Peonies Series #4 , Pastel, by John Cummings
Audio for I Want begins at 3:24
I WANT
to wear my wanting like a favorite shirt,
threadbare, holes at the hem;
to celebrate my wanting — insufficient as it is—
scanty as the gnat that gathers with her sisters
on the lashes of the dead—
If this body’s just a garment,
can’t I wear it how I want?
I’m like a dog with a gravy platter;
winged scavenger scanning
winter’s threadbare field. I can love
the scraps of others. I can love the turkey
buzzard’s black suit and plucky head,
beak sharp as a serving fork,
her wanting circling, patient as a curse.
I’ve known the blaze
of summer, bare shouldered,
kneeling at pond’s slurried edge
where I fingered tree frogs and read
they freeze nearly solid in the winter
and emerge unscathed in spring.
I held the slippery legs and body, pressing
with my free thumb. I touched the iridescent skin,
the creature’s underbelly, marble white, dark-veined
as the water where I swam. I learned desire
can be paralyzed, but not for long.
_______________
Jane Ann Fuller
Review by Edward Harkness
There can’t be more than a couple of dozen people on earth who have never read Edgar Allan Poe’s great stories like “The Black Cat” or “The Cask of Amontillado,” or his almost too famous and most jangly symphonic poem, “The Raven.” Those familiar with Poe’s tales and poems may not be as well acquainted with Poe, the literary critic, or with his “unified effect” theory of the short story. “If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect [of the story’s overall unity],” Poe pronounced, “then he has failed in his first step.” I like to think Poe understood that not all writers are male.
I see Poe’s theory at work in Jane Ann Fuller’s poem, “I Want,” especially regarding the crucial importance of the poem’s first sentence:
I WANT
to wear my wanting like a favorite shirt,
threadbare, holes at the hem;
to celebrate my wanting — insufficient as it is—
scanty as the gnat that gathers with her sisters
on the lashes of the dead—
These opening images are for me impossible to forget. “I Want” is not a short story, but it has something like a narrative and unifying arc about the body as a kind of well-worn coat, both durable and delicate, and about the continual longing to find beauty in the ordinary and everyday garments that contain us. “I Want,” then, is about being at home in one’s own skin. But it’s also more than that simple equation.
The speaker of “I Want” asks us to consider beings and their adornments as well: “the turkey / buzzard’s black suit and plucky head, / beak sharp as a serving fork, / her wanting circling, patient as a curse”; the touch of a tree frog’s “iridescent skin, / the creature’s underbelly, marble white, dark-veined / as the water where I swam.” These same frogs, we learn, “freeze nearly solid in the winter / and emerge unscathed in spring.” It’s a revealing image, both startling and inevitable, about suppressed or “paralyzed” desire, followed by a near-miraculous revival.
From Fuller’s first sentence on, her poem achieves Poe’s “unified effect.” The tone of “I Want” is conversational, its language precise and spare, its imagery memorable, always surprising, always emotionally intimate. “I Want” ends not with a closed door but rather with an open window that looks outward to the possible. The great Mexican poet and Nobel Prize winner, Octavio Paz, said that in the best poems, the world is seen as marvelous. Fuller’s “I Want” rises to that high standard as well.