World of Each Other’s World
by Elizabeth Metzger
Grief is like sleep. I dream in it.
I feed my caged son bits of lettuce via a long metal arm
with moving metallic fingers.
In the next dream, I visit the cage
and find him tearing at the lettuce with his beak.
As I look closer, I see the lettuce is paper
my son once scribbled green with a mint-scented marker.
Instead of his name he has written Nope.
He is laughing in the dream when I wake.
When I wake, he is mouth-breathing
in the bed beside me.
I toss myself toward him like Antigone,
go back to sleep. Have I been going back to sleep since I had him?
This time I approach the cage with real lettuce,
still wet from rinsing. I wring it out
with my own cold hands.
Pushing the soft outer leaves
between the bars,
I crunch the white cartilage of what’s left
and keep the head, relentless in my hands.
As I walk away, he doesn’t peck.
Maybe I will wake. Maybe I will go on dreaming something else.
I can no longer make a bird of what’s lost.
I wrote this poem after stumbling accidentally into an exhibit of Picasso’s Cut Paper at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. I was taken by the fragility, and surprising levity, of these works, many of which were made to be playthings for the artist’s young son. I became curious about how art might be a toy, how an artist might be a parent even in the creative process.
Around this time, I was writing some poems for my son but was starting to wonder what it meant that my poems were for him, the artifice of that. At this time, my son was emerging from a mysterious regression, having lost memory and language before it returned, and we were still trying to decipher the mystery of what happened, “where” he went, whether he was back for good, and if so, in what ways had the experience changed him? I began to consider how much these questions overlapped with the more universal mystery of children growing up and becoming themselves.
One window that caught my eye contained a wooden cage with a paper bird and a little bit of what appeared to be green lettuce made of paper. It filled me with glee, and I longed for my son beside me, his perspective, rather than the silent, serious museum-goers wishing me to move on to the next vitrine. Maybe I could bring my son Picasso’s bird in words, or bring my son to me by turning the bird into him? Could we play together in a poem? I think now of Marianne Moore’s “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”
For me, grief, like dreaming, cycles through endless combinations of what is real and what is imagined, possible and impossible. Even those we reach for in life are not always reached, the action “reach” signifying both the arrival at a limit and the attempt (even when the effort fails). The poem ends with a refusal and a kind of giving up, but I hope it is most of all an exchange of love. We transform our beloveds into creatures of our imagination, and then release them into who they actually are—even inside their own cages, sometimes at our own expense. The title is a line borrowed from It by Inger Christensen. We are made whole in each other’s minds; there is no world that is whole.
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize, and the chapbook Bed. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.