Echolocations: Thoughts on Poems by A.E Stallings (Issue 2)

In this new series, A.E. Stallings, Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, will explore a contemporary poem from a new book or anthology or journal and explain what she admires about it. You can subscribe to the newsletter to receive each issue in your inbox. The poem explored in this issue is “Coming Out of the Shower” by Armen Davoudian. The poem is reprinted with permission from Corsair Poetry from the book The Palace of Forty Pillars.
 

It is my pleasure to recommend Armen Davoudian’s splendid debut, The Palace of Forty Pillars. I could discuss several of the poems from this collection, but I will focus on the first poem, “Coming Out of the Shower.”

Mirroring is one of the book’s themes, and one of its strategies. Davoudian, an Armenian-Iranian-American poet, born in Isfahan, immigrated to the US as an adolescent, and writes under the double influence of Persian and American poetry. His wry “Persian Poetry,” for instance, begins with, “I teach Robert Lowell to undergraduates at an elite institution,” and ends, “I write in English/ because I grew up speaking Persian.” His literary forebear is the American poet James Merrill (1926-1995), another poet of homoerotic longing and technical virtuosity, haunted by mirrors and reflections. The title of the book, The Palace of Forty Pillars, (also the title of an impressive twenty sonnet sequence here) refers to Chehel Sotoun, a pavilion in Isfahan, whose twenty pillars are doubled in a reflecting pool. Elsewhere in the book are swans (Merrillian) and saffron, vice squads and travel bans (Davoudian does not shrink from the political, though he approaches it obliquely), echo poems and rubaiyats. Davoudian is also a dazzling rhymer, including palindromic rhymes (LOOP and sPOOL, “live” and “evil”). But Davoudian’s technique does not come at the expense of heart: this is a book fraught with love and desire, nostalgia and tenderness.

What better way to begin a debut, a formal coming out, than a poem entitled “coming out”? In “Coming Out of the Shower,” though, of course, there is also a potential coming out as a gay man to the poet’s (conservative?) Iranian mother, in their cramped house’s shared bathroom, with its awkward overlap of ablutions:

Coming Out of the Shower

I shut my eyes under the scalding stream,

            scrubbing off last night’s dream,

 when suddenly I hear your voice again

      as though it caught in the clogged drain

and was sent bubbling back up from the other

            world where you’re not my mother.

This time, it’s really you. I’m really here.

      I blink. We do not disappear.

Dad left, you say, to shower at the shop

            so I don’t need to stop

just yet—and yet I do, unable to

      resume old customs, unlike you.

In a one-bath four-person household, we

            learn what we mustn’t see,

growing, in time, so coolly intimate

      with one another’s silhouette

behind the opaque frosted shower screen

            that once more stands between

us two. While at the mirror you apply

      foundation and concealer, I

wash out my hair with rosewater shampoo,

            which means I’ll smell like you

all day. Mama, I shout, I’m coming out,

      and as you look away I knot

around me tight your lavender robe de chambre,

            cinching my waist, and clamber

out of the tub, taking care not to step

      outside the cotton mat and drip

on the cracked floor you’ve polished with such zeal

            we’re mirrored in each tile.

Yet, you’d forgive spillage, or forget.

      What else will you love me despite?

I admire the efficient scene setting—we have a sense of the immigrant household, the straitened circumstances (four people sharing a bathroom) with small nostalgic luxuries (rosewater shampoo), the father’s showering in the shop (an auto shop?—some job that must involve physical labor, sweat and grease perhaps—elsewhere we have “coveralls”), and the effortless sophistication of “robe de chambre,” the sense of a family whose educational background, perhaps, is not reflected in their socio-economic status in America, where they are recent arrivals making do as best they can.

The nimble quatrains here follow an unusual pattern of pentameter, trimeter, pentameter, tetrameter (the different indentations are a visual convention to indicate different metrical line lengths), and rhyme by couplets (AABB) rather than either the more standard ABAB, or envelope stanzas of ABBA. The pentameters balance but do not rhyme. The inverted effect of the rhyme scheme somewhat resembles the pairing and chiral symmetry of reflections in a mirror.

It’s also solid rhyming, whether full or slant. You can often tell something about the skill of a rhyming poet by looking at those words alone: are they paired across parts of speech, is there some contrast in syllable count or other textural counterbalance? Rhymes across parts of speech suggest a variable syntax of sentences falling over and against the lines. Only “stream” and “dream” pair two monosyllabic nouns—“shampoo” and “you” are different lengths, and the pairing “chambre” and “clamber” has the textural variation of a French loanword rubbing against the Middle English “clamber.” Slant rhymes here astutely prioritize consonance over assonance, echoed consonantal end sounds rather than matching vowels: “out” with “knot,” “step” with “drip,” and then that last and most distant “forget” and “despite.” The level of tolerance for dissonance rises in the poem as the speaker’s anxiety rises: will his mother accept him as he is, after his coming out? (Part of the neat trick of the end, though, where the off rhyme still has the sonic closure of full rhyme, is that the long-i sound in “despite” also triangulates with the long-i of “tiles,” two lines up.) That “tile” by the way, though mundane as a bathroom surface, when polished with “zeal,” in this book with its Persian palaces, somehow also calls up Kashani decoration.

Much could be said about the deft handling of the meter here, too. I will just point to the “minor ionic” of “in the clogged drain” ( u u / / ), unstressed/unstressed/stressed/stressed, that results in that clogged spondee at the end of the line. Enjambments are employed judiciously and to good effect, such as the cross stanza “silhouette/ behind the opaque frosted shower screen” where the stanza break is itself a kind of translucent screen we can peep around, or the “knot/ around me tight,” where we feel the pull of wrapping the towel around the waist.

Although a debut is often journeyman work, with more promise than finesse, Davoudian already has a master’s touch when it comes to word choice. How much is subtly implied about the mother/son relationship with “foundation and concealer,” which would not have been by, say, eye shadow and lipstick? I was struck too by the “lavender robe de chambre,” its vowel music, gendered coloration, elegant register (as opposed to “bathrobe”), and its slight hint in my ear of Herrick’s “On Julia’s Voice,” “But listen to thee, walking in thy chamber,/ Melting melodious words to lutes of amber,” or the nursery rhyme’s “in my lady’s chamber.”  

When I approached Davoudian for permission to feature this poem, he added some context to the choice of this word and the rhyme:

I sometimes fear "robe de chambre" might seem like a bit of a reach—a random French phrase inserted into the poem for the sake of rhyme. But that's actually how one refers to a bathrobe in Persian! It's one of the many loanwords from French, like "merci" (and "dictateur") that are now a permanent part of the Persian language. Not that this makes it less of a reach.

I find the rhyme ingenious rather than a “reach,” but I love the idea that it is, again, the perfect word choice in this poem about an immigrant family in the U.S.—a French loanword in Persian that passes in English. There is also the sense, then, of an Iranian cosmopolitanism imported into the rougher-edged New World, and of a family’s private, intimate language.

The poem lands, precisely yet precariously, on a sort of postpositive preposition. (It seems a Frostian move to me, although I am now stumped for Frostian examples.) The whole poem balances on the edge of this potential negation, or potential acceptance, slippery as just-mopped tile: “despite.” The reader’s hunch, and the speaker’s, is that the mother’s love will prevail, but the poignant vulnerability of the naked son, in the sensually evoked steamy and rose-scented bathroom (and how few poems do invoke our olfactory sense), everything that is at stake, is a way of asking the reader too for acceptance, an invitation, as the first poem, into this beautifully achieved book of reflections and longing.

aes

“Coming Out of the Shower” by Armen Davoudian is reprinted with permission from Corsair Poetry from the book The Palace of Forty Pillars, 2024, out now.