42opus

is an online magazine of the literary arts.

11 March 2007 | Vol. 7, No. 1

If Eurydice Is Your Father: Beckian Fritz Goldberg's Lie Awake Lake

Lie Awake Lake
Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Oberlin College Press, 2005.
72 pages. $14.95.
Check Amazon.com or Powell's Books.

If the body can slip into Nothingness as easily as it can slip into memory, then we will be haunted, bewildered, overwhelmed by distance, our grief forced into song. And if we are to sing, like Orpheus, in search of the past, of understanding the past as flesh—of remembering our childhood, the wren drowned in the pool, the vacation to the lake, and Father speaking kindly—perhaps we'll find it in the confusion of the senses. If Eurydice is your Father, and you are left to examine the world, singing on your drive home your rock ballad to the flares lingering in that nightly stadium of stars, then you might be Beckian Fritz Goldberg in Lie Awake Lake, with your eyes on the past and your mouth opened furiously on a "Godshot."

This, her fourth book of poetry, is centered around a devastation: the loss of the beloved. The death of her father forces this poet to question the nature of the corporeal, mortal realm that, for all its decadent sensual delirium, fails, ends in "mysteries, immortals, gas." Though beings of the flesh must disappear, our loss of them is imperfect, complicated by the fact that we remember and imagine and long for them.

The delirious confusions of Fritz Goldberg's text—striking for its linguistic, inventive playfulness—are also the confusions of the flesh stunned by longing. Desire in the body, she writes, is "confused by the enchantment / of the wrong orifice." Indeed, the first poem of the collection, "Prologue as Part of the Body," is nothing less than our instruction:

Beginning is
the flower to the ear
the flute to the palm, the glittering mirror to
the back of the head, the steaming rice and the plums
in honey
to the feet, to the vertebrae, to the pineal gland.

Here the poet introduces us to the sensual confusions of the body and the world indicative of the rest of her book as she searches the blissful misunderstandings between the living body and the remembered past. How else, her poems seem to insist, do we make sense of loss, as loss so ruinously intoxicates?

Lie Awake Lake is thus a book concerned with the distance between two times, memory and experience. There isn't a way back to any beautiful time with her dying father, though she writes to him

all my love for you
came back—
you couldn't take it where
you were going…

you'd drift
arms by your side

like a clock
plucked…

According to Fritz Goldberg, Death is a merciful unpetaling, the lovely dismemberment of our lives. "T