Gretchen Marquette's "Figure Drawing"

Thoughts on noticing and being noticed.

Figure Drawing

On the way to your studio, a Cooper’s hawk

dove in front of me. It left clutching yellow leaves

and not a single sparrow. I knew then,

somehow, that I would never take my own life.

And I knew it when I sat still

before your easel and watched you

holding your sighting stick to measure

my trunk. Occasionally, you pressed fingers

against my legs and hips, bluntly

but with care. You are learning

about the body and its trappings.

You’ve referred to my clavicle as a bony

landmark. There are so many ways to speak

about the body. There is a mundane history

of people telling their god, If you’d asked me

if I wanted to come here, I would have said no.

When I was your age, I entered the woods

with my hurt and sat against a tree and was

surrounded by deer that paid me no mind.

Their feet made no noise. They had no scent,

no color. You’ve painted my hair across my back

as fire. You’ve painted my face in mourning

and didn’t know. Sometimes I’m filled with fear

at the thought of seeing this through,

like I was that day in the woods, when all I wanted

was to lie like a dropped antler on the forest floor.

Still, today I’m thrilled to be shown

the muscles of my own back, drawn in charcoal.

The bones of my pelvis seem larger than my hips,

warmed over with skin. We’ve a history of telling our gods, 

If you asked me if I wanted to leave here,

I would say no. Done with your work, we walk

to the diner for pancakes. You have a smudge

of yolk-colored pigment under your nose,

another ashy smudge near your right ear. 

I know how easily I could have missed it.

Whatever else happens, I don’t want to miss it.

The machine of my body is humming.  There is a record

of my body, resting on your easel.  It is static, almost.

I saw the Cooper’s hawk leave the ground with nothing,

and carry it into the air. The nothing he carried

was yellow. It was the most beautiful thing.  

from May Day (Graywolf, 2016)

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I’ve been enamored with this book for awhile, so much so that it was absurdly hard to write about just one of Marquette’s poems. I’m still thinking of the final lines of the first poem in this book, titled “Elsewhere”:

One thing I’ve learned —

you’ve got to let love be practice

for what might happen

elsewhere.

That sentiment, that beckoning, echoes throughout Marquette’s work. This notion of love as practice for what is so often deemed as not-love, as unrelated to love.

In a wonderful interview with Kaveh Akbar, Marquette talks about the origins of today’s poem, how it details the aftermath of a relationship’s dissolution, and the comfort provided by a friend who needed to practice her figure drawing. Marquette says:

I would just sit still for hours in her beautiful, airy, bright studio while she was drawing me. I was really finding a toehold where I could go a whole day without wishing that I wasn’t there.

In the interview, Akbar points out that today’s poem exists in conversation with James Wright’s maybe-most-quoted-poem, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” And it’s true. When Marquette writes, “I knew then, / somehow, that I would never take my own life,” one can’t help but think of Wright’s final line, quoted here with a bit of context from the lines before:

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

So much of today’s poem has to do with relationships. Not just the loneliness that exists at the end of the dissolution of a romantic relationship, but also one’s relationship with noticing, one’s relationship with their body, and one’s relationship with their friends.

That moment where Marquette writes that she “knew then, / somehow, that I would never take my own life,” is so stunning and sharp and beautiful and sorrow-filled. And I find it striking that it is dependent on two relationships: the speaker’s relationship with the natural world, and the speaker’s relationship with her friend. The first relationship is detailed in this small act of noticing the serves as the engine for the poem:

On the way to your studio, a Cooper’s hawk

dove in front of me. It left clutching yellow leaves

and not a single sparrow.

And the second relationship is detailed in what follows the realization that the speaker will remain, will stay alive:

And I knew it when I sat still

before your easel and watched you

holding your sighting stick to measure

my trunk.

Noticing and being noticed. Seeing and being seen. When the speaker witnesses the hawk diving and coming up — not empty — but with talons full of yellow, one can imagine this burst of life, this beauty, this tender mercy on the part of the world. To think one might witness a death and then be faced with color, pure color. But that only comes from the noticing. From the willingness to look.

And then there is the speaker sitting still, being drawn, being touched “bluntly / but with care.” There’s something so remarkable about the way Marquette details the honest tenderness of being seen in such a way, a way that renders parts of the body as a “bony landmark,” a way that feels safe and startling at once. I’m thinking of these lines:

You’ve painted my hair across my back

as fire. You’ve painted my face in mourning

and didn’t know.

Later in that aforementioned interview, Marquette says the following about friendship:

I don’t think I’d be here if it wasn’t for those friendships. Which is strange because we give such a privileged place for romantic love and familial love, but in both of those forms of love you are under a contract in some way. But then you have friendships, which have actually been some of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in my life.

You feel that power throughout today’s poem. You feel it in how the speaker’s body is treated with such care, how it is both transformed into flame and yet given the space to mourn on its own without judgement. It’s this act of being noticed that in some ways saves the speaker’s life, that makes the speaker say, later:

I know how easily I could have missed it.

Whatever else happens, I don’t want to miss it.

How beautiful, that we can be transformed, even saved, by small acts of noticing. That we can feel worthy of being in this place where it so often feels that no one cares, that the natural earth and the birds and the deer and the people — god, the people — will go on and on without us, will pay us, as Marquette writes, “no mind.” To be paid mind is a beautiful thing, isn’t it? To be shown the muscles of your back, drawn by someone else. Maybe you remember what it’s like for someone to notice something about you that you haven’t noticed yourself, or something, maybe, that you have noticed and have hated. Maybe that’s been hard, to be noticed in such a way. But sometimes, I hope, or at least once…well, I hope someone has noticed you in a way that feels transformational and safe. I hope someone has said — about your clavicle, that freckle, that tooth, that thing you do when you’re nervous — something tender, something kind.

In her poem, “Why Loneliness,” Marquette ends with these final lines:

So that the whole world will never be enough. For the flag shuddering at the North Pole.

For another, tranquil on the moon.

I think of those lines now, those great distances traveled just to plant a flag that lives a lonely life thousands of miles away from where I sit writing this. Where you sit, reading. And why did we plant these flags? Domination? Conquest? Property? These words that could just mean one thing and one thing only: lonely, lonely, lonely. I think of a sentence from the novelist Kevin Barry: His loneliness was all of his own making. Loneliness is borne from a lack of communion with the world and with one another. It is sometimes the result of our own making and sometimes the result of a world that makes it for us. It’s why today’s poem is so striking. Marquette’s eyes are turned toward the world, “the most beautiful thing,” and her own body is in the care of someone who loves her enough to pay her mind. It’s enough, sometimes, to save a life.

I, too, am often “filled with fear / at the thought of seeing this through.” I, too, as Marquette writes in another poem, “don’t know / how I got here,” and only sometimes feel I “still belong in this place.” But it is noticing, and being noticed with care, that makes me feel like I belong, when I feel like I belong. It is noticing, and being noticed with care, that empties a little bit of that fear. How to cultivate this love — because it is love — that calls us to notice what we notice and to feel safe when we are noticed by someone else? I don’t know. Maybe it begins with slowing down, with resisting that flag on the moon, that endless march of progress. I remember one morning, a few months ago, when I sat alone by my window. Out of a seeming nowhere, a kestrel landed on my fire escape. Small, sharp beak. Speckled with dots. Streaked with yellow. It felt, at the time, like the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could not look away. I don’t want to leave here, I might have said. I don’t want you to leave.

In her poem, “Painted Turtle,” Marquette writes:

The relief, always, of you in the seat beside me, you’ll never know.

I think, maybe, some better way of living calls for us to let people know the relief they bring us. For some reason this is hard. Maybe it is because admitting that we feel relieved means admitting that we need relief — from the world, from ourselves, from our loneliness that feels, so often, of our own making. I worry about this loneliness. I worry about the ways in which there are parts of ourselves that we hold so close that feel unseen. That we are ashamed of or scared of or in love with but are too scared of being met without care to show. I hope today you find some love in what you notice and find yourself noticed with love. I hope it is the most beautiful thing.