seems at issue, and the repetition “I cannot carry” builds up great power, as if in plain linguistic illustration of a Dickinsonian numbness-in-the-face-of-death. In concentrating less on the idea than on the body of death, this poem distinguishes itself clearly from most American elegies or meditations on the subject: there is a kind of death math here, an effort physically to “grasp” or “bear” its dimensions.
The mental move from animal to human deaths—inevitable in hundreds of American road-kill poems—is left, blessedly, implicit in this Yoruba death-chant; and a kind of humor (almost unthinkable in this connection in America, where the unbearability of death is itself unmentionable) obtains in the sudden disposability of the domestic corpse, the brief heft and trajectory of mouse.
The trail of analogies is also a trail of changes. Parallels highlight a pattern of repetition and variation. The animals become progressively lighter, but also progressively closer to home. Not only how big they are but how near us they live becomes important. What death means to us, in ranges unenclosed, is what we can carry off: from the death of the elephant and buffalo much can be made, much can be redeemed. But from the deaths closest to us, what salvage? Deaths inside the human house are removed into the outer world; deaths in the outer are (at least in part) brought in.
Paradoxically enough, the most portable deaths are of the biggest, farthest animals. The verb “carried” is insistent, occurring in six of the poem's ten lines; and in the last line of the poem suddenly it is replaced by “thrown”—this accounts for at least part of the shock of levity at the end. Of these large and far-off deaths, something (quantities of something, tusk or meat) can be taken in. (We live on—live off—the deaths of things outside; we are their grave.) But of the deaths “in the house” something is thrown out. We don't eat the mouse, or use the hide of the dead domestic cat; deaths in the psychological interior have to be pushed out of mind, so we can live. The poem suggests how big a little thing can be, close-up (the closest deaths are the least bearable, is a fair paraphrase in English). The line thus drawn between the domestic (even the domestic “wild” animal like the mouse) and the outside world (even its most amicable animals) is a clear and inviolable line, physical, psychological, and spiritual.
The four its and the three somethings seem brilliandy, intently nonspecific. They are not vague, as so many somethings are in contemporary poetry (wanting to evoke the bodiless unnameable, wanting, in short, to get a big feeling out of a small abdication). Here the somethings are bodily parts, more or less simply. But a principle, an equation, even, is being worked out, and it is the pattern of carryings, not the content or mystification of them, that is most important to the Yoruba poem. Indeed these words insist on looking not at private but at a sum of public gestures, and rather than evading the difficulty of naming, by slipping from the letter toward the spirit, they do an exacter, weirder work: a kind of framing, very physical. In contemporary American poetry, “something” crops up as poetic phrasing around powerful mysteries: something told me she was dead; something moved in the shadows; there was something red about the night, etc. It partakes of our mistake about the great mysteries, if we assume that they inhere in the spirit and not in the letter of things. In short, in our poetry, a “something” is seldom so meant: it is more like a nothing, its drift is atmospheric, its vicinity the failed ideal. One feels American poets have deeply lost their faith in the physical power of words. Culturally that power seems most directly to obtain in the arenas of advertising and public relations, the very arenas from which most American poets are by nature and by economic association most deeply alienated—and the realm popularly accorded poetry, that of sentiment, is represented in America by the million-fold small-surprise industry of the greeting card. We don't, as a rule, make even our own prayers, or value freshness or invention in them. If we believe in God, we don't believe in a God that would change his mind. The much mentioned “personality” of American life—your “personal” banker, your “personal” God—seems deeply, perhaps pathologically, impersonal. And our prudishness with regard to sex—its unmentionability intimate with the industry of pornography, making much of private parts and making of property the most sacred place—resembles nothing so much as our way of dealing with death. A fundamental loneliness comes of the displacements of sex and death into dark back rooms, into solitudes, into chambers where tissues and towels are dispensed for secret blottings out, and from which the yearner or mourner returns to sunlit—loveless, deathless—streets, wiped clean of carnal attachment and animal relation.
Compare that world, its models of animal life, and the world of the poem that follows:
Quarrel
Nobody will quarrel with the woodcock,
because of his blue coat.
Nobody will quarrel with the parrot
because of his red tail.
You old people of this world,
don't be my enemies.
Would you kill a dog because he barks?
Would you kill a ram because he butts?
Would you kill the goat because he fucks his mother?
Forgive me, don't fight,
and let me taste the world
like the fly that interprets the wine…
One loves this song's sense of necessary conviviality in the grips of sex and death. Its funniness and feel of fable arise from patterns of analogy, and there are, in the translation, wonderful ambiguities that arise because we don't know exactly where to attach the becauses. (Beier gives us one of each—placing a comma before the first and not the second.) Is the red tail the sign that warns off quarrel, or is the red tail (the blue coat) the content of the quarrel? In the latter case, the “taster of the world” (the lover of barking and butting and fucking) argues that his pleasures are his very fur and feather, his very nature and stripe; no one can quarrel with what is so much a matter of born identity. In either case, the coat and tail are flashed as signs: they serve as the poet's defense against those “old people.”
The oldsters have their own say about sartorial flourish. “A young man can have a robe like an elder's, but he can't have rags like an elder's,” so the elders tell us. Notice what dignities accrue to the old—not the fancy clothes, or big pension, or store-bought Winnebago; any money can buy those. But the way we age, the way we wear and weather, those are ours alone. You can't get store-bought rags. They take years to perfect. It is a wisdom that turns the meaning of wealth inside-out, and knows how nouveau the material senses of riche can be.
Patterns of repetition and variation account for much of the momentum and charge of “Quarrel.” The trail that leads to the shock of “fucks his mother” has proceeded by analogue, sidewindingly innocent (barks worsens into butts, but remains a feature of animal nature; butts worsens into fucks, and suddenly fucks appropriates an object from the realm of the human taboo). Imagine the encounter between missionary niceties and this lively forthrightness. To my mind, such a thought recalls the transcripts we do have of encounters between English officer/lawyers and the native Americans they were trying to convince to sign real estate contracts that would, ultimately, keep the tribes from hunting—even though the tribes were promised they'd retain such rights. At the end of the negotiations, in which any reader of English can see the arts of legal interest at work—arts of representation and persuasion that would later flower into advertising's industry on those same American valleys and plains—and during whose proceedings one sees clearly the respect the native American elders pay their visitors before agreeing to what they clearly understand would mean sharing the land—at the very end of all of these negotiations, a sign appears more telling than the legal signatures. The tribal elder remarks, as he makes his assenting mark on the documents, that the parties must concur on equal footing, being
