Warning
NO SWIMMING EXCEPT
WITH A FRANCISCAN FRIAR
sign posted at
Mount Saint Francis Lake
No plunging your
body into the cool lake
no letting the water lilies
caress your breasts
no letting the trout
nibble your toes
no fanning out
your hair
no floating on your back
wind whispering
over fevered skin
except with a Franciscan.
Alice warned me
"No Swimming Except
with a Franciscan" was taken
by another poet.
No writing about
no swimming
except with a
Franciscan friar.
No writing about swimming with
Robert Hass
Robert Pinsky
Robert Frost
the Lakers
or Gwendolyn Brooks.
No reading this poem
about no swimming
without a Brother.
It might lure you in.
When I asked Brother Tim
if he'd go swimming
he was agreeable.
"Since I lost my swimming buddy
Mimi, I haven't been in."
How did he lose his
swimming buddy Mimi?
No drowning without
a Franciscan friar--
better yet, not
without a priest.
No swimming
with Holy Rollers
Mennonites
or Chasids.
(Brothers: no preceding
to walk on water
by striding
across the old
barely submerged
dam.)
When I asked
Brother Tim
how I could be sure
he was really
a Franciscan
and could he show me
some ID
he assured me he'd taken
his vows in 1983.
No babies
in baskets
by the bulrushes
without a friar
no chicken picnics
in the canoe.
Insurance can be
costly. Remember
what happened
to Mimi.
This "first" poem demonstrates Kallet's often surrealist/absurdist approach toward reality. Anything and everything can be taken up and meditated upon, even something as bizarre, unlikely, funny, and endearing as a sign reading "NO SWIMMING EXCEPT WITH A FRANCISCAN FRIAR." The smallest thing for her sensibility can be an entry point into larger concerns, and we see this kind of "move" throughout her work. For instance, the title poem of her collection Packing Light moves from a kind of mild complaint about the incompetency of an airline losing her luggage ("When I said I wanted to travel light,/didn't mean I'd part with undies/and mascara") to an awareness of those who have been forced to lose possessions, forced to lose their lives. The poem swerves, or deepens, without warning, to "cousins becalmed/by the Schwarzwald/[who] were forced to let go."
Something else of note in "Warning" is the way Kallet often takes words and celebrates them, lifts them up. Even the word "Franciscan"--most likely not a word common to the average vocabulary--she takes from the epigraph and repeats throughout the poem, presenting the word as mysterious, absurd, foreign, yet also desirable, even intimate. The "warning" not to swim without a Franciscan soon turns into a desire on the reader's part to swim with one, if for no other reason than the unlikelihood of ever doing so.
This poem, like so many others in her body of work, moves effortlessly through multiple registers of emotion, sometimes from stanza to stanza, other times from line to line. Her poem "No Make-up," for instance, begins self-deprecatingly:
"Makeup can only do so much,"
Marco at Bendel's said
when I went for my wedding consultation.
He would try.
After recounting the wedding ("I was a vision of loneliness") and later the marriage ("Three years and I was ready to jump/from our Stuey Town window"), she is "rescued by a cowboy/and a Jungian." She says:
In one dream,
my mother, sister, and I
wore wedding dresses in a rowboat
at sea. "There's Moby Dick," I yelled.
"Row back to shore
for the wedding!" mother ordered.
"You go," I said,
"I have to stay here and fight."
That deterministic call to "fight" can be heard throughout her work, but interestingly she places it just below the surface, at a deeper register, slipped in and not dwelled upon as she moves from matter-of-fact ("I left him") to swagger ("The next years/made sexual history") to celebration ("I'm no shaman, but I've lived and died/many times") to surprised gratitude ("and here I am singing"). In this poem and in "Warning" and in countless others, Kallet's voice is innocent, inviting, beguiling, enticing, alluring, and lurid all at the same time; in fact, one is never exactly sure which trait is foregrounded, which backgrounded, and maybe that's the point of her poems. The world through which her speakers move is too uncertain, too intoxicating, too unimaginably horrific, too lush, too pitiless, too divine. We are, as she says in "I Want You Here," from her newest collection The Love That Moves Me, "pilgrims/at home in each other." Her poems--so aware of the doorposts and the smokestacks and the renamed streets and the words that can't really "ward off the nightfall"--woo us into the hands of each other, warning us, even as they sing, that we need each other "here and here and here."