Go Figure

Carol Moldaw

In Go Figure, Carol Moldaw demonstrates an incandescent mastery of figuration in its many forms. As the title suggests, these poems invite readers to draw their own conclusions. Observing, inquiring, and delving, Moldaw brings the intertwined strands of life and art to light at their most intimate. A wife-muse who interrogates the role, a mother hard-pressed by motherhood, a daughter whose own mother’s decline causes her to probe their connection, and an artist with an exacting eye and ear who contemplates the creative mysteries, Moldaw is driven to understand and articulate the self in all its manifestations. Like a skater cutting first lines in ice, Moldaw displays lyric immediacy and lyric expanse in her poems with an unswerving command. Complex and inviting, with deft wit, the poems engage public and private life and voice a necessary and resounding affirmation of the feminine and of language emerging through silence.

Raccoons

On my way to water the strawberries
at dusk—I gardened in those days—
I saw a raccoon clasping the outdoor spigot
like a sailor’s wheel, using both paws
that seemed more and more like hands,
as it kept twisting until water gushed
out of the copper nozzle and it drank.

I hadn’t thought of it in years, not even
after I saw another raccoon, high-stepping
the coyote fence midday with a limp vole
overhanging its mouth. Such a singular sight,
I had to tell you, and blurted it out as soon
as I saw you, a piece of domestic gossip
like the first crocus or noisy neighbors:

common property, like so much in marriage—
a small business, a friend called it, down to
the cooked books. Only later, after I spotted
the raccoon sauntering through a line
in one of your poems . . . only after the pressure
cooker of my displeasure caused you to recast
your raccoon and vole as skunk and mole,

did I flash on the one I’d seen decades before:
its lack of furtiveness, the air it had
of being within its rights, the way it took its time
to retrace its steps to turn the water off.
—Or did it amble on and let the water run?
No copyright protects idle talk, you might have said,
or: The imaginarium of marriage knows no bounds.