Out of the Bag 3 Flashcards
Summary
Section III returns to the speaker pulling grass and posting it to a cancer patient and a cancer survivor. The speaker wants to lie down in the grass alone and be visited by Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health.
Section IV describes the speaker’s childhood once again. The speaker is standing over their mother, who has just given birth. The mother is exhausted. She asks the child, as she always does, if they like the baby the doctor brought over while she was sleeping.
Bits of the grass I pulled I posted off
To one going into chemotherapy
And one who had come through. I didn’t want
nother memory in Greece
Chemotherapy – Lack of Health
Where does life and imagination come from / Out of a bag?
To leave the place or link up with the others.
It was mid-day, mid-May, pre-tourist sunlight
In the precincts of the god,
The very site of the temple of Asclepius.
I wanted nothing more than to lie down
Under hogweed, under seeded grass
Hog weed – Flower can cause blistering / Nature
Immersion – Need for mystery and myth as a child
And to be visited in the very eye of the day
By Hygeia, his daughter, her name still clarifying
The haven of light she was, the undarkening door.
Hygeia – Queen of health / Greek mythology
Daughter – Personification of health (Goddess)
Sleeping and reaming for health and reconnecting with primal forces
The room I came from and the rest of us all came from
Stays pure reality where I stand alone,
Standing the passage of time, and she’s asleep
In sheets put on for the doctor, wedding presents
That showed up again and again, bridal
And usual and useful at births and deaths.
Me at the bedside, incubating for real,
Peering, appearing to her as she closes
And opens her eyes, then lapses back
Into a faraway smile whose precinct of vision
I would enter every time, to assist and be asked
In that hoarsened whisper of triumph,
“And what do you think
Of the new wee baby the doctor brought for us all
When I was asleep?”
New wee baby – colloquial / forgetting the mothers invovlement / feeding into that mythology / playful but also feeds into these lies
Returns back to simplicity / playful joyous and innocent / no matter how much we learn from Greeks, professors, religion, Dutch master, no matter what we have no idea where life comes from
So many sources of life?
Illusion and magic
