Song’s blend of deceptive quiet and spontaneous self-study powers “The White Porch” (1983). A subtly erotic piece bound up in the commonalities of a woman’s day, the poem unfolds in a three-stage presentation. The tender chiming between “I” and “you” begins in the first stanza, which is set on a family porch at 12:05 p.m. Languorous diction pictures time stretched out like a lawn and compares wet hair to “a sleeping cat,” an introit to the inswept sexual passions that emerge with feline grace. Line 21 begins the upward spiral of sensuality as the female speaker acknowledges “this slow arousal.”
The intrusion of a third person, the speaker’s mother, literally grabs attention by grasping the daughter’s braided rope of hair, a symbol of patterned proprieties. The hair, no longer lush from a fresh shampoo, continues to unite images as the mother’s ring snags strands, a suggestion that parental control is a minor intrusion on the daughter’s mature passion. Like the knotted hair, the mother curls into “tight blankets” as the daughter loosens her hair and signals a welcome to her lover.
From the same period, “Beauty and Sadness” studies femininity in the “women of Edo.” Dedicated to Utamaro, the opening lines picture the artist, a “quick, nimble man,” as an unseen presence, similar to the waiting lover in “The White Porch.” The images stress fragility in “skinlike paper” and “fleeting loveliness,” the source of the poem’s melancholy. The second stanza masses luxuriant images of sight, smell, and touch that transform women into “beautiful iridescent insects, / creatures from a floating world.” The mood begins a downward sweep in the third stanza as the models display an outer beauty balanced by melancholy. The trembling lip takes on the surface tension of a blood droplet, a comparison that tops vulnerable veins with a transparent skin of female elegance.
In the concluding stanza, the poet’s delicate picture sequence captures both the act of sketching loveliness and the brief moment of pose that strikes the artist’s eye. Although Song dedicates the work to the artist, her verse speaks for the women. Untouched by Utamaro, they change into “dusty ash-winged moths”; their indifference and emotional withdrawal separates them from artistic technique.
