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    I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman
    I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman
    I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman
    Ebook132 pages1 hour

    I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman

    By Jude Nutter

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    About this ebook

    In "Return of the Heroes," Walt Whitman refers to the casualties of the American Civil War: "the dead to me mar not. . . . / they fit very well in the landscape under the trees and grass. . . ." In her new poetry collection, Jude Nutter challenges Whitman's statement by exploring her own responses to war and conflict and, in a voice by turns rueful, dolorous, and imagistic, reveals why she cannot agree.

    Nutter, who was born in England and grew up in Germany, has a visceral sense of history as a constant, violent companion. Drawing on a range of locales and historical moments—among them Rwanda, Sarajevo, Nagasaki, and both world wars—she replays the confrontation of personal history colliding with history as a social, political, and cultural force. In many of the poems, this confrontation is understood through the shift from childhood innocence and magical thinking to adult awareness and guilt.

    Nutter responds to Whitman from another perspective as well. It was Whitman who wrote that he could live with animals because, among other things, they are placid, self-contained, and guiltless. As counterpoint, Nutter weaves a series of animal poems—a kind of personal bestiary—throughout the collection that reveals the tragedy and violence also inherent in the lives of animals. Here, as in much of Nutter's previous work, the boundaries between the animal and human worlds are permeable; the urgent voice of the poet insists we recognize that "Even from a distance, suffering / is suffering." Here is both acknowledgment and challenge: distance may be measured in terms of time, culture, or place, or it may be caused by the gap between animals and humans, but it is our responsibility to speak against atrocity and bloodshed, however voiceless we may feel.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Notre Dame Press
    Release dateMar 1, 2009
    ISBN9780268087708
    I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman
    Author

    Jude Nutter

    Jude Nutter has published in numerous journals and is the recipient of several national and international poetry awards. Her second collection, The Curator of Silence (University of Notre Dame Press), won the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry and the Ernest Sandeen Prize in 2007. She lives in Edina, Minnesota.

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      Book preview

      I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman - Jude Nutter

      LAMB

      Saw a new creature’s first moments of thinking.

      Felt the chill blowing through me.

      —Michael Dennis Browne

      I thought she was resting with her head against the fence

      until I saw the wire, exact as a grass blade, pressed

      against her open eye. Ravens will loot a body quickly

      for its softest parts. She was newly dead; she was clean,

      storm-washed. At the keyholes of the nostrils, those flies

      the colour of ochre that follow the flocks all summer

      and lay their eggs upon the shit in the fields.

      I’ve watched ewes and lambs finding one another on the hillsides—

      calling and answering and moving, always, toward the sound.

      Her lamb in the field now on the pins of its legs, its tail

      like a whisk, its mad rattle unanswered, bolting

      from ewe to ewe and each ewe, in turn, lowering her head,

      hooking it under the belly, lifting and pitching it away. Not mine.

      Not mine. Not mine. Saw it looking around at the hills.

      Saw it turning in circles. Saw myself standing back,

      doing nothing. I took the track up and out

      of the valley to where the wind devoured

      the lamb’s monologue of panic; until the tragedy unpacking below

      became part of the view—a detail in the story, not the whole story;

      until the dead sheep was a white bag held against the fence

      by the wind, and the lamb a pale mote floating about the field.

      The lake, the burnished water, a man with a black dog

      in the reeds lining the river, gunshots, and ducks spitting skyward

      like flung gravel. Even from a distance, suffering

      is suffering. There was wind breasting through the surface

      water of the lake; there was crisp grass with green light

      up its sleeves. There must have been sunlight but it was shadows

      I noticed, small hauntings in the hills as the clouds slid past.

      THE HELMET

      Under the wind’s cold roof we are lost and homeless,

      And the flesh is flesh …

      —Loren Eiseley

      You have been lying so long with your face

      against the earth that the dirt beneath your cheek

      is warm and your teeth have a coating of grit

      and dust. In your body, a great heaviness.

      As if you had swallowed your own grave. So

      it’s true: a man can eat a shallow depression

      in the dirt to get his head just below

      a sniper’s line of fire. Hour after hour the artillery

      and the mortars coax dark mouths to open

      in the duff and the muck, and there are times

      when a man—photos, long bones, muscles, hardware—opens

      with them. While fifty yards away,

      where the light is whole and the trees unbroken,

      you can see the wind’s white shoulders moving

      through the unspoiled grasses.

      And how many times in the life you had

      before this one, did you cross, without thinking,

      walking upright and whistling, a distance

      of fifty yards? When the man right beside you dies,

      you know it, without looking: at the heart

      of the barrage, beneath the cough of mortars,

      enveloped in flame and slaughter, you feel,

      far off, on the inside of your body,

      a new loneliness. First

      there is nothing more than his great stillness;

      then, around his head in the dirt, the long-

      furled banner of his blood appearing. Under

      the skull’s curve, inside

      the heavy meat of the brain, the rooms

      of his mind, their doors blown open, stand empty.

      You notice his hair, darkened with sweat,

      a fold of skin above the collar of his battle dress;

      how sunlight is thrust like a dowel

      through the tidy stigma the bullet has punched

      in his helmet, which has come to rest beside you,

      now, on the battlefield. Alive or not,

      each man here is equally dead; and so, in a lull

      behind a screen of smoke, you put on

      his helmet, aware that a helmet pierced by a bullet

      will help you, until danger has passed or darkness

      falls, in feigning death. And so the mind begins to rehearse

      its own oblivion.

      Long before he knocks off the helmet to press

      the narrow rictus of the Luger against your temple,

      you smell the breath of the barrel. He is your age—

      no more than twenty—and his eyes are ransacked, empty,

      the windows of a mansion gutted by fire. But after holding

      your gaze for the briefest moment, he steps back

      and holsters his pistol; and flat in the dirt,

      in a fever of grief and fatigue, you are no longer sure

      if he is real, or a dream with a heart made kind

      by carnage and darkness, or even which possibility

      you might prefer. Either way, after holding your gaze

      for the briefest moment, he stepped back

      and holstered his pistol. Either way, he has passed you over.

      IN THE WORLD MUSEUM

      WORLD WAR I DISPLAY

      … and over here, drones the docent, a collection

      of smaller, more personal battlefield items. His tour

      group are boys so it’s trench dioramas they want, and tanks

      and shell casings tall as they are; and so

      as they pose and measure up against the tracks

      of a rusty Whippet, I make my way to the glass display case

      in which someone with a taste for irony has arrayed,

      as if setting a place for some formal dinner, a complete set of silver,

      non-regulation cutlery dug from the mud of Gully Ravine.

      Instead of a plate there is the shallow, upturned bowl

      of a British helmet, positioned, I suppose, so we can look inside

      to see how metal peels, petal-like, back

      from a bullet hole and is as thin as paper which is something

      an Austrian soldier marooned at the front did not have

      because placed like a serviette on the right is a postcard

      of tree bark addressed to the brothers Stickling

      in Vienna. Birch, I think—you can see the dark flecking like runs

      of stitching in the bark, and still, after all this time, that distant,

      non-committal sheen like the demeanour of moonlight on water;

      and suspended at eye level on a strand of monofilament

      is a single boot. French. Size 8. Small, really, for a soldier.

      Still tightly and evenly laced and because of this

      one detail alone, almost beautiful. The

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