It’s always the chance word, unthinking
gesture that unlocks the face before you.
Reveals the intricate countries
deep within the eyes. The hidden
lives, like sudden miracles,
that breathe there.
The dominant theme that unifies the verse of Bronwen Wallace is expressed in the closing lines of this poem. Her poems are, for the most, narratives rather than expressions of flowery imagery. She writes poetry for people who hate poetry. They tell stories and most of those stories are determined to reveal the hidden lives of those who toil behind the ritualistic explication of daily existence. It is not the ritual that defines our lives, her poetry asserts, but what is going on behind and within those rituals. Convenience and necessity are the strategic obstacles to possibility, but possibility is always available for at least a momentary and glancing expressing of the miraculous.
It makes the city seem imaginary, somehow.
As you drive through the streets,
you begin to see how the lives there look
as if they had been cut from magazines:
a blond couple carrying a wicker picnic-basket
through the park, a man in faded brown shorts
squatting on his front lawn
fixing a child’s red bike.
These lines are a more concrete manifestation of the thematic search for hidden lives behind the ritual. The imagery here is that of pure mundane existing side by side with that possibility of the hidden miracles. The preceding verse situates the central core of meaning within this poem: “settling down” is an abstract concept that nevertheless somehow seems to always be dependent upon the visceral foundation of geography. Settling down means finding a place to do so and in any place there is always present the potential for transcending the mundane. What stories led to the picnic and the fixing of a bike and what stories will the completion of that picnic and the fixing of the bike lead to? These are the hidden lives always pregnant with the possibility of the miraculous.
This started out as a simple poem
for Virginia Woolf
it wasn’t going to mention history
or choices or women’s lives
the complexities of women’s friendships
or the countless gritty details
of an ordinary woman’s life
that never appear in poems at all
The sisterhood women—especially those struggling to maintain the balancing act of domesticity with the pursuit of something else—is another common theme which is explored throughout the canon of the poet’s work. She writes about women because women—especially at the time when she was writing—were more likely than men to require this straddling of the line between domestic expectations and personal dreams and desires. Most of the men who show up in these poems tend to be obstacles and obstructions and it is worth noting that when men do take center stage and are endowed with a greater humanity, they tend to be straddlers themselves in one fashion or another. Virginia Woolf is the feminist icon who was writing before there really was such a thing as feminism; her call for a “a room of my own” echoes throughout this poem literally, but is a metaphorical presence in nearly every poem Wallace directs toward the struggles of the sisterhood.
He thinks he thinks with his brain
as if it were safe up there
in its helmet of bone
away from all that messy business
of his stomach or his lungs.
And when he thinks like that
he loses himself forever.
The policeman is quoted just before the poem proper begins: “The problem with you women is, you think with your hearts.” The police is well aware of the problem with women. As for self-awareness, well, that has never really been either a major concern or a major problem for law enforcement officers. Critical thinking—by which is meant thinking both the heart and the deeper recesses of the mind rather than that primal part of the head most often referred to as the famed “cop’s gut instinct” which so very often proves to be wrong—has never been near the top of job qualifications for police. Few have ever put this unfortunately reality in such appropriate and poetic terms as Wallace manages with this observational extract.
