The Open Ending

In the Paris Review interview reprinted in Next-to-Last Things, Stanley Kunitz said that he liked “an ending that’s both a door and a window” (114). By this he means that he favors poetic closure that “bleeds out of its ending into the whole universe of feeling and thought” (114). By studying the ending of selected poems from the seventies to the present reprinted in The Collected Poems, the period following the statement, we can see just what the door and window metaphor really means.

In “The Portrait,” Kunitz tells his readers that his “mother never forgave [his] father for killing himself” (142). The heart of the poem narrates an occasion when the poet found a portrait of a man he did not know in the attic. When he brought it to his mother she tore the portrait up and slapped her son. The poem ends with “In my sixty-fourth year/ I can feel my cheek/ still burning” (142). In a sense, this final sentence throws open the door to understanding the emotional impact not only of the pivotal moment but of the burden the poet has carried throughout life for the father’s suicide before his birth, the mother’s refusal to acknowledge the man’s historical presence, and the confusion that the poet/boy endured. The present-time image sums up a life of experience and becomes a controlling metaphor for that experience. The placement of “still” before “burning” rather than before “feel,” a customary prosaic placement, provides poetic richness and, in fact, opens the window on the experience. The image becomes universal as it connotes the way those seminal experiences in life, seemingly insignificant, overshadow and inform the entire life.

“Quinnapoxet,” another poem treating the relationship to the father, juxtaposes an imaginative visit from the parents and a fishing injury. In the dream-like sequence, the mother chides the son for not writing, but he avoids her and centers on the father, “his face averted/ as if to hide a scald,/ deep in his other life” (191). To end the poem, the narrator touches his forehead with his “swollen thumb/ and splayed [his] fingers out--/ in deaf-mute country/ the sign for father” (191). The ending with its image of signing opens the poem to the sense of the silent father with whom the boy has imaginatively communicated all of his life. It reconfigures the pathos of the boy fishing alone with no father to instruct in the proper manner of extracting the hook from the fish. The “swollen thumb” mirrors the “scald” and connects boy and father in a world of the boy’s own making. The image probes the archetypal connection between fathers and sons.

Kunitz opens the window or provides the key illumination in his poems with the turn his endings take. For example, in “The Unquiet Ones,” another family trauma poem, the parents are configured as lying in neglected graves apart from each other except in the mind of the poet. The poem ends with this sentence: “They slip through narrow crevices/ and suddenly blown tall,/ glide into my cave of phantoms,/ unwelcome guests, but not/ unloved, dark emissaries/ of the two-faced god” (213). Everything is predictable as a logical ending of the poem except the final phrase, “dark emissaries/ of the two-faced god.” This is a turn in the logic of the poem that opens a new door. The reader knows that the two are the unquiet ones as the title insists, the ones who continue to communicate to the son beyond their deaths, but the image of the “two-faced god” suggests a level of duplicity that is haunting as well as mysterious. Certainly, it is an image of the unresolved that each of the parents took to the grave, but it seems to question the nature of loving design in the universe as well.

The pervading presence of father and mother in the poetry of Stanley Kunitz cannot be separated from the poet’s sense of nature. Nature, in a sense, takes over the role of nurture that is somehow incomplete in the poet’s experience. “My Mother’s Pears” pulls the two worlds together, and its last line voices the imperative that results. The poem is triggered by the arrival of a box of Barlett pears, presumably the fruit of a tree mother and son planted at an earlier time. The poem modulates from present occurrence to remembered past and ends with the planting of the pear tree. The mother in the poem voices the conclusion, “’Make room/ for the roots!’ my mother cries,/ ‘Dig the hole deeper.’ (250). The command reverberates back through the Kunitz canon. On one level, it speaks of the wished-for, the preoccupation with understanding personal heritage. It voices the sanction the poet would have liked to have had from his mother to probe his paternal roots. It also suggests the inadequacy that seems to surround the son’s sense of fulfilling his mother’s expectations. Further, it suggests the life-long preoccupation of poet/gardener with caring for plants and it suggests the self-assumed responsibility that the poet takes for exploring the nature of reality. Written in the nineties, a late-in-life poem, the poem couches the final admonition in the context of the fruit of a career. The pear tree, after all, still bears fruit, and the son, after all, has done the mother’s bidding.

The cyclical intertwining of life and land is often underlined in the endings that Kunitz fashions to his poems. The “Snakes of September,” the poet’s description of a summer-long relationship with the snakes in his Provincetown spruce, ends with his sense that “the wild braid of creation trembles” (221) when he stokes the skin of the two remaining snakes at summer’s end. The conclusion is a statement of the universal complicity of man and animal in the natural world, and it carries a sense of the ultimate, awe-inspiring design of a created universe. The movement from one man’s touch to all of creation is a prime example of the “bleeding” principle that is the underlying dynamic in the Kunitz window/door ending.

“The Mulch” is an extension of this same cyclical sense of the interrelationship of man and nature. The burden of the poem can be seen in the repetition of “Repeat, Repeat” (173) as the gull drops the piss-clam and “Try! Try!” (173) of the blood beating in the narrator’s wrist. Both images underline the dominant action in the poem, the gathering of salt hay for the garden, and suggest that if life is to be sustained, there must be a keeping-on. The irony of the poem is contained in the reversal in its ending. The gatherer is working to sustain the garden “which prepares to die” (173). The ending doubles back on the title. Mulch is simple that—the dead that sustains the life.

In many ways, the ending of a Kunitz poem is a distillation of the heart, the major thrust of that poem. Each seems almost to be a poem within a poem. In a single phrase, an isolated line, a metaphor is floated that causes the reader’s mind to understand that the poem is more than he/she thought it was. The endings pull back the layers of the poem revealing yet another all important layer.