Joyce Sutphen Visit Preparation

Death Becomes Me
by Joyce Sutphen

Death has been checking me out,
making himself at home in my body,
as if he needed to know his way
through the skin, faintly rippling
over the cheekbone to the hollow
beneath my eyes, loosening
the tightly wound ligaments
in the arm, the leg,
infirming the muscle
with his subtle caress,
traveling along the nerve,
leaping from one synapse
to the next, weaving his dark threads
into the chord that holds me tall.
Death is counting my hair,
figuring out the linear equation
of my veins and arteries,
the raised power
of a million capillaries,
acquainting himself with the
calculus of my heart,
accessing the archives
of memory, reading them
forward and backward,
finding his name everywhere.
Death comes to rest in my womb,
slaking away the rich velvet
of those walls, silently halting
the descending pearls,
as if he could burrow in
and make himself my mother,
as if he could bare my bones
and bring me to that other birth.

Source can be found here. 

This poem stood out from the rest mostly because it shares the same topic as the “Death Inc.” poem posted on the class blog. However, it assigns Death a very different personality. Mr. Wensman wrote in his response that the two poems create Death as a “familiar and close” character (apostrophe!), but really, the tone in “Death Becomes Me” sounds too threatening to really contain any comfort that familiarity or regularity should bring. Spotting Death browsing through the Star Tribune at a bus stop lacks the creepiness of having him turn around and begin “checking me out, / making himself at home in my body.” Death crawling under one’s skin inspires as much appeal as a burglar taking the time to feed the dog before fleeing, even if Sutphen softens the poem down with words like “caress” and “rest” to describe Death’s actions. The detail with which Death proceeds while inhabiting the narrator makes it so that Death understands the narrator better than the narrator understands him/herself. In a way, Death acts like a secretary on the surface, but as he becomes more involved with the narrator’s more sacred parts, such as the heart and memory, he transforms into someone capable of playing as the puppeteer. At the end of the poem,  he “brings me to the other birth,” forming an image of Death acting the dominant role in the narrator’s later steps. The lack of traditional capitalization at the beginning of each line allows the reader to focus on Death as the sole beginning of each idea, perhaps reflecting the way the narrator has centered her mind and body around him. 

My initial reaction to reading “Death Becomes Me” led a Wikipedia search of Elizabeth I. A quick scroll to the bottom of the page reveals a unforgettable painting of the queen that fits perfectly with my interpretation of Sutphen’s poem.  (Here is a link to the painting.) The dark hues and Elizabeth’s bony face suggest Death has already seeped into the queen, calculating her blood cells and whatnot.

Reading several of Sutphen’s other poems astonished me because she writes about a variety of topics, ranging from natural subjects like “A Bird in County Clare” to advice for readers in “How to Listen.” Do poets write with certain trends in certain years, like the painter Picasso with his Blue Period, Rose Period, etc? Or do they scatter themes across decades of work? Also, why did Sutphen choose “How to Listen” and “Just for the Record” as the two poems for her website?