Canary by Rita Dove

Canary
Rita Dove

    for Michael S. Harper

Billie Holiday’s burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.

(Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)

Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.

If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

SELECTED BY PAUL TRAN

When I was little, odd and vengeful in a bright ladybug dress, neither Hell nor High Water trembled me because I believed in the far future, at some time, I’d free myself. That future seems even farther now, and I doubt the choices I’ve made. Holding both hope and hopelessness, doubt and faith, giving in without giving up—these seem to be the intellectual themes radiating through Dove’s exquisite poem.

The eleven lines of varying length unfold like a life with turns and twists unpredictable. The movement from an utterance in the indicative mood describing Billie Holiday’s voice to the epistolary mode, directly address “you” or the reader, then back to an indicative pronouncement about “the invention of women under siege” being “in the service of myth” and the conclusion—which blends both the subjunctive mood’s speculating “if” and the imperative mood’s command “be”—Dove reiterates life’s unpredictability—crushed dreams, unexpected grace—by deploying practically all the grammatical moods and rhetorical modes available to writer in the English tradition.

If we label stanzas 1 and 3 as “A” for being about Holiday, and if we mark 2 and 4 as “B” for addressing the reader, then the poem’s four stanzas can be understood as ABAB. This is the figure parallelism, which suggests an experience of emotional and psychological linearity.

In other words, beyond the content, the form argues for a triumphant ending in how the poem arranges—and juxtaposes—that content.

However, if we look at Dove’s rhyme scheme, the form makes another argument. “Voice,” “light,” “piano,” and “face” are mirror rhymes and slant rhymes to “bass,” “to,” “song,” and “siege.” That mirroring is the figure chiasmus, doubled: ABCDDCBA.

Opposite of parallelism, chiasmus indicates an experience of emotional and psychological circularity, turmoil without escape. This seems accurate, to combine both linear triumph and circular survival, since neither one alone is precise enough to represent our lives.

Plus, if the title—or first word of the poem— “Canary” means to rhyme with the final word, “mystery,” then Dove puts forward another formal argument: there’s a relationship, at least to the speaker of this poem, between “needle” and “myth.” Usually a poet reaches for simile or metaphor to make such argument. Dove, everlasting wizard and architect that she is, proves we don’t always need language to be heard—not if we can make silence speak.

And for those of us who have ever been unfree, and for those patiently sharpening their forks under the table, hasn’t silence been our means
of speech?

Haven’t we made lightning out of thin air?

ABOUT PAUL TRAN

Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, published by Penguin. Their work appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. They earned their BA in History from Brown University and MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.