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The Meter Reader: In Diane Seuss's Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl听"there is so much to see"

David Nilsen

搁别惫颈别飞别诲:听Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl听by Diane Seuss (Graywolf Press, 2018).

The title poem of Diane Seuss鈥檚 2018 collection听Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl听examines the eponymous painting by Rembrandt, a puzzling composition that, in Seuss鈥檚 hands, becomes compellingly complex. After fourteen lines of exploring the inner life of a small girl staring through a window at the titular fowl, the bait and switch of her life exemplified in these two dead birds in place of the pie Seuss imagines the girl had been hoping to find, we鈥檙e elbowed in the ribs with this closing sentence: 鈥淎rt, useless as tits on a boar.鈥�

If you wanted to convey Seuss鈥檚 gutter ball grace and confidence to a newcomer to her work in one poem, make it this one. For the majority of the poem, we get a sincere if unconventional ekphrastic exploration of this young girl鈥檚 inner and outer realities. There is the poet鈥檚 signature unnerving humor, to be sure, as in these lines:

She wanted pie, not these beautiful birds. Not a small, dusky apple

from a basket of dusky apples. Reach in. Choose a dusky apple.

But if the majority of the poem takes a slant look at a classic painting, with a curl on the poet鈥檚 lips, it does so earnestly. And it is that set up, that earnest work for thirteen and a half lines, that allows for the sucker punch of that final half a line to pay off, to earn its place. It鈥檚 a joke best told with a smoker鈥檚 coughing laugh from a dive bar stool, but it鈥檚 Seuss鈥檚 skill that allows the line to earn that laugh while functioning as an honest part of the evaluation of the painting.

Commenting on art鈥檚 uselessness seems like an unexpected way to conclude the title poem of a collection of ekphrastic work. Seuss has little use for the stolid trappings of the generally reverential form she explores in听Still Life, however. She doesn鈥檛 reflect so much on the content of the paintings themselves as the lives unfolding at real speed before the frame and after it. Life is anything but still, and Seuss refuses to confine herself to the single frame of each work. She refuses too to allow the artists she examines to hide behind their perfectly arranged compositions, and, by extension, refuses to allow herself to hide behind the carefully constructed order of a poem.

One imagines she could have picked a dozen different stories for each of her chosen muses, that she spun each frame and stopped it, looking at it from the angle where it landed, and wrote from that slant. Seuss renders still lifes epic, and epics, in some cases, still lifes, as when she captures the life of Medusa as a traumatized young woman living in a 鈥渞usted-out potato-chip-delivery-van / between the gasoline storage tanks and the river,鈥� whose damage turns her world to stone.

Seuss鈥檚 poems have long dripped with wet decay, of life verdant and careless, and here she lends that same effect to long dried works of art. You can smell wet oils, deep green and messy, as she picks apart the motivations behind each captured character. Her language in 鈥淢emory Fed Me until It Didn鈥檛鈥� is lush with synaesthetic textures:

My eyes were hungry for paint, like I used to imagine

a horse could taste the green in its mouth

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before its lips found the grass.

Then I woke to the words 鈥渟till life,鈥� not as the after-image

of a dream but as the body wakes and knows it needs

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mince pie before the mind has come to claim it.

Still Life听begins with this same primordial imagery, bursting with life and loss. In 鈥淚 Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called听Paradise,鈥� she starts

with the milkweeds splitting at the seams emancipating their seeds

that were once packed in their pods like the wings and hollow bones

of a damp bird held too tightly in a green hand.

The contrast between the faded earth tones and static compositions of the paintings that are Seuss鈥檚 subjects and the dripping, pulsing language of her explorations thereof creates the ironic tension that defines much of听Still Life.

Irony and observation are not the entire picture, however. The moments when Seuss peers directly inward, without slant, are weighted with sincere fatigue and vulnerability. In 鈥淪ilence Again,鈥� in which Seuss looks at her father鈥檚 death after a his long, painful decline, she sees the permanent still life painting of death as a longed-for relief from the cacophony of his life.

My father, after all the yelling when he was a boy,

the threats, the bottles of whiskey, the guns,

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and the racket of war when he was on that ship,

the听Nashville, finally got to open his arms

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to silence. Now, when I embrace it, silence,

especially at night, in the dark, I see my father鈥檚

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name, as if silence were the canvas he painted,

and his signature there in the corner.

It is the poem that directly precedes this in which Seuss offers perhaps her clearest thesis on still life as a form. 鈥淭he Heroic Penetrates the Quotidian鈥� is both title and first line, and it continues 鈥渂ut the quotidian, like a cockroach, / has strength in numbers.鈥� The poem goes on to explain that every painting of action, every general on horseback and angel on wing is eventually stilled, and the epic moments their actions represent are buried under years of the boring, everyday details of living and dying. Much of life is still, whether that stillness is worthy of the brush of a master or not. If we remove the spikes from the graphs of our lives, the moments from which we craft our narratives, we could just as easily call 鈥渟till life鈥� mere 鈥渓ife.鈥� So perhaps it鈥檚 not so strange to freeze these moments onto canvas, and for a Pulitzer-nominated poet to then reanimate them onto the page. Most of the time, 鈥渟till life鈥� is a redundant phrase. In听Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, Diane Seuss shows us that in stillness, there is so much to see.