The above phrase, “Hold on tightly; let go lightly” was spoken by the spiritual teacher, writer and thinker Ram Dass. But this quotation is one I have not heard first hand: it was quoted to me from a podcast. Somehow, I would like to keep it this way: language can gain resonance through the second-hand nature of its retelling; the indirectness of a quotation is freer to grow in meaning through the context in which it is spoken.

The quotation, “Hold on tightly, let go lightly”, seems all the more relevant when applied to my reading of Diane DiPrima’s poem. I will hold on tightly to the feeling of loss and desperation inspired by my first reading of Song after an Abortion; but I could not do so entirely. It is a painful, gut-wrenching poem to read; and I therefore must hold it, and its embedded grief, lightly. Perhaps poems, and the memory of them, also grow in meaning with each retelling and each rethinking of their meanings, purposes and pluralities.

Fittingly, the subject matter of Song After an Abortion is about letting go; but also the impossibility to do so when you have never held that very something in the first place. It is about the painful aftermath of an abortion; holding onto what has never come — and never will — to fruition.

Diane DiPrima’s masterpiece is a series of fragmented poems grouped under the painfully simple yet stinging title, ‘Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, after an Abortion’. It provides a rhythm to the grief which the speaker cannot formalise or contain through either regular line lengths or sustained imagery. Even words are cut to pieces; shortened to their very bones and made again in the reader’s internal voice:

to say I failed, that is walked out

and into the arctic

How shd I know where I was?

Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, after an Abortion. Stanza I, part one.

An abortion here is first a failing, in the past tense, and shortly a walking out — also in the past. But what about the remnants of an action which cannot be undone, though remains a choice which seemingly could not have been made otherwise?

The speaker asks themselves, in a pleading and contracted rhetorical question: How shd I know where I was? How can one situate oneself in a context which cannot be described or told; a pain which cannot be articulated through language? The answer is perhaps in the numbing here. The arctic — un-capitalised, stretching and generic — is both a fitting and fleeting initial context for this poem.

The second stanza — equally short and difficult to pin down in a physical sense as the first quoted above — contains the flash of a three-year-old and a mother who is poisoned. It is unclear who either of these characters are in relation to the speaker and the titular abortion, but it is clear that the speaker is beyond knowing the searing cold of the arctic in the very first stanza. The coldness of the arctic continues; and it is nothing short of mind-numbing:

and what of the three year old girl who poisoned her mother?

that happens, it isn’t just us, as you can see — 

what you took with you when you left

remains to be seen

Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, after an Abortion. Stanza I, part two.

Who is the three-year-old girl who poisons? Is this more metaphorical, or a painful and physical reminder of the girl this unborn child could have been? Is the “you” here the unborn child? Who is doing the taking, and who is at fault or to blame?

The picture is further muddied by the transference of “you” to the unborn child’s father, surrounded by references to a mundane life which feels unimportant and incongruous with the gravity of an abortion:

I want him to know

I’ll not forgive you, or him for not being born

for drying up, quitting

at the first harsh treatment

as if the whole thing were a rent party

& someone stepped on your feet

Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, after an Abortion. Stanza I, part one.

Whose feet are these? The unborn, unformed feet of the baby’s? Or the feet of the now absent, un-father who acts as though his feet were stepped on at a rent party? Both are absent. The “cookies” that the father wants to send in the following stanza feel ridiculously trite, almost offensive. Who needs cookies when in the arctic?

The uncapitalised questions, without their respective question marks, of the following stanza serve to confirm this cold and the inability for anyone to help relieve it:

do you have enough sweaters, is the winter bad,

do you know what I’ve done, what I’m doing

do you care

Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, after an Abortion. Stanza III.

The speaker’s care here turns to a bitterness towards the man’s lack of care, and the imagery becomes somewhat like Plath’s poetry collection, Ariel, in a seascape of the dead. The unborn foetus and the un-father become one, floating “in the seaweed”.

Flies swarm the scene by the sixth stanza, and here resumes a direct address — with an incongruous reference to “your useless neverused cock, the pitiful skull, // the pitiful skull // the pitiful shell of a skull, dumped in the toilet”. By the end of these few lines, the compound adjective “neverused” has new meaning; the male genitalia mentioned here may refer to the unformed body of the foetus, “dumped in the toilet” with a “shell of a skull”. Or perhaps the image refers to the speaker’s own desire to dissolve the very man who impregnated her.

The most potent half lines of the poem unite to form a melodic and heart-wrenching letter to the unborn — who has, with such water-filled metaphors and image-scapes, become another animal altogether:

what moonlight

will play in your hair?

I mean to say

dear fish, I hope you swim

Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, after an Abortion. Stanza XI.

Moonlight, wherever the essence of this soul might now be — as a soul the foetus is made into being, through the act of writing and indeed reading this poem — is multiple: “what” moonlight, and which world will this come from?

The address to “dear fish” is an astonishing send off; at once a recognition of otherness and a nod to familiarity (through “dear”), though undoubtedly a slippery image too. It is also an image of beauty, and protracts the mention of moonlight as the reader pictures a fish swimming with its scales lit by the moon.

A final painful contrast to this mention of sealife highlights what could have been:

you, age three

bugged

bearing down on a sliding pond.

your pulled tooth in my hand

(age six)

Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, after an Abortion. Stanza XI.

The child here is three and then six in such short succession; a slippery “dear fish” as in the preceding stanza who is now both “bearing down” and leaving behind a “pulled tooth” — a traditional symbol of death and decay. But the unborn child’s presence has left behind more than a “pulled tooth” — for, disturbingly, it is a child that this foetus has now become through the speaker’s conjurings and imaginings.

The final lines are agonising and full of a yearning; a wanting and an absence which is almost too much to bear. But like the speaker, we “do what [we] can” to share in such a memorialisation and an ode to the unborn:

will

you

come here

again

my breasts prepare

to feed you: they do what they can

Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, after an Abortion. Stanza XII.

We must, as Ram Dass tells us, “Hold on tightly; let go lightly” to what is not meant to be — and potently, Diane DiPrima invites us to do this with her.

Roots & Wings