Contributor’s Marginalia: Elizabeth Metzger responding to Carolyn Orosz’s “What We Lost in the Fire”

1.

What woos me first is how the first word “marriage” comes out of the title the way the speaker cannot come out of the marriage:

“Marriage felt like a low doorway. I didn’t know how to come/ out the other side intact.”

The form is full of doorways, enjambed long lines, broken into two intact, closed stanzas.

Is it a sonnet? 13 lines, but 14 if you count the blank line between the stanzas. Is the volta the break itself?

What is that invisible middle line for a marriage?

2.

The hinge of Orosz’s 13-line poem occurs after this sentence: “Humans as characters who build their own guilt.”

Why am I beginning this response in the middle? To find myself? Because there’s room for me there or because the blank is me? Low doorway.

Guilt often shuts my husband down. If he can share it, get to the other side, bring it into his body, what opens after?

The second stanza begins “The sky was purple with fog.” Fog is so rarely purple to me, air made visible, made moving, occluding the rest of what we know, distorting. Here it is bruised like the sand dollar my husband showed me the first time I visited him in California, the first time I visited the Pacific. The purple part’s alive. How can one round creature be half alive? For how long?

Our marriage.

Guilt is something constructed, something we have agency over—not directly as humans, only through the simile of characters. Is marriage a theater even for its participants?

I have considered the performance of a wedding, but I do not understand the performance of a life together. Define intimacy.

3.

“Sex as the only relief from bureaucracy,” Orosz writes in the previous line. Then the sentence enjambs into the clause “sex as bureaucracy.” I, too, have found that romantic love, in the context of families, in the context of crisis, can become a matter of ordering the files. Conventional.

Where is the relief? The secret escape from one family to another, which I thought love was? Is it only a new set of paperwork?

There are 19 sentences here. The last three (spilling over four lines) are questions, one after another.

4.

Was marriage a rite of passage, a doorway, or a doorway you stand always on, that threshold from which they say a woman can be both artist and mother. Sure, the arms float up into both rooms at once, as long as you stay very still in the frame. Is this what Orosz means by “I lost all sense of dignity, of value”?

The poem’s second sentence: I didn’t know how to come…” The sentence enjambs “out the other side intact.”

When I got married I had already stopped using contraception, desperate to conceive. To have a family justified marriage.

Line break between come and out. How many ways are there for us to come? To let ourselves go. To let each other go. To admit who we are. To become it. What we lose in our fire.

5.

When I got married, pleasure was not a problem. Mother first. Pleasure was not a problem because I didn’t understand desire. We had sex, “relief” and “bureaucracy.” I loved and I was loved. I found what I had always wanted and hadn’t gotten from a mother. And from there, I was ready to mother.

Mother anyone?

Call it unconditional. Except it’s become all about the conditions.

Who is who, Orosz must also wonder: “I did not/ know who was crying.” I thought love was a dissolution: blurring my need for him with his for me, my role as mother with wife, the intimacy of being fucked with the intimacy of editing my poetry.

We made up a game, Strip Poetry, in Provincetown the summer after I graduated from college. For every edit, we took off an article of clothing. We had to find the poem on the page before we could let ourselves be truly naked. Revealing in the sonic mirror is relieving. “sex as the only relief…”

After “I lost all sense of dignity, of value.” the line continues, “I did not /” It refuses to believe what’s lost. Is this denial?

Or dignity, regained by contradiction.

How many times do we relive our life? What makes a love spark, a love combust? What allows for two to evolve together rather than apart? Is sudden change or stasis the greater threat to marriage? Does someone have to change more or both at the same rate?

6.

A year before I began dating my husband, I asked a boy named Woods to take my virginity, because the word of him felt like the right place to lose myself—his name symbolic. Or was I hoping to be found? To be enchanted?

7.

“I wanted children for all the wrong reasons. / I didn’t care that they were wrong, they were the reasons.”

She means the reasons are wrong. But are the children?

I had to have children early so I did not become my mother, desperately wanting them, desperately losing them. Once she had us, she was the oldest mother I knew. She gave up her self for us, her life suspended for ours to thrive. I didn’t want the stakes to be so high I’d lose myself. I’d try right away—for sooner certainty and better chances.

My mother had 12 miscarriages. Only 11. Now she peels one off each time we talk—guilt for her losses burdening my choices? Was it always her guilt I was escaping?

Maybe the extra one was me. I wasn’t lost. Or…

We are lost, apart. Did the children lead us into the woods?

Lost: the woods where we are still together.

The other day my husband gives me a scary compliment: If you said you weren’t you, I wouldn’t believe you.
You are the most you person.

Should I be grateful to have a boundary so clear to others? Or did I delineate myself so clearly to make sure I would not be defined by others who could not seem to hold, contain, understand, console me?

8.

Orosz writes “I had so few now / I felt that I must follow them.” These wrong reasons for having children might include pressure from others, killing time, social expectation, fear of dying, emptiness, the body’s designated purpose?

My son was born a year into our marriage. When a baby’s born one says they’re perfect. My son was born with birth defects, cosmetic. What is this part? I asked the nurse and no one answered. I thought it was a matter of perspective—I couldn’t yet see the way his features fit together, tried to wait for the ear to unfold or settle. Make sense.

No, it was not sense but extra skin. Right away, there were murmurs of when, not whether, to remove it. What function might it impair? Something’s wrong. They did genetic testing. No one said, oh he’s perfect. The grandmothers just pulled his cap down low to take their pictures.

I have made many choices for the wrong reasons. Easier to prove I can than to believe. Easier to move beyond doubt than let it pause me. Marriage, that low doorway.

9.

“Human desire knew no boundary.”

Did I say I didn’t know desire? False. My desire was boundless but disembodied. It was desire for the human, the baby, the proof that I was human, was woman, was fertile, was maternal. Oh, for my body!

Post-children, only, suddenly emptied, I wanted another body to be alive with. Outside language, but not before it. I wanted my boundaries overcome, fed and filled and finished, erased and eaten and embraced. My breasts observed, not needed for a feeding.

10.

Orosz is funny, self-deprecating: “I was nothing and it was dirty work.” Before sex, it’s the lack that’s dirty.

When am I nothing? When he avoids me.

I am nothing when the children seem like I forced them into being, way too soon or it’s too late, and yet I blame them, or they are melting down or I am frozen, or we are helpless to soothe them from each other, or arguing within their earshot. Sometimes I curse him mornings for pouring himself orange juice. Sometimes he shakes his head when he sees me smile at my phone.

When you love someone, you watch the way their eyes move as they sip a drink, the way they place their feet when they are reading. Everything is a live-wire. The world: all the lovers you may envy and become in fantasy.

In marriage, we must comfort ourselves from each other, too. Humiliating.

11.

We don’t despise each other. We despise the doorway. What does it mean to stay intact? I make it mean a future touch. He makes it mean a living death.

Now and then, we wake up in each other’s hell and fuck.

I like the way he is undeniably inside me. Because the children are not present. I come knowing the pressure now is low. We already made them.

12.

We began stanza one in a doorway. By stanza two, we are outside: “The palms looked like pines before sunrise.”

The landscape of motherhood and marriage. I love it for a minute every morning, but it burns off early.

I once thought life was made of choices, a series of seeds that grew once planted, but change is what happens either way, and rarely because we chose it. There is an ever about both pines and palms. In other words, they are not deciduous. Seasonal or unseasoned.

In the summer I get a haircut. The stylist gasps her scissors shut. Her cold finger makes an oval on my scalp. No hair there.

Did you know this?

Floating through the rest of the haircut, I tell myself the punishment for vanity is death. Vanitas. I beg my husband to prove he’ll find me beautiful regardless.

Regardless or forever? Whose sacrifice?

How did this go unnoticed, my mother asks when I call her. Was I not looking? Where was the back of me?

13.

The night before, I had asked him to pull my hair erotically. We were so tied up in trying to satisfy ourselves at the same moment, as if sex were a fact of timing or at risk of turning bland, when it was our selves apart, the underneath parts, we took for granted and didn’t understand.

14.

Orosz returns to the children, no longer the reasons for them, but the real, made things: “three babies, made of sculpted clay.” We are back at our origin myth, first creative and original fire that made us human. We are back at the desire to make, not just remake ourselves, or multiply with one other, but take the stuff of earth and call it living. Even now, feed the earth as we destroy it.

Beloved objects with subjectivities, like poetry.

Oh, art. We sculpt to be loved. We fire clay to love.

“One had a head with a hole / in the top of it.” I think of Emily Dickinson missing the top of her head. “The other two end at the neck.”

Who knows where loving ends and being loved begins?

15.

The unknown is not one mysterious thing. Like the three children, there are three questions that boldly end this poem:

“How much / of our relation to the world is authentic and how much / is learned behavior?”
“Am I hurting or am I, in fact, creating that hurt?”
“Have I ever been gentle?”

These are not just uncertainties, but matters of self-doubt.

At the heart of this poem are the questions at the center of marriage: how much of our relational life is transactional? What is the liminal space between intimacy and contract? What is a boundary once one consents to eternity together?

16.

If a marriage is threatened, one might feel fiercely protective of the children. One might also feel guilty for having them. They are evidence of how one choice is rarely right, or wrong.

Or do I still think of marriage as proof of first thought, best thought? First love, true love.

Before I met my husband, a sudden superstition came over me that I must fall in love soon because first loves were disappearing and how would I bear loving first someone who has loved and lost before? I lived in a world of pre-love and pre-loss and it felt like other members of my world were diminishing, exiting. I was waiting. We were one of the first couples in our community to marry. When I hear of couples separating, which is barely beginning, I picture the soft ash after a fire, wondering whether something new can still ignite there?

How to trust there will be another poem? How to surrender to one’s own inventions?

My husband, even on days or nights when he’s sharp-tongued or hurt or avoiding me, rubs tenderly the ear of his first stuffed animal. It is so worn with soothing that I almost forget when he does it that he is not comforting the animal but himself. My husband is gentle. “Have I ever been gentle?”

Awkward and gentle, the words I told our mutual friend I wanted in a boyfriend.

I remember him laughing, Who says that?

Gentle comes from the same root as the word human, I thought, like “genesis” for creation, but it turns out it really stems from “gentlis” which is more specifically “people from the same family.”

We may not always be gentle. But we are people that came together to start a family.

17.

Orosz doesn’t answer her questions, but returns us emotionally to the physical frame of the opening: “I felt low, so low.” The figurative world, the “low doorway” of marriage, becomes the emotional core of the speaker, the place where she is most in-between, depressed.

Is this the doubt one is left with when choosing or becoming “so low” or “solo” after a marriage, or inside it?

Does one person always leave another, I wonder in the doorway of the guesthouse where I write. Is feeling lost any different than the grief of losing? If a marriage ends, does it still exist after? Marriage heaven. We will be each other’s emergency contact and the sound of our keys in the door forever.

So much gets lost in the fire but we are lucky to keep the frame. We still fight and make love and take each other for granted, graze hands in doorways and lock each other out of rooms. We still throw birthday parties for the children and take them to the doctor together.

When we got married, a brilliant poet joked that we were marred. We are still married, still marred. But for now, we’ll stoke between us the very embers we didn’t know we were missing at the beginning, and let the fire grow so wild it burns us down again.

18.

I read him “What We Lost in the Fire” before we go to bed.

Is marriage mostly form? I ask.

All we can do is try, he says.

I ask him if it can be ours even if it is someone else’s.

He says, go write an essay.