"It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns."
"I know it's a poem by Robert Burns."
She was right, though. It is "If a body meet a body coming through the rye." I didn't know it then, though.
"If thought it was 'If a body catch a body,'" I said. "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
That's what Holden tells Phoebe he wants to do with his life. He wants to save children from falling off a cliff. He wants to keep all children safe. Allie. Phoebe. He wants them to just play and not have to worry about things like cliffs or schools or leukemia or growing up. He'll be their savior. All from a poem by Robert Burns.
There's something about certain poems that stick with you, years after you read them. Robert Burns sticks with Holden, thanks to the kid he sees in the street earlier in the book. In 2001, I read a collection of poems like that. The poet was Julianna Baggott, and the book was This Country of Mothers. At the time, I was working on my MFA thesis, poems that eventually became my first published book. I was stuck. I couldn't see any shape or reason in what I was writing. Everything I got on the page struck me as crap. Shallow, self-conscious crap. And then I read Baggott.
Baggott draws stories of women's lives that cut close to the bone. Stories of birth and death, tragedy and beauty. The poems in This Country of Mothers are both very personal and very universal. She's able to take the profane elements of this world and spin them into something like prayer:
My Mother Gives Birth
They gave her a form of truth serum,
not to dull the pain, to dull memory.
But she does remember
asking the nurse to take off her girdle--
not a girdle but her skin taut with pain--
that the nurse told her to stop screaming,
the girl one over was having her first
and scared enough already.
She rolled my mother to her side, standard procedure,
handcuffed her to the bed rails, left her to labor alone.
My mother says her last thought was of Houdini,
that she too could fold the bones of her hands
and escape. I want her to slip free,
to rise up from her bed and totter
out of that dark ward of moaning women.
I want to be born in black dirt.
But her mind went white as cream lidding a cup.
And she does not remember,
although her eyes were open, blank,
how I spun from her body, wailing,
drugged for truth, my wrists on fire.
A few years after I first read Baggott, I met her. My book had just been released, and she came to the university where I teach to read from her recently published novel. I couldn't tell her how important her poems were to me as a writer without sounding like some crazed Kathy Bates stalker. I sat and listened to her read her work. She was beautiful and full of a kind of manic nervous energy. After the room had cleared and I was helping clean up, I approached her, gave her a copy of my book. She was gracious and welcoming, and I fell in love with her all over again.
I know I'm going to sound like Holden Caulfield right now. I want to live by Julianna Baggott. I want to call her up and have coffee with her. I want to return again and again to her creative fountain, full of poems like this....
After Giving Birth, I Recall the Madonna and Child
Who could ever believe it:
the cows, shoulder to shoulder,
lowing three-part harmony,
the stable so Hollywood-set tidy,
Joseph and Mary, serene, smiling,
and the boy, pink and fat, already blessing us
with two tiny fingers raised
from his white swaddle?
He's never purple, blood-stained,
yellowed--like my babies---
from swimming in his own shit.
Maybe if we could see her belly
hardened by contraction,
her knees
spread, steam rising
from the wash of blood,
and her face contorted with pain,
the cords of her neck
taut and blue,
then we might believe Joseph,
how he must have said,
I can see the head.
It's glowing.
That's Julianna Baggott. In a wash of blood and shit and pain, she finds a miracle.
Today, she is Saint Marty's catcher in the rye.
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