The separation between a mother and daughter as the child becomes woman is difficult under any circumstances. If there is a conflict in the relationship, the break can be a good thing, but is still painful – especially if the conflict is likely to remain unresolved. In reading today’s poem, I see in it a young woman who has separated from her mother with serious and unresolved issues.
Before getting into the poem, I would like to address the poet’s interesting use of deliberately obscure words. On my first reading, I could not imagine why a poet would use words like coruscation and homunculus in a poem. As a poet, I certainly don’t want my readers making a run for the dictionary in order to understand my poetry.
There are far better word choices the poet might have made – for example, instead of hibernal, why not “wintry” – the same effect, but more immediate because it doesn’t cause the reader to halt and think about the definition of this rarely used word.
However, as I moved into the poem, I could see an underlying reason when I hit upon the word, homunculus. Diminutive human. This is a woman who has grown up in the shadow of her mother. A mother who was, perhaps, overbearing – if you’ll forgive a terrible pun on the opening line regarding Great and Small Bears.
I recalled that when my daughter entered college, she made deliberate use of every polysyllabic word she knew. It was her way of saying, “I’m a grownup – I’ve arrived – I’m as smart as you.” Perhaps by using more sophisticated verbiage, the speaker is doing the same thing, showing that she has grown beyond that childhood suburb is out of Mama Bear’s frigid and fearful cave.
And yet, in looking at the poem as a whole – a poem about a young woman who has escaped a bitter childhood – I believe it also emphasizes the intelligence of the speaker over her appearance. I believe that her appearance has been the issue that has divided mother and daughter, and, perhaps, irreparably damaged the relationship.
Stars of the Great and Small Bears,
lost in a cobalt padlock above Detroit,
the orient coruscations of car factories,
skating ponds, six-lane highways,
now lumbering across decades
into my childhood suburb, that rimed ruin—
picnic table, dispirited shucks and obeisant leeks
of our winter garden,
The poet uses the constellations of Ursa Major and Minor to indicate the relationship that will drive the poem – that of mother and daughter. She is flying above the city of her childhood, soaring above the remnants of the cave they shared, and she looks down upon those things that marked – and marred – her childhood.
I like the way she moves from the larger, less important things, to the smaller, specific, very important elements – from car factories to a picnic table, to the ruins of their winter garden not cleared away to the tell-all hairbrush. She speaks of decades – and I’m guessing that she’s probably in her thirties, has escaped the “cave” some time ago, has no intention of stopping here to see Mom, but is thinking of her as she looks below.
. . . homunculus
at the mind's edge—I can't return to you,
though I believe you're calling me
from the polar house of hibernal fear
with its skirted vanity table, its angry mirror
& Bakelite brush, bristles up, still fleeced
with a child's hair,.
And here we have the six million dollar word that changed my view of this poem – homunculus. A diminutive human, dwarfed by Mom. And the speaker says that she knows that her mother misses her, is calling to her, but she cannot return to Ursa Major. To that polar house of hibernal fear. Home was not a warm and pleasant place. It was a frigid place of fear. Fear of Mom? Perhaps, fear of displeasing Mom?
I would stop here to address that Bakelite brush with the bristles still up and still fleeced with a child’s hair – this brilliant and indelible image tells the story for me. Mom wasn’t that gentle in her brushing. It pulled and it hurt. In addition to the fierce image of the brush, we have also a prissy, skirted vanity table and the angry mirror.
Added together, these things bring to mind the sort of little girl whose appearance was everything to the mother. Perhaps, her appearance fell short of the mother’s expectations. Or the child may have been a beauty, but a beauty with a brain, who needed to escape an environment that put all value on appearance rather than intelligence.
Finally, the closing lines: a wavering frequency/ in the key of oblivion, mammalian, contracting. These indicate to me that as the plane flies out of the range of the rimed ruin of her childhood memories, the signal grows fainter and fades out.
The word mammalian is interesting here. Mammalian refers to mammals, of course, but when you look into the word more deeply, there is the shared mammalian characteristic of the mammary glands in the female – the ability to breastfeed the young – a symbol of warmth and nurturing, which this mother did not provide. And so the mammalian is contracting, the maternal growing smaller in importance – a brilliant contrast to the use of homunculus earlier, in which the speaker was diminutive, dwarfed by the mother.
This is a fine, well written poem for a change – a nice start to my day.
Angel
