Among Women: Marie Ponsot
by Idra Novey
I first read Marie Ponsot’s poem Among Women while living in Chile in my early twenties. I was drawn to its bold opening question, “What women wander?” but most of all to the feisty declaration that most would, and “no wonder.” And why not? What woman wouldn’t travel if she could? For nearly a decade, I had stayed in all sorts of suspect hostels and taken various dodgy overnight buses for that singular experience of being spit out somewhere with new smells and sounds and histories and words.
At twenty-three, I didn’t think of Among Women as having much to do with being a mother. Until nine years later, when I was one, and unloading boxes of books in the two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment I’d moved to after having my first child, I opened Springing, Ponsot’s book of “New and Selected Poems” and turned to one of the pages with a folded corner. When I’d read the poem years earlier, the grandmother’s warning to “have nothing to lose” hadn’t seemed radical to me, but now I saw the irony of the grandmother’s warning. To have children, to create a home for them, meant there was always something and someone you could lose, every second, in every grocery store. I saw, suddenly, that the whole poem was about negotiating impossibilities.
Ten years after first falling in love with the poem, I stopped longer at the artful line break between the word “once” and the word “wild” and then “once” again, coming twice, as it does not in life. And as I had on my first read years before, when I lived out of a backpack, I admired the quiet restraint of the poem’s final line break, which I had understood, intuitively, even in my most nomadic years:
women wander
as best they can.
Among Women
By Marie Ponsot
What women wander?
Not many. All. A few.
Most would, now & then,
& no wonder.
Some, and I’m one,
Wander sitting still.
My small grandmother
Bought from every peddler
Less for the ribbons and lace
Than for their scent
Of sleep where you will,
Walk out when you want, choose
Your bread and your company.
She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”
She looked fragile but had
High blood, runner’s ankles,
Could endure, endure.
She loved her rooted garden, her
Grandchildren, her once
Wild once young man.
Women wander
As best they can.
Among Women, from Springing: New and Selected Poems © 2002 by Marie Ponsot, used by gracious permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
Watch a HD video of Marie Ponsot reciting her poem. Download the FREE app for the iPad. Go to contents page.
