Phoebe's broken record is a pretty small loss for Holden, compared to all the other losses in Catcher. He's lost his younger brother to leukemia. He's lost his older brother to Hollywood. He just got kicked out of school. Jane, the girl he loves, is dating his roommate at Pencey Prep. His mother is lost in grief, and his father is lost to work. By the end of the book, Holden will be close to losing his mind. Salinger's whole novel is pretty much about loss, but it's also about healing. At the end, Holden is facing his losses head-on, probably for the first time in his life.
Last night, I shared a poem by Sharon Olds. It was from her latest collection, Stag's Leap, which is all about loss and, eventually, healing. The book, inspired by the dissolution of Olds' 30-year marriage, is full of pain and anger and love. In each poem, the struggle to let go, forgive, move on takes center stage. It is a painful and wondrous process rendered in Olds' typically stunning imagery.
In an early poem, Olds talks about the loss of things:
Object Loss
The banjo clock, suspended in thirty-weight
dreaming marriedness, for a third of a
century, doesn't come down easy from the wall,
rusted to the hook, then it lurches up,
its gangle throat glugs. Big-headed, murmurous,
in my arms it's like a diver's bell,
Davy-Jonesed. When I lean it by the back
door, it tocks, and ticks, it doesn't even
cross my mind I might wish to kick it.
Using his list, I remove his family
furnishings, the steeple clock,
the writing-arm chair, the told-and-brass
drawing table--I had not known
how connected I'd felt, through him, to a world of
handed-down, signed, dated,
appraised things, pedigreed matter.
As I add to the stash which will go to him,
I feel as if I'm falling away
from family--as if each ponderous
object had been keeping me afloat. No, they were
the scenery of the play now closing,
lengthy run it had. My pitchfork
tilts against the wall in the dining room,
web thick in its tines, spider
dangling in one cul-de-sac. . . .
What if loss can be without
dishonor. His harpoon--a Beothuc harpoon--
and its bone and sinew and tusk and brine-wood
creel I add to the pile, I render
unto Caesar, and my shame is winter sunlight
on a pine floor, and it moves, it sways like and old dancer.
Loss is a palpable being in Olds' poems, a creature that must be confronted, described, tamed. Olds is losing a three-decade-long life, full of banjo clocks and harpoons, children and sexual desire, the most intimate and sacred elements of her existence. It is a long and difficult process to behold. The book is divided into six sections, titled for seasons and times: January--December, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, Years Later. The poems in each part reflect the healings brought on by sunrises and sunsets, snows and thaws, August heat and October harvest. In the end, it's all about holding on to the precious things of memory, finding out what is left in the fields of the heart after years of cultivating loss, as in the final poem of the collection:
What Left?
Something like a half-person
left my young husband's body,
and something like the other half
left my ovary. Later,
the new being, complete, slowly
left my body. And a portion of breath
left the air of the delivery room,
entering the little mouth,
and the milk left the breast, and went
into the fat cuffs of the wrists.
Years later, during his cremation,
the liquids left my father's corpse,
and the smoke left the flue. And even
later, my mother's ashes left
my hand, and fell as seethe into the salt
chop. My then husband made
a self, a life, I made beside him
a self, a life, gestation. We grew
strong, in direction. We clarified
in vision, we deepened in our silence and our speaking.
We did not hold still, we moved, we are moving
still--we made, with each other, a moving
like a kind of music: duet; then solo,
solo. We fulfilled something in each other--
I believed in him, he believed in me, then we
grew, and grew, I grieved him, he grieved me,
I completed with him, he completed with me, we
made whole cloth together, we succeeded,
we perfected what lay between him and me,
I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me,
I did not leave him, he did not leave me,
I freed him, he freed me.
Stag's Leap recently won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. It's a work personal and universal. It touches upon the very core of grief and relief, holding on and letting go, being imprisoned and being freed from the past. Sharon Olds' poems are full of wisdom and a visceral truth that grab the reader by the scruff of the neck and don't let go.
Saint Marty can still feel their grip on him, their fingers strong and urgent as a lost lover's kiss.
Confessions of Saint Marty
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