Frank Bidart

Herbert White

“When I hit her on the head, it was good,

and then I did it to her a couple of times,-
but it was funny,-afterwards,
it was as if somebody else did it…

Everything flat, without sharpness, richness or line.

Still, I liked to drive past the woods where she lay,
tell the old lady and the kids I had to take a piss,
hop out and do it to her…

The whole buggy of them waiting for me
made me feel good;
but still, just like I knew all along,
she didn’t move.

When the body got too discomposed,
I’d just jack off, letting it fall on her…

-It sounds crazy, but I tell you
sometimes it was beautiful-; I don’t know how
to say it, but for a minute, everything was possible-;
and then,
then,-
well, like I said, she didn’t move: and I saw,
under me, a little girl was just lying there in the mud:

and I knew I couldn’t have done that,-
somebody else had to have done that,-
standing above her there,
in those ordinary, shitty leaves…

-One time, I went to see Dad in a motel where he was
staying with a woman; but she was gone;
you could smell the wine in the air; and he started,
real embarrassing, to cry…
He was still a little drunk,
and he asked me to forgive him for
all he hadn’t done-; but, What the shit?
Who would have wanted to stay with Mom? with bastards
not even his own kids?

I got in the truck, and started to drive,
and saw a little girl-
who I picked up, hit on the head, and
screwed, and screwed, and screwed, and screwed, then

buried,
in the garden of the motel…

-You see, ever since I was a kid I wanted
to feel things make sense: I remember

looking out the window of my room back home,-
and being almost suffocated by the asphalt;
and grass; and trees; and glass;
just there, just there, doing nothing!
not saying anything! filling me up-
but also being a wall; dead, and stopping me;
-how I wanted to see beneath it, cut

beneath it, and make it
somehow, come alive…

The salt of the earth;
Mom once said, ‘Man’s spunk is the salt of the earth…’
-That night, at that Twenty-nine Palms Motel
I had passed a million times on the road, everything

fit together; was alright;
it seemed like
everything had to be there, like I had spent years
trying, and at last finally finished drawing this
huge circle…

-But then, suddenly I knew
somebody else did it, some bastard
had hurt a little girl-; the motel
I could see again, it had been

itself all the time, a lousy
pile of bricks, plaster, that didn’t seem to
have to be there,-but was, just by chance…

-Once, on the farm, when I was a kid,
I was screwing a goat; and the rope around his neck
when he tried to get away
pulled tight;-and just when I came,
he died…
I came back the next day; jacked off over his body;
but it didn’t do any good…

Mom once said:
‘Man’s spunk is the salt of the earth, and grows kids.’

I tried so hard to come; more pain than anything else;
but didn’t do any good…

-About six months ago, I heard Dad remarried,
so I drove over to Connecticut to see him and see
if he was happy.
She was twenty-five years younger than him:
she had lots of little kids, and I don’t know why,
I felt shaky…
I stopped in front of the address; and
snuck up to the window to look in…
-There he was, a kid
six months old on his lap, laughing
and bouncing the kid, happy in his old age
to play the papa after years of sleeping around,-
it twisted me up…
To think that what he wouldn’t give me,
he wanted to give them…

I could have killed the bastard…

-Naturally, I just got right back in the car,
and believe me, was determined, determined,
to head straight for home…

but the more I drove,
I kept thinking about getting a girl,
and the more I thought I shouldn’t do it,
the more I had to-

I saw her coming out of the movies,
saw she was alone, and
kept circling the blocks as she walked along them,
saying, ‘You’re going to leave her alone.’
‘You’re going to leave her alone.’

-The woods were scary!
As the seasons changed, and you saw more and more
of the skull show through, the nights became clearer,
and the buds,-erect, like nipples…

-But then, one night,
nothing worked…
Nothing in the sky
would blur like I wanted it to;
and I couldn’t, couldn’t,
get it to seem to me
that somebody else did it…

I tried, and tried, but there was just me there,
and her, and the sharp trees
saying, ‘That’s you standing there.
You’re…
just you.’

I hope I fry.

-Hell came when I saw
MYSELF…
and couldn’t stand
what I see…”

 

Wow. so this poem was one of  the picks for the National Book Critics Good Reads, 2008, and my initial reaction was just that i was really disturbed. this guy seems like a creepy killer pedofile!!  I think that it is a good poem, but it makes me wonder whether there is a level deeper to this poem beyond the fact that it is a truely gruesome and terrible sexual assault/murder story.  i think there is an incredibly interesting psychological perspective to the killer in this poem, mainly how he rationalizes the killings and the fact that he seems to blame his father for his ways.  this raises so many questions, like how do you justify something like this and can people truly be that insane?  it really can be scary to think about. 

concerning the poem structurally, the one major thing i noticed was that it was easier for “Herbert” to rationalize his kililngs when nature was “flat, without sharpness, richness or line,” and when “the nights became clearer,” he could no longer ignore what he was doing, i.e. “nothing in the sky/ would blur like I wanted it to.”  While Herbert takes out his anger towards his father through killing and raping these women, he does not seem as insane at the end of the poem because he KNOWS that he should not be doing this anymore.   So why does he do it anyways?!? Well we could ask the same thing of Adam, why does he take the apple when he knows not to? Herbert and Adam are both expelled, Adam is driven out of the Garden of Eden, and Herbert is no longer in his perfect sick little world; he is in hell. maybe it is temptation? curiosity? sin?

There are many questions and explanations that this poem raises, but the one that is most important to me is that terrible killings like this happen every day, so what can we do to stop them? I was up at an orientation session today and we were actually talking about sexual assault and how it starts with the “initiator” and how we need to be proactive to not only protect ourselves from being a target, but also to stop these people before they start.  Maybe if these criminals had psychological help when they were younger or before they became out of control in order to understand and deal with their violent emotions and feelings, perhaps poems like this one would not be so realistic.