"POETRY may be done with me," Grace Paley told the Los Angeles Times in an interview two months before her death last August, "but I'm not done with it." Strange to think that even as she made the soup, greeted her friends, showed photographs of her grandchildren, talked about her writing, the poet was dying.
I have experienced the amputation
of my left breast I hate its absence.
"Fidelity," posthumously (odd word, recalling dirt) published, is her fourth collection of poems. Clearly, she had death and its retinue -- illness, aging, memory, regret -- in mind. Clearly, she was angry at the prospect of death, unready to surrender.
In any event I am
already old and therefore a little ashamed
to have written this poem full
of complaints against mortality which
biological fact I have been constructed for
to hand on to my children and grand
children as I received it from my
dear mother and father and beloved
grandmother who all
ah if I remember it
were in great pain at leaving
and were furiously saying goodbye
These poems mark her passage (heels dug in, sure she should be more gracious about the whole thing) closer to death. "I had put my days behind me . . . ," she writes: "future was my intention." So she tries (still learning, still trying to get it right in her 80s) to savor the days. "Fidelity" is a record of that savoring: the familiar landscape around her home in Vermont, memories of friends, the sorrow of a woman she meets on a plane.
this eighty-year-old body is
a fairly old body what's it
doing around the house these days
checking the laundry brooms
still work what's for dinner
there are the windows look oh
beyond the river Smarts Mountain
with the sun's help is recomposing all
its little hills never saw it that way
before windows the afternoon story
It's what she does best: look down, look up, see things as they are. This is Paley's great legacy: fidelity to things as they are: "Abandonment How could I have allowed myself / even thought of a half hour's distraction / when life had pages or decades to go / so much was about to happen to people / I already know and nearly loved"
Daughter of exiles, youngest in a household of outspoken women, she believed in community. "Don't ever do anything alone," she warned me last summer. She writes from her experience, but not in the trapped, circular, cloying way of the narcissist. No stranger in her poetry or fiction to the first person, she's the everyman/woman/child, the perplexed individual, even in this small poem of regret:
