The Deathwatch Beetle by Linda Pastan : Poem Guide : Learning Lab : The Poetry Foundation
Practically every line of Linda Pastan’s
“The Deathwatch Beetle” is appropriately assertive and menacing. The cardinal is
also fitting as a metaphor for the human spirit. In the first case
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| Nightmare Cardinal |
there is a battered
red bird, probably as it tries to escape a vision of itself seen in a window.
Then, in the final stanza, another cardinal is “blood brother” to the spirit of
the deceased, which is desperate to escape the dead human body restraining it.
In addition to the nightmare
quality of the poem as a whole, I want to look at three specific images that I
find new, fresh, and compelling because they are original and so aptly
jarring.
First, body parts. Most people love
cardinals, which can be the only color in North American winter landscapes. Now
the “crimson bird” is more or less insane, an imprisoned victim trying to
escape a cage of skull through—of all things—a nostril, or possibly an ear
canal. I wonder if Linda Pastan is referring to some particular belief system,
but whether or not that’s the case, I’m taken aback by her strategy of
emphasizing mundane, unglamorous body parts. They form walls and create a
lunatic frenzy in the spirit, which is personified as a beautiful, beloved red
bird.
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Hungry Cardinal
|
That in turn might be a hint that
“blood-red” is the end result of the war between the flesh and the spirit, in
which the spirit loses—or in any case the spirit is painted in the carnal color
of the human that trapped it, at least for a time.
In that nostril and that ear canal,
I feel I’m in a scene from Bosch or Dali. I hope readers from the art world will offer names of other
painters who might fit here.
The second image—or is it a
concept?—that slapped me into longer consideration is, “I will be left—ridiculous.” In the wake of a loved one’s death, who
among us worries about feeling ridiculous? I suspect all of us—if we were honest
and perceptive enough to say so, though we’d probably point first to more
obvious conditions like loneliness, emptiness, helplessness.
Pastan makes me uncomfortable
taking those more predictable states for granted and skipping straight to the
less expected and more embarrassing “ridiculous.” She disturbs me just the way
good poets are supposed to stir us, get us off the couch. It’s at least
possible that we fear looking or feeling ridiculous as much as we dread the emptiness
of life without the deceased.
What a powerful question to have
dropped on our plates: Bereavement,
this new-to-me condition, this stripped down way of being in the world, is so
disarming that I feel ridiculous.
But maybe I am ridiculous. How so?
Where did that condition come from? Maybe it feels like nakedness in a
blizzard. The ice and cold are obvious; pain is obvious. But as much as cold and pain, I also feel . . . ridiculous. Actually, I especially
feel ridiculous. There are support
groups for the grief-stricken, for the newly widowed, but what about the newly
ridiculous?
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| Spirit Cardinal |
Maybe, “She’s too young to be
widowed. That’s a ridiculous state of affairs.” Or, “He’s too old to be that moved
by his father’s death. It’s ridiculous.” Or, “He broke down in tears? There?! In
front of all those people? That’s ridiculous.” Or, “She has no idea how to
balance a checkbook? Ridiculous.” Or, “She just had a year-long affair with the
dog trainer. This show of grief is ridiculous.”
Applied to an individual human, how
many adjectives are as dangerous as “ridiculous”?
The third item that seizes my attention
is “ticking.” Whatever the literal
sound of the death beetle is, I cannot imagine that it’s more alarming than
“ticking”—first as a literally odd noise from a bug and secondly with its
connotation of clocks and therefore mortality . . . for us all.
So, in an All-Star poem—oh yes, the
game’s tonight—those three specifics are Hall of Famers.
My hunch is that this will be a
popular poem here and probably already is out there in Anthology-Land. How well
do you like it? Respect it? Scale of 1 – 10? I welcome responses to that or anything
else Linda Pastan and I have said. Regulars here know I always want to know
what their favorite parts or aspects of the poem are.
One question nags me. Do we need to
know more clearly who’s died, or is it enough to feel sure it’s someone near
and dear?
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