That Evening at Dinner by David Ferry

Another "dinner" poem, and a different experience:

That Evening at Dinner by David Ferry : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

That Evening at Dinner

by David Ferry

By the last few times we saw her it was clear

That things were different. When you tried to help her

Get out of the car or get from the car to the door

Or across the apartment house hall to the elevator

There was a new sense of heaviness

Or of inertia in the body. It wasn’t

That she was less willing to be helped to walk

But that the walking itself had become less willing.

Maybe the stupid demogorgon blind

Recalcitrance of body, resentful of the laws

Of mind and spirit, was getting its own back now,

Or maybe a new and subtle, alien,

Intelligence of body was obedient now

To other laws: “Weight is the measure of

The force with which a body is drawn downward

To the center of the earth”; “Inertia is

The tendency of a body to resist

Proceeding to its fate in any way

Other than that determined for itself.”

That evening, at the Bromells’ apartment, after

She had been carried up through the rational structure

By articulate stages, floor after flashing floor,

And after we helped her get across the hall,

And get across the room to a chair, somehow

We got her seated in a chair that was placed

A little too far away from the nearest table,

At the edge of the abyss, and there she sat,

Exposed, her body the object of our attention—

The heaviness of it, the helpless graceless leg,

The thick stocking, the leg brace, the medical shoe.

At work between herself and us there was

A new principle of social awkwardness

And skillfulness required of each of us.

Our tones of voice in this easy conversation

Were instruments of marvelous finesse,

Measuring and maintaining with exactitude

“The fact or condition of the difference

There was between us, both in space and time.”

Her smiling made her look as if she had

Just then tasted something delicious, the charm

Her courtesy attributed to her friends.

This decent elegant fellow human being

Was seated in virtue, character, disability,

Behind her the order of the ranged bookshelves,

The windows monitored by Venetian blinds—

“These can be raised or lowered; numerous slats,

Horizontally arranged, and parallel,

Which can be tilted so as to admit

Precisely the desired light or air.”

We were all her friends, Maggie, and Bill, and Anne,

And I, and the nice Boston Brahmin elderly man

Named Duncan, utterly friendly and benign.

And of course it wasn’t whether or not the world

Was benign but whether it looked at her too much.

She wasn’t “painfully shy” but just the same

I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been

Painfulness in her shyness earlier on,

Say at dancing school. Like others, though, she had

Survived her childhood somehow. Nor do I mean

She was unhappy. Maybe more or less so

Before her marriage. One had the sense of trips

Arranged, committees, concerts, baffled courage

Living it through, giving it order and style.

And one had the sense of the late marriage as of

Two bafflements inventing the sense they made

Together. The marriage seemed, to the outside world,

And probably was, radiant and triumphant,

And I think that one could almost certainly say

That during the last, heroic, phase of things,

After his death, and after the stroke, she had

By force of character and careful management,

Maintained a certain degree of happiness.

The books there on the bookshelves told their stories,

Line after line, all of them evenly spaced,

And spaces between the words. You could fall through the spaces.

In one of the books Dr. Johnson told the story:

“In the scale of being, wherever it begins,

Or ends, there are chasms infinitely deep;

Infinite vacuities ... For surely,

Nothing can so disturb the passions, or

Perplex the intellects of man so much,

As the disruption of this union with

Visible nature, separation from all

That has delighted or engaged him, a change

Not only of the place but of the manner

Of his being, an entrance into a state

Not simply which he knows not, but perhaps

A state he has not faculties to know.”

The dinner was delicious, fresh greens, and reds,

And yellows, produce of the season due,

And fish from the nearby sea; and there were also

Ashes to be eaten, and dirt to drink.