Linda Pastan, "The Deathwatch Beetle": Spirit, Flesh, and What Might Be Ridiculous

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

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. 

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? 

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?  

The Deathwatch Beetle by Linda Pastan : Poem Guide : Learning Lab : The Poetry Foundation