Abstract
As much as the title suggests otherwise, Doug Anderson’s Undress, She Said is a collection of poems about the experience of dying, although it also has much to do with love and intimacy. Dying naturally refers to a span of time that precedes actual death, extending, if circumstances allow, over a protracted period. In a psychological sense, dying begins with a person’s first acknowledgment of approaching death. For Anderson, a contemporary American poet, dying is operationally an unfolding and reorganization of images and memories from different epochs of one’s life: “What you have is the longer death,/the dying, the composting of the soul.”
If for some it can feel unhurried, dying does not lack for intensity. For that reason the memories recounted by the poet appear to have been chosen for their emotional force. In this spirit, as a dedication, Anderson offers the following thought from a fellow poet, C. D. Wright: “Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.” Lest this opening salvo prove insufficient as a warning of the affective magnitude of what is to follow, the opening poem, titled, “Prophesy,” should alert the reader: There is a storm coming, clouds opening, closing their fists. No point in boarding up the house.
Undress, She Said has four interconnected sections, each of which presents a different aspect of old age and dying that evokes a memory from the 78-year-old poet’s life.
The first section, “Love in Plague Time,” depicts the consciousness of one’s nearness to death as a distressing milestone, a universally experienced plague. One of the most widely shared perceptions of “plague time” is how “loneliness locks the door.” For all of its mutual features, dying remains an individual and therefore lonely progression. In Undress, She Said, the poet’s antidote would undoubtedly be love. But how might love counter the loneliness and “sting” of dying?
The craving for love, for human connection in all its manifestations, may be ceaseless throughout life. Sexuality in old age can also be ever present, not necessarily in the conventional form of bittersweet memories, but in urgent, time-sensitive expressions of desire; so sexual pleasure may actually, at least at times, be intensified during the period of dying, even if illness and age have affected function. The poet captures this perspective succinctly. Referring to modifications, but not abandonment, of both sexual and romantic love, he writes: “At seventy-eight I think/of other ways to love.”
In “All Over Town,” Anderson, upon awakening one morning, envisions how most of the younger world is at that moment getting into showers between sleep and work. About his own matinal shower, he reflects on injuries to body and spirit: But I’m gentle now, knowing the hurt places I’ve gathered. I tune myself to a lover’s hands, remember the last woman who was good at it. . . . My throat, a broken cathedral of backed up love.
In this book, Eros and Thanatos, human longings in the direction of love and death, respectively, are cojoined, not opposing irreconcilable drives, as in Freud’s (1920) classic formulation. Consequently, in many of these poems the Angel of Death is not only personified but eroticized: “She is here again with her little black car, wings folded and/tucked under her sweater.”
Death also has “attitude.” She is nothing if not cheeky, with punky magenta hair and a nose ring, yet also reassuring, aiming to avoid raising alarm unnecessarily: I want you to get used to me, she says, so when I come for the last time, you won’t be frightened.
For the moment at least, the dying man is free enough from fear to sharpen his senses for pleasure, to enjoy the first “rich coffee of the morning” and “smell her [Death’s] perfume for the rest of the day.” Anderson, always the protagonist in these poems, clings to life and love in any form that is credible and available.
What the reader knows will inevitably occur is beyond human control: Death holds the reins (or the steering wheel of her sexy little sportscar). With an irony that is almost facetious, Death is herself vibrantly alive, cast in the female gender as an object of lust and love.
Death, however, cannot always be a comforting or amusing presence. “She” remains supreme mistress of the experience of dying, and within her sphere of influence is the sole entity empowered to issue orders or imperatives. The authoritarian inequality between Death and the declining human person, together with overtones of sex, can all be inferred from the book’s title. “Undress” may use the language of seduction but it is a far larger ask. It is a command to the dying to prepare for the moment of death by symbolically undressing one’s soul, revealing a lifetime’s roster of defenses, excuses and missteps.
Like most aging persons, Anderson has accumulated regrets, many of them about opportunities for love he had ignored or neglected: “Someone loved me and I didn’t see it” is among the most shattering of them. There are painful expressions of guilt, too. In one poem Anderson writes, “Time to send the soul to the cleaners” and in a darker vein: It is winter now and also, for me the other winter that has no spring. . . . My imperfect life weighs on me.
Another point of gathering concern is that dying, like living, encompasses an unknown length of time. For fortunate individuals, the period of dying is not wholly unpleasant, but of its nature, transient. In these poems, what exactly death will be like and when it is to occur eventually become anxiety-ridden matters of conjecture. Here the poet broods in in italics to accentuate his growing unease: “Who’d have thought impermanence/could last so long.”
The second section of the book, subtitled “The War Doesn’t End,” is a reimagination of Anderson’s days as a young soldier in Vietnam, underscoring his remorse for having participated in the wartime killing. These memories differ from the original experiences in that they are altered and amplified by the proximity of death. After a posttraumatic stress disorder–like experience, the poet realizes that with advancing age “we become what we do/soul-heavy in the later years.” That which we have done will never leave us.
In another poem Anderson is attempting to undo death, the one in Vietnam that he directly caused, and also, by implication, his own. In “Rewind,” he writes: I play it back. . . . Three bullets retrieve themselves from his lung and return to the muzzle flash. . . . How that would have made all the difference.
In the book’s third section, “Homage,” several poems are dedicated to medieval-era Chinese poets, honoring the timeless content and quality of their writing. In “Homage to Li Po,”
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Anderson notes both the subjective speeding up of time when dying and the recurrent rueful feeling that opportunities for love have been wasted: Wake up one morning to discover I’d grown old. . . . So much love clumsily spun like sunlight. Where did it go?
The final section of Undress, She Said is subtitled “Mythologies,” suggesting that it will contain an enduring final message or image. It has both, but reads as a coda, more a confirmation of what has already been put forward than an entirely new perspective. Anderson returns here to the persistence of Eros, now merging ever more seamlessly with Thanatos as death closes in. Accordingly, in the book’s penultimate poem, “Beloved,” the link between death and the act of lovemaking is at last made explicit; this is also where the poet includes, as he does nowhere else, the title of the collection: I hear the river running in the dark, watch the stars swirl in the water. Death says, Come to me. I go to her and she folds back the black bed clothes. Undress, she says.
But that is not quite the end. The concluding poem, “Age Is Asking Me to Give Up Love,” is a protest, a rebuttal, an insistence that love, not just its platonic, sentimental or spiritual variants, but love in all its contradictory configurations and messiness, is perfectly compatible with the course of dying. This poem, as does much of the book, contradicts the psychoanalytic reverence for sublimation that ranks it at the top of a hierarchy of psychological defenses, “civilizing” sexual drive in the direction of art, creativity, or productive work. Yet there must also be a place for the raw, unsublimated love that can remain a dynamic force until one’s last breath. Ultimately, it is basic, unrefined love, not Dylan Thomas’s “rage,” that stands as the critical bulwark against “the dying of the light.” 2
In this last poem, after questioning whether dying might be easier “if love gave me up,” Anderson rejects that notion, embracing the lifelong primacy of love in all of its expressions and possibilities. Referencing Hafiz,
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he proposes that even after death, love is not utterly lost, but held in metaphoric reserve as a “vat of honey.” That image and its message are gifts of sweetness to the reader, concluding the wise and beautiful poems in this book: Might be easier if love gave me up. It won’t, nor has it sublimated into something holy. . . . Ah, Haviz, tell me once again how all the love we feel, however unrequited or lost, is gathered somewhere in a vat of honey.
Footnotes
1
Li Po (ad 701–762) was a lyric Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty.
2
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” from the poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” by Dylan Thomas.
3
Hafiz (also written as Hafez) was a celebrated 14th-century Persian poet.