The first thing that stands out about this great poem is—it has zero irony. It is not a made-up thing. It is breath-taking in its flat-footed clear vision. It breathes (to use the verb of its climactic moment) truth and wisdom without apology. Before I even really grasped it, when I first read it in The Temple—this is what first spoke to me. It made it a thing for the ages. Of course, as I am ever the gun-shy reader, I still fitfully scanned its lines, on the lookout for the twist—baby onion, zest of lemon, bitter olive maybe. There was none of that—yet what there WAS held together through what seemed consummate craft and control. It was, it appeared, a tight ethical, philosophical drama in six brief stanzas—a drama where we glimpse the young poet at the beginning of her artistic ascent. And the ascent, for her surely, is always two-fold, two hills at once.
The hill is called "persecution," and it is also called "wisdom." It is one hill, one only. Doubiago eschews in this poem all the irony, all the bitterness, all the special pleading, all the "class struggle" which is, so often, just a handy excuse—for greed, for a hope to plunder, for a design to turn the tables. She takes instead the mystical view down from the circling stars. I think of what it has cost the poet to have retained her complete respect for, her humility toward the man to whom this poem is addressed. "Moral money"—she is accepting of this notion. Surely stranger things have happened! And she accepts that his making of it provides him with a prelude to wisdom. And though at first she has difficulty recalling the moment after the Junior Prom, the moment of the chaste kiss—it provides, if he will listen, and we believe he will, the key to gaining all that wisdom.
This unique act, back in a shared past, is a perfect key to each future. When the acquaintance is renewed, in the first stanza, it is a moment to which both persons bring a deeply mature poise. It is a poise that has been gained because of who they each became in the act of the kiss. At first, all that Doubiago remembers is that she sold him the car a year later, at the end of high school. It was a good bargain for him. Her car was "more cherry than any of the boys.'" The poet is in full control of the second meaning—that she, removing the apostrophe, is also "more cherry than any of the boys." This car, with its fifties clear plastic seat covers, becomes a figure for its yet virginal owner. As an avid reader of Doubiago's work, I hear echoes of her mother's constant admonition—"the greatest gift you can give your husband will be your virtue, your virginity."
In the second stanza, the old friend, now rich, but seeking wisdom, introduces his memory almost as a question. He describes the kiss, but his "aura" has it as a question. What did it mean? A strange, upside down and backwards kiss, with the poet’s hoop skirt (the legacy of a dead cousin) and taffeta petticoats filling the passenger-side window. With her upturned face under the steering wheel, she requests and receives his kiss.
What does it mean? The poem is the answer. Like some lyric Sherlock Holmes whodunit, the poem methodically excludes all the IMPOSSIBILITIES one by one. Like Sherlock it arrives at the improbable truth. She escorts him past every potential pitfall, precisely by taking him back into the long-ago moment. She answers him there. For the poet, that moment faces in two directions. For one thing it faces backward in time, back toward 5903 Roosevelt, corner of Industrial, the poet's childhood home in Hollydale, California, which is more than a "place," it is, as she describes it in "Geography of My Soul": "that sense when you are a girl / of knowing as in the Bible the spot you are drilled into / on the planet, to seeing, as from the eyes of God, the turn / you are making..." So the poem turns back to THAT. But it also turns forward. It turns to a place away from what would keep her down, forever baffled and stymied, a place where she stands next to God.
She describes herself then in such poignant terms. "An odd girl so wise she was already an old man." A superficial understanding of Doubiago would place her in the tradition of forthright, outright sex and sensuality. She is indeed at home in all of that. But what her poetry reaches here makes of all of that merely a metaphor standing for something greater. She wants, above all, that “photo taken by the stars.” And the truth of this moment is set against every lie, jealousy, snobbery or sarcasm. It is the way of the old, wicked world to hate wisdom, beauty, truth. The high school girl wondered why she was picked on, why the lies and slander. Yet in the nobility of the remembered kiss, she gives the lie to it all!
Doubiago proceeds, in the fifth stanza, to go into a great litany of "no's". It is reminiscent of other great moments in the poetry of our language. Shakespeare in "Macbeth," Arnold in "Dover Beach," Marvell in "To His Coy Mistress." When she really gets it going, she has the VOICE of greatness, awesomely ascending the heights of accurate language as the greatest poets have. This is such a passage: one must speak it slowly. "One kiss / not of lust. Not a broken vow, not betrayal, not / infidelity. Not seduction, not submission (except / to the Cosmos). Not duty, not for material gain. Not / reputation, not abandon, not mindless, not crazy, not / immoral. But..." And in the denials we hear the susurrus of the evil chorus of their opposite allegations. For the poet, the genius, the beauty, the seeker, it started long before high school. Always the voices. And we know the poet, and in her truth-telling all the accusations fall of their own weight.
In this fifth stanza, the poem moves into two pairs of dynamic, unexpectedly paired opposites. Reputation vs. abandon, mindless vs. crazy. She can't be both at the same time. But it is the way of scolds, gossips and bigots to ignore logic and take "both sides of bad" against their chosen targets. A famous example of this is that of the anti-Semites who accuse Jews as, at once, wicked Communists, and also as wicked monopoly capitalists. In the depths of bigotry, the bigot no longer can see the contradiction. Both accusations must be true, even if self-contradictory. Likewise, Doubiago's high school classmates saw no contradiction in calling her both a snob and a slut, both too careful and too careless of her reputation. Can one be both moronic and neurotic? Her classmates think so. Both mindless and "mental"!
Often hate speech culminates in the blanket charge of "immorality." As the target of this final, hateful charge the high school girl, future poet, stands with the greatest, with Christ, Buddha, Socrates, Confucius. And the marvelous elevated language continues. The negative chorus is dismissed. The final, sixth stanza is a marvel. "but even then / it was that nothing else / was wise. You and I. / The absolute demand of the moment, the Truth. / A photo taken by the stars."
As I remarked at the beginning, there is zero irony. Doubiago is not afraid to capitalize "Truth." And she finds it here, and later many times, as the great poet that she is, in yielding to the "absolute demand of the moment," despite lies, persecution, opposition of all kinds, even what she refers to in her great poem near the end of "Body and Soul," "Old Man House at Agate Passage, Poetics at the End of the Millennium" in these terms: "No tears come / but my heart is breaking for the poets’ betrayal of poetry..."
Let me close with this. I am challenged by Doubiago to be fearless for poetry, for poetic truth. This poem gives me my agenda. This freedom, this courage, found in this great poem, is what poetry is all about for me. As a fellow poet, I am fiercely proud of her achievement.