The epigraph to Holaday Mason’s new collection of poems provides a keen insight into the urges driving her work. It’s a Scottish proverb that gives the long view behind the carpe diem impulse: “Be sure to live your life, because you’re a long time dead.” These poems tenderly address love, aging, death and family in three parts, BEDTIME STORIES, HE CARRIES ME LIKE A BOUQUET OF FLOWERS, and EXTINCTION. The early poems are sensual and erotic, the latter elegiac and remorseful. All her poems are clear-eyed, vivid, and thoughtful.
Mason cleverly pairs her poems with similar titles and themes, an image poem that is like a précis of what comes next, which is a more fleshed-out lyric poem that expands the theme (“Covid” followed by “A Covid Christmas Card,” “Sunlight” followed by “Late Sunlight Like Monet,” etc.). “Lizards” and its companion, “Lizards Are Always Dreaming,” which start the HE CARRIES ME LIKE A BOUQUET OF FLOWERS section, poems devoted to her lover, illustrate the strategy. “Lizards” reads:
You’reall the beautiful boys
swimming the rapids
never fucked too pink
honey crisp
nude at first light
when the birds talk
to the trees.
The lyric that follows, “Lizards Are Always Dreaming,” fleshes this out. It starts:
You’re all the beautiful boys
of youth lying like lizards
on the granite grottos, warm & tan,
the boys I never fucked, too pink
& plump to be what they desired.
You’re honey crisp, not melancholy...
It’s such a heartfelt paean to a late-life lover, detailing his virtues, which outshine those “beautiful boys” heedlessly sun-tanning themselves by the pool (but forgive them; they are only young!), a fulfillment of youth’s desires. By contrast to the feckless youths, she assures her love, “you see & we listen / as birds talk to the trees.” “You are every beautiful boy,” she tells him, summing up, “& I, composed
dress in blood red to bring you
baskets of stars, every last
one of them exploding.
While love is central to both parts 1 and 2, aging gets a subtle emphasis in the first while the sensual and erotic dominate part 2. This is a late love, as is made plain throughout the BEDTIME STORIES section, with references to “your lost widow” and to fingers too luminous “to know they’re no longer young” (“Old Music”); to “your silver/ chest curls” (“Imagoes, Minerals”); to “our bodies beyond / the lathe of the years / clasped and wed” (“Netsuke Gradually Waking”); “as if to say age can’t be tidy,” she observes in “Neptune Chorale,” which ends so tenderly:
The storm can’t get inside
the ring of beginning—
where we have time,
we still have
a little time left.
In “Woman Leaning Over a Resting Man Reciting a Myth,” the poet notes: “I was no virgin when we met / but was still completely whole,” acknowledging her experience but pledging her devotion.
Even as the title of the second section suggests, these poems celebrate the erotic connection between the narrator and her love. In “The Room Overflowing with Tulips,” the poet addresses her love. The winter holidays have come and gone and her lover’s children have been silent. She reminds him how the two of them
translated the vague jazz
of sorrow & you covered me
where I lay & I covered you
where you lay, the hours
everywhere, tulips everywhere.
“Summoned to Perform at All Hours of the Night” is likewise intimate. In the wee hours the poet recalls her grandmother, Margery, prowling the house, smoking Dorals and then blurts with amazement,
We are so wet again, our pool hair swims
across cushions. Is it fever or is it sex?
Spent, they lie together and the poet thinks of her grandmother, drinking red wine, shifting on her feet. She regards her lover.
You smell so good even fast asleep,
your eyes tumbling like the unborn
under lids crisscrossed with lilac streams—
the waters we come from. The waters we are.
Margery, you call me & no one else ever has.
The poem “Tiptoeing” begins with the declaration:
When you lay your head between
my breasts you’re always whistling,
seeing only rosy mountains.
The poem ends:
Come close to me, my love, close as you can.
When you get here
I’ll make you something nice.
In observing the rose vines climbing her neighbor’s wall, in “So What if the Chimes Are Silent?” the poet notes, comparing herself and her lover to the vines:
the way you wrap around me
& together we become an original
carved from old scars.
The sensuality of these verses is breathtaking, almost palpable.
The third part of As if Scattered, EXTINCTION, takes on death. It always follows love, the two entwined impulses, Eros and Thanatos. Indeed, as in the book’s epigraph, it’s what gives urgency to love, to personal fulfillment, the knowledge that nothing lasts forever. The section starts with elegies for the death of trees, nature – “Talking to Ashes,” which channels the Day of the Dead, and “Orchard Elegy,” which morphs into the pointlessness of war and ends: “I can hear the dead.” The two are preceded by “Ashes” and “Elegy” respectively. “Elegy” reads:
No water—
falling from blind eyes,
the blackened
corpses of the trees.
I can hear
the dry wind—
Other poems are more poignant in dealing with her mother and her brother. “The Earth Then Sealed” literally takes a bird’s eye view, flying over West Virginia (“We fly over the land where my parents / courted (what is that town down there?)”), over the blue ridge, and over Lake Erie.
We fly over our ancestral graves. Over
our spectral lives. We stare out
the windows & wish we could fly backwards,
searching for any point we could turn it around.
This yearning to turn back time, for a “do over,” is something we’ve all experienced, and Mason expresses it again in “Empathy Drawn on Asphalt,” which ends with the lament about her mother, “I can never restore
her to me, to brush her hair, make chamomile tea,
scramble her eggs & tell her at least
one last time, I am so very,
so very, very sorry.
In the same poem, she remembers her brother, “who died alone in West Virginia
in a trailer park, transformed by death
to an oxycodone pool of jelly on the floor,
twenty guns in the safe, surrounded
by the unseen, unshared tenderness
of his own exquisite art.
Heartbreaking. The final poem in the book, “From Mountains to the Prairies to the Oceans White with Foam,” the title taken from Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” likewise alludes to her mother, whom she sees in a dream (“My mother swells like roses in her bell white gown”) and ends on an image of her mother wearing a “quizzical look”:
I’d last seen my mother wear when in the island house
she’d come to kneel with great pain at my side where
I’d slept on the floor near the fire & whispered,
Did you do you do the right thing? Do you still believe
that’s true? Then the kettle was screaming, which
simply meant it was time to go.
Time to go! End of the dream, end of life, end of this lovely collection of poems. As if Scattered is lyrically exquisite and leaves the reader with philosophical thoughts about existence, about love, family, and death. The title of the book comes from a line in the poem, “And Both of Us Saw Tiny Spears of Violet,”