
Watch Martha Zweig recite her poem
SCARAB
Mind plays trickles
in memory, chilly rills into surges to blurb
over yellow pebbles & black. Girls who knocked
dolly heads together whose eyelids rolled
lashes down & boggled back. Strange, true:
somebody could die of the duck nibbles.
My Majesty: popple scepter, circle of campfire rocks
I once ordered together adjacent the brook.
All the comforts of plush moss I might entertain.
Midafternoon: syllables of veery wit
among antonyms, odd syntactics to twirl & speckle
yesterday’s squall’s runoff still slipping along.
Critter squabbles. Kibitz & switch. Mother’s own
mother’s own trinket box away upstairs, its baubles
linking to lock loops upon lost, &, quick to the glance,
pretty fob I could pick out still if I looked:
heartstrung, glassyeyed, lucky enough twice
to have flashed back night terrors thunderstruck.
_____________
Martha Zweig
Review by Jared Pearce
This poem is a fine memory, even if tricky, where the sounds build the image as much as the pictures in an almost Hopkinsesque kind of way that makes the world again as amazing as it always was, either near the brook or in the box.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
Either the Darkness alters— / Or something in the sight /Adjusts itself to Midnight— /And Life steps almost straight. (from Emily Dickinson, We grow accustomed to the dark)
There is a preciousness dressing this poem, sequencing it between fairytale and daily life. Each image, run of words or pause awaits to be found and appreciated – gems in the treasure chest of our mind, precious totems of an even more precious life; a hymn. What a scarab does, it buries traumas like it buries dung; it transforms them into new life. And Popple: the playfulness of the brook of memory, the dangers of its white waters, the coronation, the role-play of a child that continues into adulthood, sharpened into verses. This is a specimen case poem in which every image is a fossil to brush clean; syntax itself becomes the archaeological tool and the reader becomes the child holding the magnifying glass. This poem turns the light off and on, and off, and on.
We close this issue with more tricks of the mind. Some have been educational, some beautifully fanciful, some have fed the war machine that is now taking innocent lives.
Review by Manny Blacksher
I like Martha Zweig’s “Scarab,” a poem of three sestets that mixes iambic and trochaic rhythms. What I like most is the punning skill and play she exhibits, reworking familiar phrases and pop-product period references to keep the mental ear entertained with fluid rhythms and sudden redirects. While the ‘ear’ feels the verses zip about, our mother-wits strain to decipher what artifacts of late childhood and early adolescence are figured to dramatize the speaking persona’s intrigues and adventures.
We identify scarabs with ‘ancient’ Egyptian relics. They were carved from semi-precious stones or made with glazed ceramic, fired to shiny, gem-like hardness. They were personal talismans and fetishes, usually inscribed with the owner’s name or with passages from The Book of the Dead. As a ‘scarab’, the poem doesn’t have to be elegiac, and, if it is, it might only memorialize a period of a woman’s life. But the speaker advises that “duck nibbles”—little constant abrasions, the continual catastrophes of mundane life, perhaps what we’d dub “micro-aggressions”—could kill us. It’s a piece about the life of a child who didn’t die but sometimes felt mortally threatened.
From the first lines’ punning, “The mind plays/ trickles of memory.” toys, games, and imaginative doll play are evoked. The speaker’s world is bedecked with the exquisitely name-branded merchandise that brought franchised characters of television cartoons immediately, tactilely into our play theatricals. If the poem’s an elegy for a now-vanished girlhood, then the speaker was perhaps a princess or aristocrat among her playmates. Her “sceptre” was surmounted with a stuffed “popple.” The “critter squabbles” feel like they aren’t so much frictions between pet animals as they are inter-familial- or friend-disputes between “Calico Critter” miniatures the girls identity with and are marshalled in impromptu dramas. The “Kibbles-‘n-Bits” you’d treat your puppy to are substituted with the ‘pals’’ inclinations to “Kibbitz and switch,” talking over each other’s play narratives and wresting back control of the toy drama when you’re tired of your BFF’s monologues. In these dynasty-scaled disputes about how the play stories ought to work out, there are indeed Game-of-Thrones-like fights and counter-aggressions between playmates: it’s allowed that the “Girls [. . .] knock[ their] doll[ies’] heads together,” concussing the babies hard enough that they pass out (their eyes briefly close) but then quickly revive, their eyes floating up in their heads, “boggl[ing].” Well, little girls can be tough customers. ‘Better they bonk their Baby-Alive’s noggins than send each other (with panicking, furious parents) to urgent care.
This feels like a richly detailed and ornamented figurative account of relationships between friends in a kind of suburban arcadia (with a stream and trees and a campfire). I regret not getting handles on all the references because, for all the vertiginous word-play, the poet seems to have worded these allusions carefully, methodically. I don’t like missing out on seeing how more props and plot-details further enrich the poem.
But I think I get something of the remarkable difference in the ‘magic’ device alluded to in the third stanza’s last lines. Here the speaker refers to a uniquely rich and powerful talisman kept safe in a ‘grandmother’’s [“Mother’s own/ Mother’s own”] “trinket box,” which, while still a child, the speaker was permitted access to twice. Maybe it was actual “thunder” and lightning that conjured her “night terrors” or she might have felt unmoored by nightmares from which she abruptly woke. What’s decisive for the narrator is that on two catastrophic occasions of fright amplified by fantasy, she was allowed to keep with her, for protection something that was Grandmother’s and is now Mother’s. Maybe it’s a fine gold pocket-watch chain with, attached to its clasp, a unique, talismanic figure that is the chain’s “fob.” Could the fob-figure be scarab, or is it another creature or person who, for the girl, guarantees magic security? Or might it be that all Grandmother’s fabulous “baubles” are fascinatingly “lock[ed to minute] loops” as jeweled charms on a charm-necklace long as a gold watch chain, with each charm a magical fetish.
The adult speaker contriving this retrospective doesn’t need a luxurious watch chain or all the bauble- tchotchkes of a charm necklace to ensure adult safety; nonetheless, it remains important to her that she knows where it’s still secured. Whether it’s a proof of grandmother’s wealth, or a loving parent’s generosity and trust, or even a special personal fetish that retains some of the child’s sense of extraordinary imaginative power, the thought of the talisman upstairs keeps her “heartstrung, glassyeyed” with wonder. A sovereign antidote to duck-nibbles.