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Andrew Moss (The buy-buy is a great louse that sucks. Repeat. Start. Repeat. Start. ) Ruth Stones career has been recently celebrated in a volume of essays edited by Wendy Barker and Sandra M. Gilbert.
The volume, excerpted on MAPS, lauds her poetry via reader response, feminist politics, and the unwinding of the tragic and comic entwined in her poems. Without too much more (deserved, I say) unrestrained appreciation, Id like to look at the ways From the Arboretum is worth repeating, and at the poems internal repetitions that, themselves, startle. From the Arboretum makes a double move, from the scientific space of a plotted land to the kinetic and florid interior of The buy-buy, and from that organic web to the domestic and ordered space of the front porch. The first move, like the swift chaos of A. R. Ammons poetry, shakes the straight lines of a planned garden, and the straight laced observation which is an arboretums reason for being, into the parasitic and regenerative economy of an Australian evergreen tree.
The moves diction is quite alarming: The buy-buy is a great louse that sucks. It is a simple, declarative sentence whose surface meaning and syntax are direct, but whose terms are foreign, comically juxtaposed, and frankly visceral. The vehicle an its tenor lack an abstraction that might qualify their equivalence: they differ most noticeably in their sound, the soft alliteration of buy-buy contrasting with the sharper consonance of great louse that sucks. The buy-buy is a great louse that sucks, as a first line of a poem, then, invites particular attention to its aural texture at the same time it de familiarizes its subject. This hermeneutic code, inscribed in the beginning of the poem, animates its investigation of otherwise heftier topics: the suffering that attends nurturing work, the pangs that accompany growth, maturation, and self-expression, and the grotesqueness and cruelty that domestication and civilizing practices have on the bodies and psyches of the colonized.
The buy-buy is a great louse that sucks: From its center many limbs are fastened to the sky which lies behind it placidly suffering. At its bottom it wears the ruffles of a cancan girl. Bird dung and nits drip with its resinous sweat. Its forgotten threads underground are anaerobic with the maximum strength of steel. For every stretch upward it splits and bleeds fingers grow out of fingers.
Rings of ants, bark beetles, sponge molds, even cockroaches communicate in its armpits. But it protests only with the voices of starlings, their colony at its top in the forward brush. To them it is only an old armchair, a brothel, the front porch. From the Arboretums second move, unlike its first, takes a circuitous route, but replicates the forms and sounds of its first.
In figuring the buy-buy tree as an old armchair, a brothel, and the front porch of a colony of starlings, the poem shifts out of a series of organic metaphors, and into a domestic and global economy. Such a shift depends on the sharp and obvious contrasts that obtain between images such as bird dung and armchair, sponge molds and front porch: the persistent, odorous, and dynamic growth of the buy-bunya's ecological community reduced to the static and antiseptic geometry of its residents abode at its to. In this broadly figured set of distinctions, the poem relies on a series of concrete images expressed in equivalent metrical feet: bird dung, nits drip, bark beetles, sponge molds, cockroaches, armpits, armchair, and front porch. These images, nearly all compound names for single entities, appear in spondaic feet: nodes in the poem that thus make thematic and aural connections. The poems sharp repeated consonant sounds, however, cut against a connecting grain. Its ss, ts, ps, and hard cs work in nearly every line to interrupt an otherwise simple cadence and many end-stopped lines, so that in line ten as cockroaches communicate in its armpits, the seamless organization of the buy-bunya's lives is expressed in staccato rhythm.
The poems thematic and aural dissonance never threaten the poems subject, however. Such tension sustains the buy-buy tree. Though it splits and bleeds from the strain of its expression (in the fictional narrative of the poem and in the time of the poems reading itself), such tearing promotes growth and the possibility for new forms: fingers grow out of fingers. The buy-buy tree objects to the pangs of growth and the scurry of movement about its trunk through a passive ventriloquism, the unprompted starlings complaint: ... it protests only with the voices of starlings, / their colony at its top in the forward brush. / To them it is only an old armchair, a brothel, the front porch. The buy-buy tree, like the sky to which it is fastened, suffers placidly, a shared disposition that suggests an unlimited expanse of natural strength and stoicism to which more minute and clamoring self-interest might attach.
The colony of starlings is such a self-interested junta. Politicized and historic ized as a colony, domesticated in their armchairs, and serialized as patrons in a brothel, the starlings have imported a sense of the rational and objective world into the forward bush of the buy-buy tree. The starlings treatment of the buy-buy tree reflects an objectivity that science and economy presume. Without a sense of the placid suffering that lies behind the colony's presence and the forgotten threads underground that strengthen its base, the starlings perceive a one-dimensional tree, made for consumption. The starlings perception, marked by the qualifying only, gives the poems dissonant tones and discordant images a unifying purpose: to resist simplification of complex or alien modes of being, and to resist commodification in an economy predicated on use and exchange. The buy-buy tree shows the most vulnerability to its colonizing starlings in a com modified, gendered form.
Two images in this poem are alliterative doubles: the buy-buy itself, and the cancan girl, a marker of aural similarity and, thus, identification, given this poems hermeneutic code. The ruffles of a cancan girl, worn at the trees bottom, describe the costume of a woman on display, a woman whose performance, and therefore her value, depends on seduction and resistance, the play of revelation and concealment of legs beneath the ruffles of a costume. The starlings limited perception, however, imagines an erasure of one end of the cancan girls dialectical performance. To them it is only... a brothel, an exchange of money for sex. Such a conflation of modes of relation and consumption on the starlings behalf extends the arborist's as metonymy for science, objective study, and rationalism misapprehension of his relationship to the buy-buy tree in its most signifying form.
In doing so, the scientist and colonist, from the falsely constructed position of objectivity, confuse the visual with the sensual, reduce the feminine to the sexual, and nature to its usefulness and exchangeability. If, in its appearance as cancan girl, the buy-buy tree reveals itself as vulnerable a brothel to starlings, who see with through a lens marred by only, perhaps as the cancan girl it reveals itself to a broader vision as a more maximized strength. One wonders if its florid web isnt only the base of a structure that supports a more ratiocinated network of relations, but also a massive, comic, and shockingly physical threat to that networks life: The buy-buy is a great louse that sucks.
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