A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

a black umbrella,
blooming like an ancient flower,
betrays their recent arrival.
Suspicious of so much sunshine,
they keep expecting rain. 355
In a very perceptive self-portrait, she says,
It seems you’ve been looking out
one window, one moment, all your life,
at the slant of roof and trees,
while everything around you evolved,
became something else (83, “The Age of Reptiles”).
In one poem, her mother’s jar of buttons becomes a simile for what she is doing in her
writing, keeping and storing the “undervalued […] unremarkable […] a relic […] oddly
private” (45-6, “Humble Jar”). Even if the garments are long gone or faded, their loose
buttons are kept like treasures. On a psychological level, such poems reveal an obsession
with remembrance and preservation. The tableau-like quality of Song’s poetry is
epitomized in an imagined scene from an undistinguished foreign country:
The clock is stuck in the rain […]
The waiter bends over your cup
without filling it,
the storekeeper holds your change
until the rain, hypnotic and dramatic,
leaves the streets and the gutters (48, “The Vegetable Air”).
An oddly frozen moment, in spite of the connotations of movement in the overflowing
gutters. Always, the focusing mind is set off against the elusive event. At times this mind
can see something beyond the visible, as in the winter poem “Symphony” (27-8), which
perceives falling snow as music, hopping birds as the score, “a feat of cookiecutter feet /
leaving stenciled tracks as delicate as doilies” until a garbage truck shatters the reverie,
the metaphor with its “mammoth roar.” Like most of Song’s pieces, this one contains
precision (“Two days after Christmas”), and multiple markers of elusiveness (“Smoke
from the chimneys”), and obsolescence (“The Christmas Carcass - / the balding trees,”
355 “Magic Island,” in Cathy Song, Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, New York 1988: 20.
128