levelheaded: Mrs. Carty

1.

“Old bottles purpled / in sun perch / on the back porch shelf.” Try saying that five times fast. Now try saying it slowly. All this attention to sound—all these p’s and b’s coupled with “hush consonants” like ch and sh—demands we slow down even when the language is as simple and straightforward as it is in “Mrs. Carty.” It isn’t just that we’re expected to spend a little more time with the language (though we are), but that the sounds stand in for what we cannot see in the image. We can’t actually see the bottles. We can’t actually see a ray of sunlight penetrate the “purpled” glass, or watch it spread triangular fans of pink light across the back porch. We can, however, hear the sounds the words make. We can feel our lips come together to make those sounds. If sound is unnecessary for an image outside of a poem, say in a painting, inside a poem, sound has a kind of synesthetic effect wherein alliterative lines like “Husband built her this house / just before Hoover” or the repeating e sounds of “Family headed west, / eighteen-eighties, / grandfather settled // to work the lead- / zinc smelter” take on a certain, if intangible, temperament based on their particular combination of sounds.

2.

Since we can only access a poetic image using a series of grunts and hisses (read: language), poetry offers a limited view of human existence. Only in rare cases like Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy can poetry offer the same expansive, mythologizing experience that seems so perfectly adapted for epic cinema (just scroll down this timeline of Star Wars for proof). Still, even a short, 22-line poem like “Mrs. Carty” can span a country’s history then circle around to themes of mortality and individualism. The poem moves from the “eighteen-eighties” to the days of Hoover to present day (or at least present tense), where an immovable Mrs. Carty is staying perfectly put. But the thing is, she’s not. She wasn’t here when the “[f]amily headed west” and she won’t be here when we’re flying around with jetpacks.

When we’re told, “She’s not leaving” in the only one-line stanza in the poem, our speaker is being dramatic in the stubborn but familiar way an aging mother-character might reprimand her son for mentioning a nursing home. At that moment, it’s as if we’re hearing Mrs. Carty herself calmly and adamantly end a conversation by saying, “I’m not leaving.” But she isn’t just talking about her house and homestead; she’s talking about her life. And of course she is leaving—just as we all eventually leave—at the ominous, symbolic behest of a crow in the backyard and with “a thunderhead ris[ing] /over the mountain.”

-The Editors