Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. 56 pages. $15.95.
The title of Martha Rhodes’s fifth poetry collection, The Thin Wall, indicates you are entering an unsteady world. Thin walls are porous—to sound, to voices, to other peoples’ lives—in an interior area. They betray intimacies. You can hear anger, sex, love, and accusation through a fragile divider or partition. Sexism, and all of its attendant toxicity, permeates without respect for grace—or privacy.
In fact, you can read The Thin Wall as a gradual, sly assembly of elements elliptically spun into a feminist story. From Eve, the original bad girl of the Bible—who cast us out of Paradise—to the witches of Salem and today’s professional female, Rhodes suggests society considers women even unworthy of time. “Thus, I continue to take / it from you, one second, then another.”
This book is partitioned into three sections, each an unfurling series of poems, untitled. The first section called (Burden of Inheritance) refers to the history of patrimony seeping through the thin wall between past, present, and future. There are many thin walls, but this temporality, I believe, is the primary conceit in Rhodes’s story.
The narrator in the first poem lives in colonial Massachusetts during the Salem witch trials. Betrayal begets betrayal: “Girls run the streets accusing / the accused.” A mother, Goody Proctor, tells her son: “Look / darling child, there’s your father. // Now shut your eyes and forget him.”
This, in a community known for education, reform, and progress. Why smart, reasonable people do great evil isn’t so much the point, I think Rhodes is saying. Rather, children grow up and pass along whatever lies within them. Stacy Schiff writes in The Witches: it was “our earliest instance of conspiratorial fantasy and reckless demonizing, of the brand of national distemper that grips us in anxious times.” The Puritans believed “others,” such as Quakers, and most particularly women and girls, were witchlike. We see the ongoing inheritance:
Now look at their offspring. Uphill deposited
onto our front porches. All over town,
in the shadows of the twin stacks,
we raise them, boiling up water stews,
water broths, water purees.
This sonnet concludes with two additional words on a fifteenth line. Rhodes leaves us questioning:
They flourish
and appreciate. What can we do so they’ll hate us
and leave?
The “twin stacks” suggest the Twin Towers. In the third poem of her collection, Rhodes moves us from Salem to Wall Street, where the worship of the dollar replaces the reverence for the Bible. But both small elite communities are patriarchal and have had outsized reach in the lives and imaginations of Americans, with dire consequences:
Even from their graves their disdain
toward us reaches. Our lungs burnfrom the ashes of their profits.
And now they fall, one by one, onto the pavementsthey drop . . . . Even dead, through their children,
they take all we have.
Called (Yard Fire), the title of the second section is a clever amalgam of yard sale and bonfire. Here, domestic household detritus—that you sell and therefore pass along—may translate to the everyday slights, the self-betrayals that accumulate, and which others, then, “pay” to receive. The fury escalates so that women—families and communities—are figuratively burning up:
. . . my wife,
glaring out the kitchen window,
every tree and shrub on fire.
As the landscape degrades, the idyllic wilderness of early America becomes
Warehouses of palaces
Warehouses of gruel
Warehouses of lost sheep
Tall columns of confusion.
Where is the respite? Rhodes finds temporary relief in “The place of Etcetera,” introduced in the longest poem, at the heart-center of the book:
Cherry tree branches grazing our foreheads
Many beetles on peonies
All seen clearly from this place we want to remain
Inside forever, place of EtceteraAnd very busy with potholders here
Though at the same time we can’t be identified
As useful—don’t take it personally
You see here we can follow the sea.
A holding pattern may not be ideal, but sometimes it’s enough. Sometimes, it’s all we’ve got.
In the third section, (Looking Down), the narrator hovers over scenes of marital and familial discord like a disembodied spirit. The small cruelties accrue further. Intimacy between husband and wife is accompanied by blood . . . and a knife:
. . . as he grabs her hips at the kitchen sink once they’ve both cooled down,
in ten or so minutes. Surprised, she’ll drop a knife into the suds,
cut her pointing finger, turn around to rub it bloody down his cheekto his chin, and leap to his Adam’s apple, press in a little, won’t she?
With apples scattered throughout the collection, with a garden and a fruit tree, Eden is an eerie presence. Here, in the last section, the apple is caught in the throat of the narrator’s husband. Rhodes suggests we are not only destined to embody the myths we create and inherit. We are choking on them.
Of the many female voices and stories conjured in this collection—from Salem’s Goody Proctor who bears her son in jail, to the narrator’s friend Lucy who drowns in Maine—almost all are persecuted, struggling, and exhausted. In one poem, the narrator is “pecked, consumed, / scattered.” In another, the narrator asserts:
I’m his are you kidding she’s your wife? wife.
I’m secluded in a church, abandonedby the church. I was pawned forty years ago
and remain unclaimed. I was happily foreclosed upon.Declined admittance by the dentist.
Sewn shut by the gynecologist.
Revenge is a given:
. . . the other day
I stole and sold his watch
because I was completely
dying for some extravagance—
and thought nothing of him
“The witch is a shapeshifter,” writes Kristen J. Sollée in Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive. “She transforms from vixen to hag, healer to hellion, adversary to advocate based on who seeks her.”
Near the end of The Thin Wall, Rhodes conjures a short poem that flows like a spell from a high priestess—or a lyric poet. Both enchant:
My job is to extract your soul and usher it
along to where today we find, north of north,
a strip of sand wide as wide, a branch of river,
leaf deep. Nothing surrounds or meets us here.
“Nothing,” here, is death. It’s only a step away on the other side of the “thin wall.”
. . . Nothing grabs us all: good or bad, boy,
girl, popular, un-, you. I also think that my ability
to become misplaced, to take a few steps away and find myself
in someone’s poppy garden, or in the frozen aisle at the market,
or hovering at the ceiling of my sister’s bedroom in Thomaston
looking down at her asleep—lost, upside down, turned-around-unable-
to-navigate-lost—so far might have . . . I believe . . . kept me
from the thin glass wall just over there—I know exactly where it is.
In other words, averting her eye—stepping out of herself—helps the narrator “find herself” sane, alive.
The poems of The Thin Wall are short, mostly only ten to fourteen lines, chipped like shards of overheard conversation, or other times internal dialogue. Once in a while, the poem resembles a witches’ spell or lamentation. Either way, this is a poetry of survival: dark, haunted, and strangely—powerfully—luminous.
