'Open to Astonishment, to Surprise'

My brother sent me a photograph via text of the dog we had as kids, taken in profile, in a pose we think of as canine nobility. It’s a black and white snapshot, out of focus, with a narrow white border scalloped along the edges, the sort of photo that was held together with others from the same roll of film by a plastic spiral when it came back from the developer. His name was Mike and he too was black and white. He was the only dog we ever had. He remains vivid in memory but I didn’t know we had a photo of him. When I saw it, my reaction was the same as always when I see a picture from childhood: looking for clues, hoping to somehow reanimate the past. I can make out Mike’s license tag hanging from his collar. No revelations. He looks like the dog I remember from the Sixties, now dead almost half a century. 

The most intense scrutiny of a family photo I know is Herbert Morris’ “Boardwalk,” published in the December 1984 issue of The New Criterion and collected in Dream Palace (1986). Morris, his brother, mother and father are posed on the boardwalk along the beach, probably in Atlantic City. The photo was taken by an itinerant photographer who took pictures of tourists. The year is 1932, late winter. Morris is four years old. All of this is slowly detailed in blank verse, late-Jamesian in its throat clearings, halting clarifications and rearticulations. In another poet’s hands, it might be tiresome but with Morris’s stately disclosures, the syntax is the poem. Late, off-handedly, we learn about his brother, never named:

 

“In the photo his shoes seem new, unscathed,

looking as though they had not yet been walked in,

the light that issues from them so contained,

so manageable, it appears, his smile

so compliant, his breathing, like his presence,

so unobtrusive, I am almost certain

(definitiveness quite eludes me here:

freedom from doubt, pertaining to my brother,

is arrogance, mistaken, self-deluding)

the way he holds himself may have to do

with having come to learn—how can I say this?—

what it will be to die, and to die young.”

 

The memories are painful, tempting to suppress, no doubt, but Morris’s attention never relents. He gives us no grand insights, no self-congratulatory epiphanies, as we would expect with a lesser poet, just remarkably detailed memories and speculations based on what he sees in the photo:

 

“[K]eep us, for perhaps just a little longer,

open to astonishment, to surprise,

accessible to what one understands

dimly, imperfectly, or not at all,

just awhile longer, no more, just awhile.”