For Wayne Booth, February 22, 1921-October 10, 2005
I.
Last March we went to see
what they’d made
of the old big-shouldered yards,
the clawed gash between the
Art Institute and the Magnificent Mile:
Millennium Park, brand new
mind-boggling mix
of Imax and Maya Lin,
metallic blooms on the outsize square
where prairie and city meet lake.
Pedestrians feel like pinballs or pilgrims there.
The evergreen hedge is training in a wire pen
near perennial gardens of grasses,
rocks, brickwork and wood,
cairns and low-walled rooms
as if you could
wander solo in a crowd.
It was Dad’s kind of civic physics project.
He always liked blown-glass paperweights
in the window’s sunlight,
a show of blue caves and buds
frozen mid-explosion.
While he talked, his hands
often played with
magnets, rolling things
or balancing a water glass on a fork.
He would have liked the Crown Fountain:
montage of Chicago faces
in forty-foot-high close-up
on two Hockney-tiled screens
bookending a long pond.
The slow video loops fade out
to someone else in turn,
a diversity of bone, skin,
gender, age, Brobdignagian
and fragile, not seeing
ahead:
Each is amazed
not by the transient face opposite
nor the squat crowds tossing coins;
not by their heavy spit into the basin,
but by the superhuman effort
to blink or move their lips.
The memory of nature, the creator Jaume Plensa calls it,
the sound of a mountain river.
He’d been going deaf, we thought, for years.
In the early spring
he could still speak and walk a bit.
It was cold in the sunlight, and the wind
sliced clean cross-sections of the plaza
where the Cloud Gate was wrapped in scaffolding.
We took the futuristic footbridge
to look at Gehry’s burst band-shell.
Then we had lunch at McCormick Tribune Plaza.
He had a portobello sandwich that he didn’t understand
as ice-skaters unraveled in the windows.
II.
Yesterday the neurologist,
who had gone out of his way,
taught us about Dad’s brain.
The MRI prints from February
showed darkness on pleats at the upper right,
or whiteness, I guess, elsewhere.
Late onset,
no sign of stroke,
not Alzheimer’s—
too quick, and the autopsy agreed—
not human mad cow disease,
not in our genes.
Call it fronto-temporal dementia lacking
distinctive histologies.
An attack on the language centers.
Good with words,
he had compensated for years.
Maladroit, flamboyant—
the Latinate lasted almost as long
as the Anglo-Saxon four-letter word
for pounding your cane in rage.
In April Dad enjoyed The Pirates of Penzance,
the solo he sang in high school circa 1938.
In July he looked at David Copperfield or the front page,
and we helped him to the park across the street.
He liked following the lizards
on nature DVDs, the Brahms CD,
and he shook both hands
toward the amaryllis in the sunroom.
On a gurney he looked like Quixote in a shroud;
an orderly thought he couldn’t move.
A young doctor, who had gone on the Web
and seen all the books he’d written,
asked, and Dad wiggled his toes.
When he couldn’t swallow
we donated the piano to a school
and put a hospital bed
beside the bookshelves.
He’d lost all his flesh, like a camp survivor.
III.
In November, the Cloud Gate’s final phase,
only its nether archways are walled in plastic.
Late, over budget, they are grinding and polishing the seams
inside the omphalos.
The globe bulges like mercury spilled
from the old Standard Oil building,
the giant tube
that spat it out.
The outer polish shows sky
skyscrapers and people and pavement
reversed in a stretch-skew
Breughel world.
In the concave underbelly,
workmen in white jumpsuits
and Star Wars masks are smoothing the inner lining.
They sway the heavy sanders
over the scars till they shine like rope burns.
One man rocks in his chair,
waving his polisher double-armed
like an overhead triceps press.
His right foot’s dust-covered boot
rises and pats down in a single dance-step
along the plywood floor,
timed to each stroke.
Where we stand outside,
head to head with our funhouse reflections,
we can’t hear the metal whine
or the music their iPods play.
© by Alison Booth. Printed by permission of the author.
Alison Booth is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. Since studying creative writing at Bennington and Cornell (MFA 1979), she has focused on teaching and research on women writers, Victorian culture, and narrative theory, in the past decade returning to writing poetry. Her exploration in a forgotten archive of biographies of women appears in her book, How to Make It as a Woman (Chicago, 2004) and an online project http://womensbios.lib.virginia.edu. A book on literary tourism and museums, Writers Revisited, is nearing completion. She has been co-editor of three editions of Norton’s Introduction to Literature.
Lisa Russ Spaar notes: The creative force of certain writers seems inextricably linked to the energies of particular cities—the London of Pepys, Johnson, Blake, Woolf, or Dickens, for instance, or Borges’s Buenos Aires, Baudelaire’s Paris, the New York of Crane or O’Hara, the Newark of Baraka, Ginsberg, and Lynda Hull. In Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, Richard Sennett writes, “The city has served as a site of power, its spaces made coherent and whole in the image of man himself. The city has also served as the space in which these master images have cracked apart. The city brings together people who are different, it intensifies the complexity of social life, it presents people to each other as strangers. All these aspects of urban experience—difference, complexity, strangeness—afford resistance to domination.”
Wisely, Alison Booth makes Chicago, long-time home of her father, the late esteemed American critic and distinguished teacher Wayne Booth and a place with which he is deeply associated, the literal and psychic site of her elegy. As “Cloud Gate” records the last year of Booth’s life, and the sudden onset of a crippling dementia that attacks the iconic critic’s language centers, it also maps the creation and the family’s concurrent exploration of Chicago’s great civic project, Millenium Park, which officially opened, behind schedule, a year before Wayne Booth’s death. Proceeding by a non-linear journal poetics, Alison Booth conflates the new public space going up in Chicago’s front yard (“mind-boggling mix / of Imax and Maya Lin, / metallic blooms on the outsize square / where prairie and city meet lake. / Pedestrians feel like pinballs or pilgrims there”) with her subject’s final illness (“Good with words, / he had compensated for years. / Maladroit, flamboyant — / the Latinate lasted almost as long / as the Anglo-Saxon four-letter word / for pounding your cane in rage”), allowing the confluences and ironies of these juxtapositions, highlighted by her subtle use of rhyme and off-rhyme throughout (square/there, wood/could, skin/Brobdignagian, genes/histologies), to illuminate her meditation. As she moves in and out of various points of view, playing deftly with a vexed and fluid sense of tense and time, Alison Booth also pays tribute to many of Wayne Booth’s intrepid insights into narrative theory—the “implied author,” for instance, and the “unreliable narrator”—which altered and continue to influence the course of literary studies.
Millenium Park—with its trained wire hedge, Crown Fountain (“montage of Chicago faces / in forty-foot-high close-up / . . . / The slow video loops [fading] out / to someone else in turn, / a diversity of bone, skin, / gender, age, Brobdignagian / and fragile, not seeing / ahead”), “futuristic footbridge,” Gehry’s “burst band-shell,” McCormick Tribune Plaza (where “He had a Portobello sandwich that he didn’t understand / as ice-skaters unraveled in the windows”)—is, Alison Booth writes, the kind of place one might “wander solo in a crowd. / It was Dad’s kind of civic physics project.” The poem’s descriptions of the park allow the speaker to address both the kinetic, prodigious agility of her father’s healthy mind, a sensibility both intensely public and intensely private, as well as the “clawed gash” of his brain under siege (“The MRI prints from February / showed darkness on pleats at the upper right, / or whiteness, I guess, elsewhere”). Especially moving are the stanzas that relay the fury and dignity of the father in his last months, singing the solo from The Pirates of Penzance, “[looking] at David Copperfield or the front page,” watching the quick motions of lizards on nature DVD’s, listening to Brahms, “[shaking] both hands / toward the amaryllis in the sunroom.”
The dedication to the poem tells us that Wayne Booth died in October 2005. The poem’s third section is set in a November that feels posthumous, and it is here that the poet focuses on the Cloud Gate, perhaps the most famous and beautiful centerpiece of Millenium Park, a large metallic silver sculpture by Anish Kapoor known informally as “The Bean” for its legume-like shape. Begun in 2004 and completed in 2006, this centerpiece of the Park seamlessly reflects the city, its denizens, and the sky above. It resembles a brain. And it is in many ways a portal, the underside of which is indented like a navel or omphalos. It’s not hard to see why the poet finds the piece symbolically resonant, particularly as she shows it to us in the final phases of construction, the seams still showing, so to speak. On the one hand, the poet shows us what the sculpture will become and is meant, ideally, to represent—the collective city, “sky / skyscrapers and people and pavement / reversed in a stretch-skew / Breughel world.” But she also shows us the construction workers, inside the concave underbelly, in white jumpsuits and masks, hard at work at artifice: “They sway the heavy sanders / over the scars till they shine like rope burns.” The watchers, like the grievers, are separated from fully knowing these interior, Other processes, of fathoming the paradoxes of living and dying, even as all share the same spell of time and space:
Where we stand outside,
head to head with our funhouse reflections,
we can’t hear the metal whine
or the music their iPods play.
“The Brain,” Emily Dickinson writes,
. . . – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You beside – .
The wonder of this perception seems especially relevant to Alison Booth’s “Cloud Gate.” Chicago, the city (with, again, what Sennett called its “difference, complexity, strangeness”) allows Alison Booth to create a sense of the mystery and dignity of a mind prodigious, private, and communal, and of a personhood that was, and is, in itself, a far-reaching and influential force of nature.
(Photograph by Flickr CC user Cortney Martin)
