THE ANDREW POEMS: A Review from the Heart

by Harvey Lillywhite

    

   The Andrew Poems by Shelley Wagner[1] do not require a literary docent to be appreciated; the essence and emotion are completely available. Once you learn that Andrew is the poet’s child drowned at age 6, your expectations are fairly well set. These are poems of the deepest grief imaginable. They are, at the same time, heartbreaking and restorative. But because the catastrophe inspiring these poems does set up such stark, hard-edged, uncomfortable expectations, it’s important to note that this book is more than a gallery of carefully snapped photographs of a mother’s shock and anguish, even as compelling and frightening as such an exhibit would be. The Andrew Poems because they are transformative beyond their occasion, as momentous as it is, are art.

     I feared they wouldn’t be. In fact, I was afraid to commit to what I knew would be an unspeakably sad journey. I didn’t want to stare over the shoulder of a stunned mother at her mortally private grieving. But these poems asked me into their world from the very beginning, asked me to participate in facing death, a sacred, necessary place pretty much in the middle of each of us. They invited me to the river as the body is found, to the graveside, into the casket with the dead child dressed in red tie and penny loafers, to the house full of food and visitors afterward, to the bedroom, to the bed and under the covers, right beside the bereft mother whose pain is her survival.

     I immediately felt intimate with this generous mother, asked in as a witness and maybe to help wrestle with a question, not a simple question of innocence or guilt—the opportunities for guilt when a child dies accidentally are surely vast. However, the inevitable guilt at not being there to stop the tragedy, while it must be poignant, is finally a very small part of the gravity in these poems. And this is not at all the question raised. There is certainly guilt over the loss of control. And there is guilt for simply taking the time to grieve apart and alone. Doesn’t grief entitle us to break down, to be unavailable to others, to suffer alone (I think of Emerson digging up his wife a year after her death)? Maybe it does entitle us to this madness, but the one grieving is, in a very real sense, an outcast. However, the question raised in these poems is the most obvious and the most real: How does a mother continue after something like this?

The first poem in the book, “Treasure,” speaks directly and invitingly to the reader from the first word.

 

Treasure

Follow my hand into the trunk,

Examine for yourself its treasure.

 

 

How eerie. Is the trunk the casket? Is the dead boy the treasure? Are we being asked to touch death for ourselves? While the answer is literally no, figuratively this is exactly the request. And the poem continues naming the treasures in the box, each thing an emblem of the boy.

 

Lift and read the heavy board,

a scrap of lumber

on which he scrawled his name—

red letters, all capitals,

the E backwards.

In kindergarten he learned

to sign perfectly his many drawings,

the jewels of his last will and testament.

 

 

At this point, you understand that these poems will not rant. Their sensitivity toward the child, toward all that’s attached to his memory, and toward the probably reluctant reader, is inspiring. The irony here is rich—that the treasures of childhood should become “jewels of his last will and testament” is the kind of transformation that’s always happening in these poems. These are unexpected and breathtaking moments.

     And finally we come to Andrew himself as we explore the things he’s left behind that are obviously so haunting to the mother.

 

Try on his brilliant yellow sunglasses.

See the world as he saw it—clearly

full of hope.

Slide your hand up the sleeve

of his favorite red shirt

as though you were to tickle him.

He would laugh. You may cry.

Finally, with utmost care,

hold what he made in nursery school—

a white plaster cast of his hand,

fingers spread wide apart

as though he were telling you

how old he would be when he died.

 

     It does break the mood to discuss how this poem is crafted, but a quick look at just the first two sentences shows a careful, intentional design as rhythms and sounds build, uniting sound and sense.

Follow my hand into the trunk,	Note the rhythmic palindrome here: /–/ /–/. Note the “f” sound that repeats in the words follow, self, and lift, and resonates in the word heavy. Note the interesting repetition of the “h” sound in hand and heavy and the “tr” blend in trunk and treasure that is later subtly spread between the words left and read. Note also the assonance in the short “a” of hand, examine, scrap, and capitals, and the “uh” sound in trunk and lumber that marries these words.
Examine for yourself its treasure.	Note the nearly perfect iambic rhythms in the next four lines, suggesting a level of control that is greatly unexpected. This control persists throughout the poems as the subject matter itself portrays the crippling, out-of-control grief of having to live through this ordeal that will literally never end. In this line, the final iamb is missing its stressed syllable, which is picked up immediately in the next line. Things are maddeningly regular while, at the same time, out of kilter.
Lift and read the heavy board,	The image of the heavy board here recalls several things: the casket, the gravestone, and a thing that should be light enough to float but has become a heavy barrier that is then immediately dismissed as “a scrap of lumber” on the next line. There is a dread presence and absence simultaneously throughout these poems.
a scrap of lumber on which he scrawled his name— red letters, all capitals, the E backwards.	The repetition of the “scr” sound in scrap and scrawled suggests something unimportant, discardable, and an action dashed off in a hurry, which, ironically, is the permanent and untimely signature we’re left with, the “E” backwards in the red name all in capitals that screams innocently the way a child screams for fun and records a flashing moment in a life that too suddenly was over.

 

   

     Though this review won’t delve any more deeply into the craft evident in every one of these poems, it’s important to understand the artistic control that does create a strong tension between the heightened but never obtrusive musical background in the poems—something that works on us unconsciously as we read, hungry to “know what happened”—and the drama in the foreground that is related with a relatively flat and matter-of-fact precision. These are always spare lines with absolutely no clutter, images emerging like bright ornaments from the sad narration.

     The Andrew Poems present an iterative but mainly chronological journey, beginning with the memory of Andrew’s birth, which is depicted as a first separation between mother and child that in a most unlikely way foreshadows his death. Then there is the accident, horrible and cruel, a little boy climbing a tree who, in falling, bumps his head, and falls into the river. The funeral follows. And then the days after the funeral pass, the mother hardly able to stay in her own skin. And finally, the years pass. Is it scars that come and cover the wounds?  Actually not. The wounds are assimilated and become part of the new person, the mother who survives, but they never actually heal and disappear.

     What I find so strong about this collection and how this story is told is the refusal to transcend any part of this experience. We have inventions that might help us move on, get on with our lives—the imaginary comforts against grief. There are, for instance, heaven and God the father and eternal protector. And while it’s clear by the end of the book that the mother is a woman of faith, that faith is never couched in any escape into religion or even into a community of friends and family so willing to help. The faith is hard won. It comes from acknowledging and honoring the unspeakable emotions, the pain that no adjective could adequately qualify, from staying true to every moment, and to those feelings that are so awfully isolating.

     At one level the imagination closes down, and what is painfully real takes over. The poems catalog almost endlessly the stuff of life that surrounds us and, in this case, reminds the mother of her living son and is therefore a joy at the same time as it reveals what is lost. But at another level, the mother’s actions are full of imagination, bringing home petals from the grave and spreading them on the kitchen table, witnessing blackbirds in the backyard lifting as one like the soul, hearing a needle stuck in a record, saying “grieve, grieve, grieve.” While we know that this ordeal will never pass—it’s a reality that must never go away—we know that “the pain that has come between us will someday be our pearl.”

     We learn a lot about Andrew and come to love him ourselves as precious moments from his life are actually memorialized in such a tender way. We see him watching soaps with his grandma, chasing ducks in the yard, decorating the kitchen door with pictures, swinging on his tire swing, having his leg run over by a car. These moments are celebrated throughout the book in a way that’s never sentimental.

     Most of all, we see the mother in poem after poem, facing everyday situations that keep her circling back to Andrew’s death. The physical environment always reflects the emotional environment. She’s left on Halloween holding Andrew’s collapsed rubber gorilla mask. We see her in the black limousine at the funeral and learn that after the burial she would live for years enclosed in this black car. We see her in her bed with Andrew’s six-year-old girlfriend who has come to comfort her with a jar full of shells—her tribute to him. We see her at the grocery store with no desire to eat but having to get food for her son, Andrew’s older brother, who is also a poignant though not often mentioned person living in this tragedy. We see her having to throw away Andrew’s things even though “after death / everything is a shrine.”  We see her on the first anniversary of his death, making him lunch and apologizing to him for not being there. We see her turning the spot beneath the tree where he fell into a garden whose plants are all living memories of Andrew. And, finally, by the end, we see her re-married to a man who lost his own son and who had actually been the doctor who attended Andrew when his leg was broken when he was three. We must admire her willingness to make all of this public but never asking for the sympathy she surely deserves.

     As the poems continue, we feel the healing. This is redemption that comes from sticking with it. It is true growth, never away from the loss but always enriched by it. This ability to stay with the pain obviously comes from her love of Andrew and her healthy and absolute unwillingness to let go. We come to realize through these poems that love and grief are the same thing. How is it possible? But it’s true. Love is attachment, suffering, and the compassion that comes when something like the death of a young son finally breaks the distance between the mother and others, between the mother and the world.

     The book, finally, becomes a lesson for all of us, though it’s never preachy or didactic. The poem, “A Dance,” toward the end of the book, epitomizes what the mother has learned.

 

The Dance

 

My life is a circle

forever going forward,

forever coming back.

His birth, his death,

my birth, my death,

ad infinitum.

Is not the symbol for infinity

a circle twisted over itself

in the middle, forever

squeezed in agony? Is that

the wringing out of sorrow?

Grief runs on a circular track.

When pain strikes us

at any point on the line,

we go fully around again

like a sleek greyhound

who will never catch

the mechanical rabbit.

Will the golden ring

free us from sorrow?

We kill ourselves

chasing foolishness

in revolving doors.

My child was only playing.

The river that took him

has never spoken,

the ever-widening concentric circles

that marked his fall

silently backed away.

Tell me, are life and death

a hoop flipped over,

one side like the other?

Life is a closed circuit;

blood flows back to the heart.

The solar system spins in circles.

Am I dancing pirouette,

heart pounding with each revolution,

eyes seizing the same spot—his grave,

my reference point for balance,

arms swirling over my head

stirring heaven’s stars

with a circular motion,

grasping for an imaginary cord,

my calloused, pointed toe

drilling into the ground beneath me,

my grave spiraling below?

 

 

Here, the simple line, “in the middle, forever” speaks volumes. And it’s this feat of staying in the middle of what is so real and so painful that is both wrenching and ultimately supremely significant. By the end, the mother knows the answer, which is clearly revealed in the poem, “Your questions.” But, the answers, the great answers to life’s great questions no less, seem pedestrian, not because the poet or the mother fails to understand or fails to articulate this heartfelt wisdom that comes, it seems naïve to say, from such struggle.  But the answers are won through the foot, so to speak, through walking day by day and truly moment by moment through what life is regardless of what we think we want or wish for. She explains that she has tried to write

 

Not the poem that tries

with constricted throat

to speak the unspeakable,

recapture in foolish, shallow syllables

the trauma of loss

so you might

know for a moment

grief that gives life,

transcends,

blesses with wisdom.

 

 

She goes on in this poem a little later to remind us that

 

You will die, too, you know.

There’s nothing I can do about it

but have you drown in my poem

for only a moment,

then come gulping to the surface

looking into my eyes

smiling because you are not dead

but happier than you were before

to shake the water off your head,

go home and kiss your children,

tuck them in bed,

sleep yourself unsettled

but wake somehow refreshed.

 

 

     This book comes to the divine by way of mortality. Stevens told us that “Death is the mother of beauty.” And in a deep sense, this is important to acknowledge. And the beauty here is aesthetic—literally through the senses, through every sense. Life and death, as one, are seen and heard, are smelled and tasted, and are felt as fully as they could be. This is a baptism by anguish, but also by joy, plain and simple.

     This book is a gift. While I understand it has helped many through their own grieving, it is not at all a book just for those in the throes of deep grief. In these poems, there is humor as well as sadness, there’s dark humor, irony, but also a sane and level way of seeing what things actually are and, maybe the greatest lesson, of accepting the world, of accepting life, just as it is—no looking away, no averting the eyes, no escape.  What strength that takes. What strength The Andrew Poems have.