Contributor’s Marginalia: Kelly Rowe responding to John Wall Barger’s “The Delight of Misapprehension”

Like most poets, I read a lot of poetry. And often, I’m reading to learn what I can about technique— about image, rhythm, line break, pacing, etc. But once in awhile, I read a poem, and I’m shaken out of my analytical rut, thrust deep into the experience of the poem, and reminded of why I love poetry—why its beauty and power move me.

When I read John Wall Barger’s poem, “The Delight of Misapprehension,” I had one of these moments. Barger slyly begins the poem by beginning a conversation. He asks the reader a question,

“Ever hear, far off, a grinding,
Some big machine in the wrong gear—
Then realize with a pang
It’s an animal in pain?”

I was hooked. Who can resist being asked about their own experience? Four lines in, I’m nodding, “yes, yes,” because who hasn’t heard a strange noise, and thought it was one thing, when in fact it was another? I allowed myself to be happily led along; it was like chatting at a cocktail party. Then, abruptly, I was yanked into a darker place, thrust into an unimaginable experience—

Just ask the Arizonan mother
Resting her head on the chest of a girl
Not resting, listening,
To her son’s heart, transplanted…

all at once, without quite knowing how I got there, I became the mother, hearing my dead child’s heart beat in another child’s body. And all her pain became, briefly, mine.

The precision of the poem’s language created that living experience and allowed me no escape. Line after line, the poem carefully corrects misapprehension, misstatement. In the central image of the poem, the poet corrects his own (and the reader’s) misapprehension that the mother is “resting her head on the chest of a girl.” She isn’t resting—that apparently placid tranquility is immediately seen to be all wrong—the mother is “not resting, listening,”—a very different experience. And then the unbearable reality—she is listening to “her son’s heart, transplanted.” The image refers back to the beginning of the poem, and suddenly the “animal in pain” isn’t hypothetical, not a conversation starter. It’s the mother. And you, as reader.

Poetry is a communicative art, and this poem succeeds beautifully in creating communion. To do this, the poet had to maintain complete control of the poem, so that I, as reader, trusted him. And followed him. And strolled blithely right into the poem’s dark heart. And forgave him for the suffering that entailed because the suffering meant that I shared an experience, that I communed with the mother in the poem. Though the technique wasn’t what I noticed or loved initially about the poem, the technique is there and is what allowed Barger to maintain the necessary control. Relaxed three stress lines are followed by punchy two stress lines that express emotion or fear. The last line of the poem has only one stress—as if to emphasize to the reader that this is the end—of the poem, and of the mother’s hope. As to the word choices—there is not a throwaway line in the poem. For example, the line just before the poem shifts in tone states blandly—“It’s hard to hear right.” It seems like offhand commentary, a statement about our faulty human hearing. On a first reading, I didn’t pay it too much attention. Only later, did I realize that it was a stark, if understated warning, one that I misapprehended, as the poet knew I would. The line doesn’t say we can’t hear correctly, it says that we can’t bear to hear correctly—that as humans, it is just too painful. And so we invent a reality we can live with, we hear what we can stand to hear, not what is “right.”

It is unbearable that the beating heart belongs to another child, and so the mother, and the reader, hear the son’s heart—and hear him. And briefly, Barger allows the misapprehension—in fact, suddenly the boy appears in the poem. He is there, just beyond the splintered wall. But as always, Barger soon corrects our constructed reality—separation remains—death isn’t vanquished; its wall still stands. The child leans close but misapprehends his mother’s breathing as the fighting of dogs—not a loving, but a fearful, desperate sound. Paradoxically, given what the mother is experiencing, this misapprehension is actually accurate, a “right” hearing.

Ultimately, neither mother nor son can avoid reality. And so, at the same time they “hear right” and cannot bear to “hear right.” Perhaps the saddest lines in the poem are these:

In antique times those who died abruptly,
they called gods. Since that’s not
an Arizona custom,
the dead boy (still just
a boy

Saddest because they seem to point out, and correct, the misapprehension of a belief in god. That is the cruelest correction, one that leaves the mother, and us, to confront the reality of loss, without hope that the dead loved one somehow still exists, reigns in another, though separate reality. In sharing this last lost hope, we connect with the mother, who is otherwise so alone. And in living through this experience with her, we ultimately understand that “It’s hard to hear right” is an understatement of a monumental kind. Re-reading the poem, it becomes clear that that line is the most important in the poem; with it the poem and the world shift, and nothing will ever be the same, in the life of the mother, or in our understanding of the world.

Poems like this are the ones I print out and stick on the wall over my desk and re-read. With its perfect technique, its casual, spare language, it taught me what we ultimately go to a poem to learn—something about being human, something about how to live in this world.