In the Waves at Ponquogue, I Talk to My Pain
by Jenny Molberg
When you called from the other side, I’d been dead
a few days in the white foam of pills, pulled under
the anesthetic sky and propped as a half-made doll
so the surgeon could cut into my spine.
I’d slept through the squall. You came to peel
wrack from my grave like you could reverse summer.
The beachscape of survival banged us together
like the wrong teeth kissing. How has the glass
turned green, and smooth? We must enter the water
to find out. You thought showing me the sky would help.
We crossed arms and looked directly at it,
from a distance, the clams making out with our toes.
This morning, we went for our first long walk. A swarm
of gulls buzzed around the trash, nested in my hair.
Because I could not bend or twist, I just had to feel
the moment, to be in the feeling. You taught me this.
This poem, included in my forthcoming collection The Medium (LSU Press 2027), is an ekphrastic response to Joan Mitchell’s 1957 painting George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold. The collection engages the work and lives of twentieth-century American women painters, particularly those whose achievements were gatekept or eclipsed by their male peers in the New York School. Mitchell’s painting is a gestural, dynamic piece, striking in its scale and its charged blues, yellows, and whites.
In a 1957 issue of ArtNEWS, Irving Sandler interviewed Mitchell in “Joan Mitchell Paints a Picture,” the first monograph devoted to her work in a major art publication. Of this painting—named for her dog, George, swimming in East Hampton—Mitchell said, “I carry my landscapes with me.” Mitchell said that the feelings she sought to express were “the qualities which differentiate a line of poetry from a line of prose.” What began as a joke—the poodle as subject—shifted, as Sandler recounts, when the East Hampton beach “got too cold” in Mitchell’s process, drawing on memories of a devastating 1954 hurricane.
Inspired by Kim Addonizio’s writing prompt on pain bodies (from Ordinary Genius), I set out to make a portrait in words that could hold the chronic pain surrounding my spinal surgery. Pain, personified, becomes the “you” of the poem—a kind of beloved that both torments and instructs. Recovery, which requires an embracing of pain, informs the poem: the world is re-seen as a gestural abstraction, a new way of seeing. The immediacy of pain—being fully in the moment, fully in the feeling—teaches the speaker how to imagine the second half of life post-pain: constrained but sharpened by knowledge into a provisional kind of wisdom.
Jenny Molberg’s third poetry collection, The Court of No Record, was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her poems and essays have recently appeared The Adroit Journal, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and Oprah Quarterly. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. Molberg is professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing and editor-in-chief of Ploughshares at Emerson College.