[In the essay below, written in 1977, Kumin surveys her "tribal poems" or "poems of kinship and parenting" and the examines the recurrent theme of parent-child separation.]

A terrible ego, as rife among poets as roundworm in the barnyard, had caused all of us represented in this collection of essays by women writers to agree to examine critically some aspect of our own work. Some will argue that we leap to do so because we are women and only recently in the history of American letters has the woman writer been taken seriously. Since I began as a poet in the Dark Ages of the fifties with very little sense of who I was—a wife, a daughter, a mother, a college instructor, a swimmer, a horse lover, a hermit—a stewpot of conflicting emotions has given me some sympathy with that point of view.

But I suspect that the desire to be heard is purer, or more purely corrupt than that. Every poet everywhere longs to be understood, to plead his / her case before the tribunal. To explicate an image, to verify an attitude, to point out the intricacies of a rhyme scheme or stanzaic pattern is a far brighter fate than to take up a soap box in Hyde Park. And although I have not been unhappy with the epithet "pastoral" which is routinely applied to my work, although I do not deny that I write a poetry concerned with the smallest particulars in the natural world, I too have a thesis to advance.

I would like to discuss here in chronological order certain of my "tribal poems"—poems of kinship and parenting—that span two decades. Three of them are taken from Halfway, my first collection, long since out of print. They were written in the late fifties; it was not popular then to speak of the uterus or the birth canal. The Women's Movement was still unfounded. An editor of a national magazine wrote me with regret that he could not accept any more poems from me for six months or so because he had already published a woman poet the preceding month.

But what interests me about these poems now is not so much the sociology of the situation to which I was stupidly inured. I am more interested in reading the poet's opening statement of what is to be for her a recurring theme: the separation, for the sake of identity, of mother from child and child from the parental milieu, and her changing perceptions of that separation.

Indeed, I am going to speak of myself henceforth as "the poet" in hopes that the third person usage will cleanse memory and provide objectivity.

     Nightmare

This dwelt in me who does not know me now,
Where in her labyrinth I cannot follow,
Advance to be recognized, displace her terror;
I hold my heartbeat on my lap and cannot comfort her.
Tonight she is condemned to cry out wolf
Or werewolf, and it echoes in the gulf
And no one comes to cradle cold Narcissus;
The first cell that divided separates us.

Eight lines, predominantly iambic pentameter, except for the longer fourth line which stands as the fulcrum of the poem, a poem rhyming in slant couplets. Two mythic allusions, one old English, the other classical Greek, neither of them difficult. These are the tools the poet uses to deal with strongly felt or painfully perceived material. She liked then, she likes to this day to cram hard thoughts into formal patterns, thereby rendering them malleable or at least bearable. It became her conviction over the years that form can provide a staunch skeleton on which to set the flesh and blood of feeling. Moreover, she came to believe that the exigencies of rhyme force her to a heightened level of language, especially of metaphor. A level she might not rise to on her own, so to speak. These, then, are her shibboleths.

"The first cell that divided separates us." The child must grow according to her own clock. The parent must make the effort of consent, must relinquish her offspring. If not gracefully, then a great ragged tearing will ensue.

     The Journey
     for Jane at thirteen


Papers in order; your face
accurate and on guard in the cardboard house
and the difficult patois you will speak
half mastered in your jaw;
the funny make-up in your funny pocketbook—
pale lipstick, half a dozen lotions
to save your cloudless skin
in that uncertain sea
where no one charts the laws—
of course you do not belong to me
nor I to you
and everything is only true in mirrors.

I help to lock your baggage:
history book, lace collar and pink pearls
from the five-and-ten,
an expurgated text
of how the gods behaved on Mount Olympus,
and pennies in your shoes.
You lean as bland as sunshine on the rails.
Whatever's next—
the old oncoming uses

of your new troughs and swells—
is coin for trading among girls
in gym suits and geometry classes.

How can you know I traveled here,
stunned, like you, by my reflection
in forest pools;
hunted among the laurel
and whispered to by swans
in accents of my own invention?

It is a dangerous time.
The water rocks away the timber
and here is your visa stamped in red.
You lean down your confident head.
We exchange kisses; I call your name
and wave you off as the bridge goes under.

Curiously, again allusions to Greek mythology, to Narcissus, Daphne, and Leda crop up, although here they are suggested by the actual I. A. Richards text referred to in the second stanza. Again, a prevailing formal pattern with more widely spaced rhymes. This time, the separation is viewed as a metaphorical journey. The daughter is not traveling off to boarding school, as one reviewer suggested. She is undertaking the rites of passage, making the necessary crossing from the innocence of childhood to the acute self-consciousness of adolescence. In her new life she will converse with her peers in their own patois. She goes forth armoured with the correct costume and the correct appurtenances. The sea, that sad, dying, all-mothering ocean that she must cross, is seen as "uncertain"; the time is "dangerous." But the daughter goes forth confidently, her visa (the menarche) already validated. No turning back. The bridge between mother and child serves no further function and it goes under.

There seems, perhaps a common enough phenomenon, to have been less fear on the poet's part that her daughters would be able to make the transition than fear for the fate of her son. In the following poem, rhythmically imitative of Auden, the poet remembers the boy's birth and the heroic measures required in the hospital to keep him breathing. No literary allusions here. The trimeter line and the abab rhyme scheme doubled or even trebled provide the reinforcing rods. The poet still likes this antique and sentimental poem. If only she could retract that dreadful "kiss" / "this" final couplet!

     Poem for My Son

Where water laps my hips
it licks your chin. You stand
on tiptoe looking up
and swivel on my hands.
We play at this and laugh,
but understand you weigh
now almost less than life
and little more than sea.
So fine a line exists
between buoyance and stone
that, catching at my wrists,
I feel love notch the bone
to think you might have gone.

To think they smacked and pumped
to squall you into being
when you swam down, lungs limp
as a new balloon, and dying.
Six years today they bent
a black tube through your chest.
The tank hissed in the tent.
I leaned against the mast
outside that sterile nest.

And now inside the sea
you bump along my arm,
learning the narrow way
you've come from that red worm.
I tell you, save your air
and let the least swell ease you.
Put down, you flail for shore.
I cannot bribe nor teach you
to know the wet will keep you.

And cannot tell myself
unfasten from the boy.
On the Atlantic shelf
I see you wash away
to war or love or luck,
prodigious king, a stranger.
Times I stepped on a crack
my mother was in danger,
and time will find the chinks
to work the same in me.
You bobbled in my flanks.
They cut you from my sea.
Now you must mind your way.

Once, after a long swim
come overhand and wheezy
across the dappled seam
of lake, I foundered, dizzy,
uncertain which was better:
to fall there and unwind
in thirty feet of water
or fight back for the land.
Life would not let me lose it.
It yanked me by the nose.
Blackfaced and thick with vomit
it thrashed me to my knees.
We only think we choose.
But say we choose. Pretend it.
My pulse knit in your wrist
expands. Go now and spend it.
The sea will take our kiss.
Now, boy, swim off for this.

Here the poet seems to insist on, rather than protest over, her separation from the boy. She speculates today that the insistence was culturally imposed. Her expectations that the boy would "wash away / to war or love or luck, / prodigious king, a stranger" seem to her now to have been the standard maternal expectations of her era and should be viewed in that historical context. Nevertheless, it is painful to be old enough to speak of her past as an era.

In this poem the sea is a buoying but treacherous mother. Learning to float in it is a terrifying experience for the small boy who so nearly drowned at birth when fluid seeped into his lungs. Amnion and ocean both sustain and imperil. The poet remembers an incident when she too nearly drowned and discovered thereby how fierce the will to live, so fierce that she concludes we operate by instinct; "we only think we choose." She ends in a rhetorical burst, urging her small son forward metaphorically to make his own way on the strength of his genetic and God-knows-what-other inheritance. It is an overblown conclusion to an otherwise decent poem.

There is another motif. It emerges with the second book, The Privilege, published in 1965. For its epigraph the poet has taken some sentences from Joseph Conrad, who wrote to his aunt: "That's how it is! One must drag the ball and chain of one's selfhood to the end. It is the price one pays for the devilish and divine privilege of thought…."

In two elegies for her father the poet comes again upon the desperate issue of autonomy, the ongoing and always paradoxical struggle for an identity separate from the parent. Now she looks back over her shoulder, as it were, at her own coming of age.

This is taken from "The Pawnbroker."

Firsthand I had from my father a love ingrown
tight as an oyster and returned it
as secretly. From him firsthand
the grace of work, the sweat of it, the bone-
tired unfolding down from stress.
I was the bearer he paid up on demand
with one small pearl of selfhood. Portionless,
I am oystering still to earn it.

Not of the House of Rothschild, my father, my creditor
lay dead while they shaved his cheeks and blacked his mustache.
My lifetime appraiser, my first prince whom death unhorsed
lay soberly dressed and barefoot to be burned.
That night, my brothers and I forced
the cap on his bottle of twenty-year-old scotch
and drank ourselves on fire beforehand
for the sacrament of closing down the hatch,
for the sacrament of easing down the ways
my thumb-licking peeler of cash on receipt of the merchandise,

possessor of miracles left unredeemed on the shelf
after thirty days,
giver and lender, no longer in hock to himself,
ruled off the balance sheet,
a man of great personal order
and small white feet.

Again, a strict rhyming pattern, a kind of enabling legislation to write the poem. It is interesting in retrospect to see the ocean once again, though obliquely, contained in the image of oyster and pearl and picked up on as a metaphor for the burial rites. In this instance, closing the lid on the father's body in the coffin is seen as the final act of battening down the hatches before setting sail. But the funeral is at the same time a beginning, a christening of a new ship for a new voyage as it is eased down the ways into the ocean.

Fortunately, the poet interjects, these illuminations of intent are not present at the time of composition.

A second elegy, "Lately, at Night," written in alternating twelve and fourteen-line stanzas in a looser rhyme scheme, deals more directly with the funeral parlor experience, the business of burial: "I am pulled up short / between those two big boys your sons, my brothers / brave as pirates putting into / a foreign port." Even in death, it seems, the father's domain can only be entered by an act of plunder. Autonomy is arrived at by piracy. And the final stanza, expressing the anguish of the separated child who is condemned to relive the dying man's last hours in her dreams, returns to the pirate ship metaphor:

Father,
lately at night as I watch your chest
to help it to breathe in
and swear it moves, and swear I hear the air
rising and falling,
even in the dream it is my own fat lungs
feeding themselves, greedy as ever.
Smother, drown or burn, Father,
Father, no more false moves, I beg you.
Back out of my nights, my dear dead
undergroundling.
It is time. Let the pirates berth their ships,
broach casks, unload the hold, and let
the dead skin of your forehead
be a cold coin under my lips.

The poet would define these two themes—loss of the parent, relinquishment of the child—as central to her work. Once established they thrive like house plants but tend to branch off or hybridize as they grow.

By 1970, in The Nightmare Factory, the figure of the father is clearly an historical one, as in this excerpt from a poem called "The New York Times."

Sundays my father
hairs sprouting out of
the V of his pajamas
took in the sitdowns
picket lines Pinkertons
Bundists lend-lease
under his mustache.

In with the hash browns
in with the double yolked
once over lightly eggs

mouthfuls of bad news.
Nothing has changed, Poppa.
The same green suburban lawn.
The same fat life.

And the children are almost adults. The son, restless, disaffected, leaves home in a figurative sense. The mother is no longer an authority figure; she is helpless against the urgency of his craving to be gone:

Today the jailbird maple in the yard
sends down a thousand red hands in the rain.
Trussed at the upstairs window I
watch the great drenched leaves flap by
knowing that on the comely boulevard
incessant in your head you stand again
at the cloverleaf, thumb crooked outward.

Dreaming you travel light
guitar pick and guitar
bedroll sausage-tight
they take you as you are.

They take you as you are
there's nothing left behind
guitar pick and guitar
on the highways of your mind.

Even the tree has been taken prisoner. The mother too is captive, "trussed" at the window. She can only speculate about her son's future:

How it will be tomorrow is anyone's guess.
The Rand McNally opens at a nudge
to forty-eight contiguous states, easy
as a compliant girl. In Minneapolis
I see you drinking wine under a bridge.
I see you turning on in Washington, D.C.,
panhandling in New Orleans, friendless

in Kansas City in an all-night beanery
and mugged on the beach in Venice outside L.A.
They take your watch and wallet and crack your head
as carelessly as an egg. The yolk runs red.
All this I see, or say it's what I see
in leaf fall, in rain, from the top of the stairs today
while your maps, those sweet pastels, lie flat and ready.
["For My Son on the Highways of His Mind"]

They are locked into this pattern, the mother and son, he to take part in the "on the road" ethos of the sixties, she to stand by grieving in the stereotype of mothers everywhere. The refrain lines, two trimeter quatrains, echo that early poem, "Poem for My Son." Indeed, the poet had wished to write the entire poem in trimeter, but found that the expository material was so dense that she had to fall back from the lyric line into iambic pentameter, which is far better adapted to the kinds of cataloging she felt she needed to do.

In a sense, while the mother-son relationship has simplified itself, the mother-daughter one has grown more complicated. A darker outline emerges. It is no longer a matter of waving the child off into adolescence. Now the poet must deal with a necessary rivalry developing between mother and daughter, which ends, as it must, with the metaphorical dismissal and death of the mother.

Metaphor is not smaller than life. It mediates between awesome truths. It leaps up from instinctual feeling bearing forth the workable image. Thus in a sense the metaphor is truer than the actual fact.

In "Father's Song" the poet draws distinctions between the father's attitude toward the son and toward the daughters. It is a feudal poem, not one the poet would wish to save, but it points a direction:

I have not said there is the season
of tantrums when the throats of doors are cut
with cold slammings. Rooms fill with tears.
The bedclothes drown in blood
for these will be women. They will lie down
with lovers, they will cry out giving birth,
they will grow old with hard knuckles and dry necks.
Death will punish them with subtractions.
They will burn me and put me into the earth.

Although the persona is that of the male parent, the feeling tone clearly is shared with the mother.

Again, in "The Fairest One of All," which alludes to, indeed depends for its effect on the grisly outcome of this fairy tale, the premonition of her own death calls forth from the poet this concluding stanza to a love poem for her older daughter:

So far so good, my darling, my fair
first born, your hair black as ebony
your lips red as blood. But let there be
no mistaking how the dark scheme runs.
Too soon all this will befall:
Too soon the huntsman will come.
He will bring me the heart of a wild boar
and I in error will have it salted and cooked
and I in malice will eat it bit by bit
thinking it yours.

And as we both know, at the appropriate moment
I will be consumed by an inexorable fire
as you look on.

The poet is given courage to press on by Yeats, who wrote: "I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." For these are harsh judgments, that the daughters, to come of age, must psychologically overwhelm their mothers, that they must cannibalize across the generations one on another.

With the publication of House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate in 1975 the poet has, she now thinks, completed the tasks. She has let go of the large children although she returns thematically to them, evoking memory. In "The Knot" she writes, addressing an absent daughter:

It's last summer in this picture, a day on the edge
of our time zone. We are standing in the park,
our genes declare themselves, death smiles in the sun
streaking the treetops, the sky all lightstruck…
In the dark you were packed about with toys,
you were sleeping on your knees, never alone
your breathing making little o's
of trust, night smooth as soapstone
and the hump of your bottom like risen bread…

and ends, coming to terms with the separation in time as well as place:

Similarly, in a poem addressed to the foster son who still searches for his lost mother, she admonishes:

It is true that we lie down on cowflops
praying they'll turn into pillows.
It is true that our mothers explode
out of the snowballs of dreams
or speak to us down the chimney
saying our names above the wind

or scrape their legs like crickets
in the dead grass behind the toolshed
tapping a code we can't read.

That a man may be free of his ghosts
he must return to them like a garden.
He must put his hands in the sweet rot
uprooting the turnips, washing them
tying them into bundles
and shouldering the whole load to market.
["History Lesson"]

Perhaps what she has said of the young man's ghosts can also be said of her own? Hasn't this been the informing thrust of her poetry? Particularly in this book she "returns to them like a garden"; she has spread out the decade of the thirties in which she was a small child, all of its "sweet rot" exposed. Nor does it matter which details are invented, which are recorded. If everything coheres, the poem has been served. Here is the central stanza from "The Thirties Revisited," full of those warring misconceptions:

Now I am ten. Enter Mamselle,
my mother's cut-rate milliner.
She is putting her eyes out in the hall
at thirty cents an hour
tacking veils onto felt forms.
Mamselle is an artist.
She can copy the Eiffel Tower
in feathers with a rolled-up brim.
She can make pyramids out of cherries.
Mamselle wears cheese boxes on her feet.
Madame can buy and sell her.

If daughters were traded among the accessories
in the perfumed hush of Bonwit Teller's
she'd have replaced me with a pocketbook,
snapped me shut and looped me over
her Hudson seal cuff: me of the chrome-wire mouth,
the inkpot braids, one eye that looks
wrongly across at the other.
O Lady of the Chaise Longue,
O Queen of the Kimono,
I disappoint my mother.

Yet it is in this collection that the poet begins—she is a late beginner!—to come to terms with the ways in which her own mother was shaped by the social constraints of her young womanhood. "Life's Work," "Sperm," "The Deaths of the Uncles," narrative poems of some length, take up the tantalizing mythology of her mother's family:

O Grandfather, look what your seed has done!
Look what has come of those winter night gallops.
You tucking the little wife up
under the comforter that always leaked feathers.
You coming perhaps just as the trolley
derailed taking the corner at 15th Street
in a shower of sparks, and Grandmother's
corset spread out like a filleted fish
to air meanwhile on the window sill.

She will make Galsworthian figures of them all, willynilly. In "Life's Work" she contrasts her mother's rebellion against the aforementioned stern grandfather with her own efforts to break away. Her mother, denied a musical career, eloped with the man who became the poet's father. Characteristically, when faced with his daughter's ambitions, he

swore on the carrots and the boiled beef
that I would come to nothing
that I would come to grief…

the midnights of my childhood still go on
the stairs speak again under your foot
the heavy parlor door folds shut
and "Au Clair de la Lune"

puckers from the obedient keys
plain as a schoolroom clock ticking
and what I hear more clearly than Debussy's
lovesong is the dry aftersound
of your long nails clicking.

So the mother is not the villain after all? So we are victims of our dailiness, in whatever archetypal roles we are cast? As Jung tells us, there will always be the mother, the father, the miraculous child. Everything we construct arises from these primordial images, very possibly inborn in us. The poet is still doing her homework in the human psyche. The children continue to appear in virtually every new work she undertakes, sometimes viewed with acceptance, sometimes with distance. In "Changing the Children" she concludes:

Eventually we get them back.
Now they are grown up.
They are much like ourselves.
They wake mornings beyond cure,
not a virgin among them.
We are civil to one another.
We stand in the kitchen
slicing bread, drying spoons
and tuning in to the weather.

"Sunbathing on a Rooftop in Berkeley" is addressed, some fifteen years later, to the same daughter as was "The Journey." But the lines are open and adopt a more relaxed, conversational tone. Stanzas match but there is no rhyme scheme. The poet thinks her tone is no more or less assured working in this freer way. She thinks only that it befits the material, that the collision of particulars, observed and recalled, build up to and prepare for the unvarnished truth of the ending:

O summers without end, the exact truth is
we are expanding sideways as haplessly
as in the mirrors of the Fun House.
We bulge toward the separate fates that await us,
sometimes touching, as sleeves will, whether
or not a hug was intended.

O summers without end, the truth is
no matter how I love her, Death
blew up my dress that day
while she was in the egg unconsidered.

The poet wishes to make one final entry in this often awkward disquisition on herself. A recent poem, "The Envelope," grew out of a chance encounter with a phrase from Heidegger, "the fear of cessation." It was that curious Latinate usage, although very likely the Latinism was acquired in translation, that triggered trie opening line and a half. The rest of the poem was carried forth by the poet's ongoing preoccupation with the tribal notion of succession. Her preoccupation, she concedes, is ever more heavily tinged with intimations of her own mortality. Nevertheless, the poet here records her perpetual astonishment at her good fortune in having had daughters. In addition to the esthetic and emotional pleasure they provide, she feels agreeably improved on by them.

     The Envelope

It is true, Martin Heidegger, as you have written,
I fear to cease, even knowing that at the hour
of my death my daughters will absorb me, even
knowing they will carry me about forever
inside them, an arrested fetus, even as I carry
the ghost of my mother under my navel, a nervy
little androgynous person, a miracle
folded in lotus position.

Like those old pear-shaped Russian dolls that open
at the middle to reveal another and another, down
to the pea-sized, irreducible minim,
may we carry our mothers forth in our bellies.
May we, borne onward by our daughters, ride
in the Envelope of Almost-Infinity,
that chain letter good for the next twenty-five
thousand days of their lives.

The womanly images persist. Just as there is an ovum in "Sunbathing…" there is the fetus within the womb here. But a peculiar transformation has taken place in the childbearing process. Now it is our mothers, as well as our children, whom we carry about with us, internalized lares and penates, as it were. The poem concludes as a prayer of sorts. Clearly, the poet's ego is speaking. She wants to outlast her time frame. She prays to be carried on.