Brandish a Radiance: The Poetry of Liz Rosenberg

I beg you to send them health, Lord;
—or if not health, then comfort;
and if not even comfort, then brandish a radiance
from your broken sparks
brilliant enough
to make these sorrows possible to bear.
—from “Couple on Hospital Elevator”

The world waited, cold, grim, alive, beautiful. There was no saying no to it.
—from Home Repair

Entering into a Liz Rosenberg poem is like stepping into a Chagall painting; the ordinary turns to flying, but remains humble, drawn with the acuity of a kind heart, endowed with empathy, crayoned with light. Like Chagall’s, her tropes spring from the streets of the small city where she lives and works: birds, wings, sleeping husbands, street signs, Christmas, newborns, toddlers, the elderly. In her four books, The Fire Music (1986), Children of Paradise (1994), These Happy Eyes (2001), Demon Love (2008), and the chapbook, The Lily Poems (2008), Rosenberg affirms a world that waits for us all: cold, grim, alive, beautiful.  Rosenberg’s poetry wanders from nightlight to midnight moon to hospital hallway and back again, ever centered on love, ever speaking for the disenfranchised and the powerless, ever aware of how keenly the experiences of childhood and adolescence continue to shape adult perception, ever aware of first and last things.  Rosenberg’s poems are mitzvahs, unexpected acts of kindness, which meditate on the brokenness and beauty that, miraculously, gratefully, there is no saying no to.  

In the preface to her book of prose poems, These Happy Eyes, Rosenberg elaborates a theory of prose poetry that might be applied to her entire body of work.  Rosenberg notes: “It is an odd but true fact that a horizontal window lets in more light than a vertical window of the same square footage.  Given this, it is even odder that we humans insist upon living such vertical lives, in vertical buildings, with vertical windows and views. Most verse—especially contemporary free verse—is also constructed along vertical lines. I mean this not only in the literal way, but also in the metaphorical sense of higher meanings. It is as if we are always looking up to something instead of at it.” 

Rosenberg’s poems open outward, horizontally.  Even the angels in her first collection, The Fire Music, remain bound to the earth, “bewildered by human time” and yet “pulled by the stale wind of what we wanted.”  When Rosenberg uses metaphor in this first collection, she uses it horizontally, too.  In the poem, “The Christmas Cactus,” she describes flowers blossoming on a plant in February after months of waiting:

the blooms shot out
three ragged cerise bells that rang
their tardy Hallelujahs on the sill.
Late bloomers,
like the girls that shine
and shine at long last
at the spring dance
from their corner of the gym.

The irreversibly transformative magic of this image from adolescence overlays the ordinary miracle of blooming, rendering the lyric both familiar and strange. The metaphor works hard, but goes unseen, like a maid dusting a mantle in a fancy hotel lobby. Much of what Rosenberg accomplishes in The Fire Music depends upon similar sleights of wing.

The Fire Music contains the themes and preoccupations that carry throughout the rest of Rosenberg’s collections: suburban childhood, familial loss, the joys and woes of married life, erotic love, or what she calls “that old conspiracy of kindness.”  Rosenberg treats these themes with the great complexity they demand; in her poem, “Married Love,” she says: “Young, I burned to marry. Married,/ the smolder goes on underground,/ clutching at weeds, writhing everywhere.” Desire unlooses love, but love does not know what it wants, which is what desire is, after all.  However, the longing that runs like a Heracletian fire through these poems is not simply erotic; it is the yearning described in the following lines:

Why is it hard to live like this,
simply to live?
Far off, on a highway dark as ocean water
woodchucks paddle across the road
to pass into eternal life.
I force myself to rest, unfold both fists,
and hear a weary tick-tick-tick—
the ambitious moth
testing her heart against the light.  

Like a moth insane for light, Rosenberg’s poems continually fling themselves against that difficult, but all too recognizable, question. 

This same question animates one of the most fiercely lyrical moments in The Fire Music.  In “The Accident,” a poem that elegizes a young man killed in a motorcycle crash, Rosenberg intones:

	Emmerich Antoni, I prayed for you to rise
	on your twisted feet, and hobble away like a bumped deer,
	Emmerich Antoni, you lay there thinking nothing,
	thinking black thoughts, thinking about your last meal,
	about your first girl, your young wife,
	thinking about your mother grieving—

The poem, with its prayer-like enumerations, chants down the fragility of life, provides an elegy not just for Emmerich Antoni, but also for all lost sons and departed husbands.  More than requiem, the poem praises the bonds of affection that make such a loss so difficult to bear and so impossible to understand.  Like the sleeping grasshopper, who folds her musical bones at morning prayer in “The Bells of Saint Simon,” delight and dismay collide “…as the earth/ raises its great sinking heart again/ and listens to the shaken clamor of the air.” In the midst of sinking things, these lines avow, thinking sings a melody that cannot be understood, but that comforts, nonetheless.

The problems and the consolations that light The Fire Music filter through the lens of motherhood in Children of Paradise, These Happy Eyes, Demon Love, and The Lily Poems.  “The Poem of My Heart” elaborates these problems and consolations:

But what is the use of hating time
when everything we’ve ever loved is made of it?
I’ve always thought that we could live forever,
coming to terms with the tyrants who live in us.
I’ve hoped that love would have the final word,
and slowly, by accumulation, perhaps it will,
at first by a simple majority,
since anything learned by one is soon accessible to all,
and everything imaginable is real.

I’m not so sure about me,
but you, little bear, must go on forever…
beautiful swimmer who skydived into time—
with your sweet-smelling skull as fragile as a china cup,
your sleeping hands curled toward your heart,
and the blue vein at your temple mapping a new country.

The cares of new motherhood in this poem become the nexus for questioning a world often characterized by suffering and despair.  Domestic concerns do not barricade these poems from the realities of a world where love does not have the final word.  The world that her son inherits in this poem is the world where Emmerich Antoni died, the world in which Joey LeDome, “The Stolen Child” from The Fire Music, was kidnapped, the world where a four year old girl is murdered in “Picking Flowers For Mai Thi” from Demon Love, the world of the Jewish Polish ghettos (1934-1939) in “A Vanished World” from Children of Paradise.    

Rosenberg reiterates the concerns of a mother faced with the grief and grimness of the world in a poem to her daughter, “I Leave Her Weeping,” from The Lily Poems.  The poem, in full, reads:

I leave her weeping in her barred little bed,
her warm hand clutching at my hand,
but she doesn’t want a kiss, or to hug the dog goodnight—
she keeps crying mommy, uhhh, mommy,
with her lovely crumpled face
like a golden piece of paper I am throwing away.
We have been playing for hours,
and now we need to stop, and she does not want
to. She is counting on me to lower the boom
that is her heavy body, and settle her down.
I rub her ribcage, I arrange the blankets around her hips.
Downstairs are lethal phone calls I have to answer.
Friends
dying, I need to call.
My daughter may be weeping all my tears,
I only know
that even this young
and lying on her side,
her head uplifted like a cupped tulip,
sometimes she needs to cry.

Her daughter’s cries resonate with the “lethal phone calls” she has to answer, echo the wail, muted by motherhood, which wants to escape for dying friends.  This poem elaborates the kind of daily dying that causes one to mourn diffusely, to feel “sad without reason,” as in the poem “Sowdadge Snow” from Demon Love.    

Liz Rosenberg’s “Sowdadge Snow” (“sowdadge,” as Liz points out, is a Portuguese word that means inexplicable sadness), underscores how the poet has constructed a grateful life from the quivering scraps of silken sorrow that flit past her, and indeed, all of us, like so many moths.  The poem describes how her son feels depressed on a snowy day when he has to go to school, although he had hoped for a snow day.  The poem ends:

I should thank G-d for snow,
not curse it under my breath, I should kneel on the bed
and watch as I did last night, praying for it to fall faster,
under the church’s single light,
the hidden earth and its pockets full of flower bulbs,
over the loping dogs, and slinky cats,
over the horn of the moon, let it fall, as it fell; 
I should thank G-d for all that,
the way I thank G-d for my husband and sad boy.   

The end of this poem celebrates life while acknowledging the propensity to gripe that often makes living more difficult.  As with all of Rosenberg’s work, the poem memorializes familial bonds without idealizing family and sanctifies experience without sanctimony. 

Similarly, “White Slip,” also from Demon Love, and one of Rosenberg’s finest poems, delicately balances a celebration of Rosenberg’s mother’s life with the sadness caused by her passing.  The poem, in its entirety, reads:

Ma, I saw you wearing your satin slip
and a slash of bright lipstick, in my dreams.
We must have been going to a party,
a closet stood wide open.
I waited in a white cotton slip,
one rosebud sewed on at the chest,
while you leaned to the mirror, putting on your face.

Hopeful hours:
the decorated party plates
emptied and cleaned.
Nobody wears slips anymore

and my favorite golden-green dress
with the yellow daisies
drowned
in the last basement flood.

Oh where is your sequined dress now?
Your beautiful, slippery-scaled bright
orange dress
that hung just out of reach? 

This poem, although tinged with sadness, resists nostalgia and lovingly binds daughter and mother together through the two missing dresses: the mother’s sequined dress and the daughter’s golden-green dress.  The poem pivots on the happy hours when party plates were emptied and cleaned.  The line “nobody wears slips anymore” delicately alludes to loss through a plain statement of fact. Like the undergarments themselves, this is a poem of great intimacy. The veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is a white slip itself.  Memory, and dreams too, are that sheer.  

Liz Rosenberg’s body of work intimately and directly confronts feelings of loss for loved ones, the struggles that attend clinical depression, the difficulties of living in a dangerous and unjust world, the fears that burden parents, the dreams that plague the compassionate with hope.  Rosenberg bears witness to the plight of the poor, the elderly, those dying in hospitals, teenagers dying of crushes, the ordinary desires crushing in on us at every moment of our lives.  Her confederates are Salvation Army bell ringers, old men with IVs tracing turnpikes in their veins, children who carry rocks and feathers in their pockets on the way home from school, husbands who read Peter Pan aloud to their kids, college girls with Middlemarch syndrome, mail carriers carrying pension checks to widowers, elderly women in senior citizen centers who are unsure of themselves, teenage boys lean as timber wolves shoveling snow, Buddhist monks and nuns reciting the Diamond Sutra, Van Gogh’s potato eaters.    This is her family, and as one of her characters notes in Rosenberg’s novel, The Laws of Gravity: “Family can form between people of no blood relation.  Family, very simply, are the people to whom we feel most closely bound. Family is where we hold nothing back.” Rosenberg’s poetry holds nothing back.  Her family is everywhere.  Her poems manifest what the poet Joe Weil has called “a Eucharistic sense of the world” (that this body, the word, is both broken and blessed, and therefore meant for communion). The last poem in Demon Love, “A Poem for the Reader to Finish,” dedicated to her friend, the poet Jason Shinder, concludes with the lines:

I believe I could drive on till morning,
holding the darkness all the way back—
but the gray is falling heavily,
like rain, and soon it is too late.
If I am lucky, tomorrow will bring new light.
If I am lucky, tonight will be a peaceful night.
And if we are very lucky…

And if we are very lucky we will have more poems like this, more poets, more teachers, more people, as light-gathering, as light-shattering, as Liz.