Tensions and dichotomies are memorable. Happy melodies with sorrowful words. Sometimes memory is faulty, and all we take away is an impression, a fragment, a feeling or a phrase. We remember things wrong. We think we love a poem, then we figure out we don’t. Or, we continue to love it because we once loved it. Our response changes when our situation changes.

When the women poets I studied with were becoming women poets, there weren’t a lot of women poets. Thanks to them, however, it didn’t occur to me that being a woman presented any obstacles to being a poet. Elaine Equi’s work would occasionally hint at these hurdles, and it would occur to me to be grateful for her. Having a woman poet for my first workshop teacher was probably a lot more important to me than I can even know.

I think of Elaine’s poem, Three Deaths, again and again. It appears in The Corners of the Mouth (Iridescence, 1986), possibly the first book of poems I owned that was written by someone I knew personally, and certainly my first signed book. I looked at the poem again after 10 years or so recently, and I found that all I really remembered was the last section. The language has a flatness that makes the pain with which it trembles all the more moving, and I think that tension between tone and content is what vaults it into the stark clarity of the unforgettable.

Elaine Equi
from Three Deaths

3.

My father was a samurai
that killed over 9,000.
He wore his armor to the
dinner table.
Grown men wept
at the sight of his mustache.
My mother committed hari-kari
rather than face him
without a son.

But instead of being angry,
he called me Chicken Little.
My nursery was guarded
by nine dragons
of gold and jade for good luck.
When I accidentally fell
into a pit of hot coals,
my father sat before a statue
of Buddah, trying to
strip off his own flesh.
The neighbors lost respect
for him and said he was bewitched.
Even over a male child,
such grief was considered excessive.
But for a girl, for girl,
for a girl—they clucked.