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From section 7, Dementia and Death, of Saltian
The strength of old ideals
By Alice Shapiro
The pain, the pain
the pain, the pain
the pain
of eighty-eight
is calmed
only by such meditations I can muster
as the tale of fishermen I see
from my summer balcony.
The ramblings of my day’s events
prevents her body’s
dwelling on
monstrous unpleasantness.
I wonder when her tolerance will fade
and a crackling exhortation to the Lord
burst out her drawn shut mouth?
I have seen lesser men succumb.
Critique
By Stan Galloway
I like the way that the poem begins with the pulsing repetition of “the pain.” At first it might seem gimmicky, but the transition of the last line of the first stanza brings a balance and a context that I think works. At first, the “I” of stanza 2 and the “her” of stanza 3 is confusing, but I think it sorts out with the realization that the speaker is interacting with the older character rather than the older character being the narrator. The realization that there are 2 characters adds a desirable complexity to the poem. Now we have the sufferer and the meditator/ mediator for the older woman. The younger person provides essential distraction for the 88-year-old by telling her about her day, neatly captured in “The ramblings of my day’s events,” and “the tale of fishermen I see/from my summer balcony,” (the only rhyme of the poem, but a fitting one at the midpoint, because it isn’t predicted, yet provides a sense of completion to the first half of the poem).
The second half of the poem shows the resolve of the older woman, which is not hinted at in the first half. The “monstrous unpleasantness” is ambiguous, euphemistic, and poignant all at once, because most readers will find anything “monstrous” undesirable, but it’s not pain here, or injustice, or any earth-shaking trauma; it’s simple understated “unpleasantness.” The last stanza moves from the condition to the speculation of the younger character. The older woman’s Job-like resolve is admired by the speaker and the reference to the Lord makes the situation cosmic rather than temporal. The reader will wonder whether the mouth “drawn shut” is a medical condition or a spiritual one, but the answer is moot. The woman will not complain about her situation. And it is this resolve that illuminates the final line. It is probably no accident that the final line invokes gender separations, though noticing that is not essential. This woman outlasts men her age because of her “old ideal” invoked in the title to not charge any deity with unfairness but to suffer in silence.
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Stan Galloway teaches writing and literature at Bridgewater College in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia (http://people.bridgewater.edu/~sgallowa/). His poetry has appeared online at vox poetica, Loch Raven Review, Indigo Rising Magazine, Eunoia Review, Contemporary World Literature, Connotation Press, Caper Literary Journal, The Atrium, Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts and Letters, and Apollo’s Lyre. In print, his poems have shown up in WestWard Quarterly, Midnight Zoo, Carapace, the Burroughs Bulletin, and the anthologies Love Be Write and Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Second Century. His book of literary criticism, The Teenage Tarzan, came out in 2010.
