On Sunday I cut my thumb, slicing up a clump of romaine for a salad. I was happily chopping away, advancing the lettuce with my left hand as I chopped with the right, and suddenly….. ouch!
I wasn’t sure how deep the cut really was. But I applied direct pressure until the bleeding stopped. Then I googled first aid and found the Mayo Clinic’s site (they should know, right?), which said if you can close the wound cleanly, you probably don’t need stitches. I could. So I washed it, applied antibiotic creme as they suggested and made a bandage of gauze and first-aid tape.
Then I finished making dinner; ate contendedly with a nice glass of Malbec; and remembered a Sylvia Plath poem that was one of my favorites when I was in college. It’s called Cut, and begins, “What a thrill —- /My thumb instead of an onion.”
I recall discovering Sylvia Plath. I won a prize from the Phi Beta Kappa Society in my freshman year for having a high GPA. And the prize was a credit at the university bookstore for at least $100 and maybe more. I’d perused the poetry shelf and grabbed an armful — some whose names I recognized, others who were unfamiliar, but whose bookcovers intrigued me.
I’d taken my armful up to the check-out and someone who was behind me in line — I think it might have been a professor — deadpanned, “Catching up on the Moderns?”
It was through some of those Moderns that I fed my love of words and how you could play with them, particularly the sound of them strung together economically in a line of verse. Sylvia Plath, Wilfred Owen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. H. Auden, Adrienne Rich. They were my mentors and influences.
Cut is filled with marvellous, unexpected imagery: who would describe a bandage as a “Gauze Klu Klux Klan Babushka?” So utterly different; so imaginative; so accurate, if you think about it.
To my surprise, someone has posted a recording of Sylvia Plath reading Cut on YouTube. (I guess it’s not all pet tricks and bra failures.) Here’s the link, if you’d like to hear her, and the poem itself follows.
Cut
for Susan O’Neill Roe
What a thrill —-
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge
Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.
Little pilgrim,
The Indian’s axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls
Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.
A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.
Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling.
O Saboteur,
Kamikaze man —-
The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when
The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence
How you jump —-
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.
A few years later, I had my own experience with a wounded thumb. Not a knife cut, but a pin prick — enough to draw drops of blood. And I wrote a poem, unquestionably influenced by Cut. I was mourning the loss of a first love. Admittedly, about two years after the fact. And honestly, I think I was more engaged in the craft of the poem, than the depth of the feeling at that point.
But the memory of my own wounded-thumb poem was stimulated by my little kitchen accident this weekend. A weekend where I also attended several screenings at the New York Gay and Lesbian film festival. And Saturday’s presentation (before I cut my thumb) was a series of short films, all about boys of various ages, dealing with the strange experiences of identifying their feelings — sexual and emotional — for other boys. And the sometimes sad confusion and disappointment when those feelings are not reciprocated.
Here’s my own poem. A bit influenced also by Peter Schaffer’s play Equus, which our university theater performed shortly after it premiered in New York and which was recently revived on Broadway with Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame. A quote from the script: “… to go through life and call it yours – your life – you first have to get your own pain. Pain that’s unique to you.”
Pain
Pain in a pin-pricked thumb.
Throbbing drops of blood
from this stupid digit.
I could count them, these pains,
until I’m numb,
until the numbness set in.
Inset like a dumb, red gem.
Silent jewel of a ring of pains.
Token of broken engagements.
Refined from the mine of pain.
Mine alone. The sole possession
of a solitary, stone-cold soul,
Whom the Chinese anesthesiologist
pin-pricks to relieve the pains.
I relive the pains and count them.
That account for me, that amount to me,
But that can’t surmount me now –
for the numbness has set in.
Lexington, VA, 1974
Ironically, when I went to a client meeting at the New York Stock Exchange today, one of my clients had several bandaids taped over a finger. She looked at my bandaged thumb and asked, “What did you do?” “Cut it slicing romaine,” I said, “and you?” “Cilantro,” she replied.
