Please Marry Me

Please marry me. Your mother likes me.
—Line spoken by an unknown woman, in a dream

We are stretched out on a dingy sofa, and I think

I must be barefoot because a woman whom no one knows

Is massaging the ankle of one leg of mine and the instep

Of the other, all this toward morning, and I have that

Occasional epiphany one has while still asleep

That I am floating down a river

Because I am so happy and all the dismal issues

Have been made tractable at last, and so I say to her

That the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler

Are more lucid if you’re sitting close to, and above,

The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal

Lines moving from strings to woodwinds

And then back again, whereupon this woman,

Sitting (I now realize) at my feet, says, in the full

Heat of our dream life, and in that happiness,

“Please marry me. Your mother likes me,”

And so I wake, not laughing, although my mother

Has been dead for over thirty years, but in wonderment

Over what quality this dream-woman must have owned

To have pleased my mother so that she,

My late mother, would have said, despite her ban

On ordinary pleasantries, that she had liked someone,

Anyone, who might have cared for me, and as I lie

In bed I think of the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth

When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute

In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,

Which my mother would attend to in her bathrobe

Late at night, the stereo turned up, blended whiskey

In her highball glass mixed with milk as a disguise,

Leaning back, hand over eyes, silent-movie style

Like Norma Desmond listening as Von Stroheim plays

The organ wearing his white gloves. No, it wasn’t

Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht,

Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.

Translator's Notes:

Q & A: Charles Baxter

The poem is numerically symmetrical: each stanza contains seventeen lines. What does the poem gain from the symmetry and the stanza break?

The poem moves from a dreamlike present and hypothetical future in the first stanza to a dug-in and, to use a word from the poem, intractable past in the second stanza. The poem’s elongated syntax binds the two together.

In Sunset Boulevard, the aging former movie star Norma Desmond is a rather “camp” figure. Can you say a little more about this cinematic allusion?

The aesthetics of camp are complicated, and Susan Sontag has not had the last word on the subject. Campiness often takes the form of mockery, but it can also take the form of hyper-stylization of an emotion, so that any particular expression of, literally, anything can be inflated to grandiose proportions and theatricalized. Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard is an old silent movie star, so of course she inflates every gesture, every statement. Sincerity gets buried underneath her own personal expressionism. (Billy Wilder hired Gloria Swanson to play her in part because Swanson knew everything about that arcane acting style.) Such emotive inflation (which can also seem comic) is what signals the territory of camp. But emotive inflation is also a telling feature of alcoholism in many alcoholics: drunks have a way of acting out their emotions theatrically right in front of you, and it’s the same emotion every night. Thus the poem.

Epigraphs are usually snatches of “real” text. Why this epigraph from “unknown woman, in a dream”?

I wanted the reader to have the quotation in mind before arriving at it within the poem itself.

In another famous epigraph, allegedly from an old Irish play, Yeats quoted, “In dreams begin responsibilities.” Do you agree?

Well, if you can take a statement’s contradiction and find something truthful in it, then you can neither agree nor disagree. What if Yeats had said, “In dreams begins irresponsibility”? Both statements, Yeats’s and its contradiction, seem true to me. Why? Because dreams don’t appear to make assertions. They postulate hypothetical conditions. You can’t really agree or disagree with a hypothetical condition, can you?

Source: Poetry (December 2010)