IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE: 2 POEMS BY EDWARD HIRSCH

The idealization of your homeland as a lost paradise is one of the two possible choices, possible distortions, that one encounters among immigrants. The other is the utter rejection of the “old country.” Of course it was both good and bad. But “lost paradise” is more common, both because it’s a more pleasant way to remember one’s growing up, and also because childhood itself, when everything is so new and vivid, and you aren’t yet burdened with the struggle for existence, seems a paradise. Another factor is remembering what it felt like to belong, surrounded by family warmth.

IN A POLISH HOME FOR THE AGED

(CHICAGO 1983)

It’s sweet to lie awake in the early morning

Remembering the sound of five huge bells

Ringing in the village at dawn, the iron

Notes turning to music in the pink clouds.

It’s nice to remember the flavor of groats

Mixed with horse’s blood, the sour tang

Of unripe peppers, the smell of garlic

Growing in Aunt Stefania’s garden.

I can remember my grandmother’s odd claim

That her younger brother was a mule

Pulling an ox cart across a lapsed meadow

In the first thin light of a summer morning;

Her cousin, Irka, was a poorly planted tree

Wrapping itself in a dress of white blossoms.

I could imagine an ox cart covered with flowers,

The sound of laughter coming from deep branches.

Some nights I dream that I’m a child again

Flying through the barnyard at six a.m.:

My mother milks the cows in the warm barn

And thinks about her father, who died long ago,

And daydreams about my future in a large city.

I want to throw my arms around her neck

And touch the sweating blue pails of milk

And talk about my childish nightmares.

God, you’ve got to see us to know how happy

We were then, two dark caresses of sunlight.

Now I wake up to the same fur walls staring

At me blankly, and the same bare ceiling.

The morning starts over in the home:

Someone coughs in the hall, someone calls out

An unfamiliar name, a name I don’t remember,

Someone slams a car door in the distance.

I touch my feet to the cold tile floor

And listen to my neighbor stirring in his room,

And think about my mother’s peculiar words

After my grandmother died during the war:

“One day the light will be as thick as a pail

Of fresh milk, but the pail will seem heavy.

You won’t know if you can lift it anymore,

But lift it anyway. Drink the day slowly.”

~ Edward Hirsch, from Wild Gratitude

**

In the more recent poem, the speaker is the poet's father, remembering his own father, and his childhood in Germany. "War" is WWI. The burning bush and stuttering are references to Moses.

MY FATHER’S CHILDHOOD

I used to bring the conductor his lunch pail

on the trolley that circled Mannheim

but I can’t recall now if he was my father

or my father’s brother who moved to California.

Maybe if he showed me his wounds . . .

Papa guarded French prisoners in the village

where we moved after he was shot down.

He had trouble breathing after the war.

Sometimes he marched them by our house

and sneaked them in for tea. My mother

made him keep his rifle in the hall.

Otto, she said, and he put his gun away.

Selma came from Enkirch, on the Moselle.

My brother Hans had curly red hair

that looked like the burning bush,

but I was the one who stuttered.

The prisoners sang sad French songs

and gave us pieces of chewing gum

because they missed their families.

I always liked those men who lost everything.

My father had a premonition about the Nazis

and followed his cousins to Chicago.

He was a spotter,

who never liked working in the dry cleaner’s.

We lived in an Italian neighborhood

and I had to fight every day

on the way home from school.

I didn’t know English at first

and we were refugees with something to prove.

Sometimes I crawled out my bedroom window

to keep the fight going.

I’d say God was a bully.

You know I can’t call up a single word

of German, the bastards,

or the name of that village,

but I remember looking out a window

and seeing my mother standing in a garden.

This was before the expulsion.

I wonder if she ever liked cities.

She was barefoot.

Paradise lived under her feet.

~ Edward Hirsch, from Lay Back the Darkness

**

Ed Hirsch's poem Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad

Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad (1925)


Out here in the exact middle of the day,
This strange, gawky house has the expression
Of someone being stared at, someone holding
His breath underwater, hushed and expectant;

This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed
Of its fantastic mansard rooftop
And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed
of its shoulders and large, awkward hands.

But the man behind the easel is relentless.
He is as brutal as sunlight, and believes
The house must have done something horrible
To the people who once lived here

Because now it is so desperately empty,
It must have done something to the sky
Because the sky, too, is utterly vacant
And devoid of meaning. There are no

Trees or shrubs anywhere--the house
Must have done something against the earth.
All that is present is a single pair of tracks
Straightening into the distance. No trains pass.

Now the stranger returns to this place daily
Until the house begins to suspect
That the man, too, is desolate, desolate
And even ashamed. Soon the house starts

To stare frankly at the man. And somehow
The empty white canvas slowly takes on
The expression of someone who is unnerved,
Someone holding his breath underwater.

And then one day the man simply disappears.
He is a last afternoon shadow moving
Across the tracks, making its way
Through the vast, darkening fields.

This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky.
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it.


~ Edward Hirsch, from Wild Gratitude

**

Angie Vorhies:  

I loved this poem.  Loved the personification of the house as gawky, ashamed of itself, of “its shoulders and large, awkward hands” (I thought of a teenager) and “holding his breath underwater.”

I like how Hirsch looks not just at the painting itself but also the man who painted it, “relentless,” “brutal as sunlight,” and who “believes/ The house must have done something horrible/To the people who once lived here.”   Echoes of American Gothic, of Psycho, of all the horror films I watched as a child. 

For me the poem really turns on the short, 3-word sentence: “No trains pass.”  Coming precisely in the middle of the poem, it stopped me for a moment.  Not only because of its contrasting brevity, but because it led me briefly away from the subject of the painting (ie, the house).  The “single pair of tracks” lead somewhere—where?  Hirsch skillfully leads us away and then brings us back again. 

Now the stranger returns to this place daily

Until the house begins to suspect

That the man, too, is desolate, desolate

And even ashamed.  Soon the house starts

To stare frankly at the man.

This was the stanza where the poem really took off for me.  For a moment I thought “the stranger” referred to the poet (and maybe it does).  I imagined the poet, like Hopper, returning daily to study the house (the painting).  I even felt the house staring at me.  

There’s a strong sense of sadness and isolation, a slightly menacing (desolate, desolate) and desperate tone (unnerved, still holding his breath).

Unlike some of Hirsch’s other poems, this one ends not with a summary or on a rising note of grace, but with a increasing sense of tension (“And then one day the man simply disappears”).

Hirsch goes on to explain how the man (like a serial killer) will paint other houses and storefronts and all will have the same look of

Someone who is about to be left alone

Again, and can no longer stand it.

Leaving the reader feeling the same powerful sense of unrelieved tension.  Masterful.

***

Oriana:

Thank you, Angie, for your excellent analysis. This is arguably the best ekphrastic poem in contemporary American poetry. Hirsch (like Hopper, of course) captures what I call the "desolation of America." It may have something to do with the ease with which buildings and cities are abandoned, rather than being cherished.

My vote for #2 would be Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" -- except that it gets wearisome because it's so long. I'd love to see it edited to its best parts. I think I'll do just that in a future post.

(Added on July 22, 2010)

Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac presented a brief biography of Hopper. I find the last two paragraphs especially striking:

Hopper was a man of deliberate habits. He lived and worked in the same walk-up apartment in New York's Washington Square from 1913 until 1967. He ate almost every meal of his adult life in a diner, and he tried never to ride in a taxi. He never had any children with his wife, and he never included a single child in any of his paintings.

Edward Hopper said, "Maybe I am slightly inhuman. ... All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."