Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?
Donna Masini
W.W. Norton & Co.
Have you ever thought about how clams swim? I’d never really considered it, but Donna Masini has, prompted into such veered-off speculation by a dinner date’s plate of spaghetti with clam sauce.
In Masini’s poems, common events and objects are springboards into the multivalent but often unnoticed kaleidoscope of boundless life we live within. A visit to the dentist’s office, a trip to the CVS, or a brief, humorously inane chat with a waitress are just a few examples of the portals into life’s mystery Masini explores through musings on the ordinary and everyday. In Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?, Masini’s fourth collection, existential questions are posed in musings that are unexpectedly funny, sad, and rife with longing and loss that resonate and persist like a song stuck in one’s mind.
Can a poem become an earworm? “Clams” sure did for me. It’s simple and narrative with no line breaks (and one delightful rhyming triplet to bring it together):
The man has ordered Spaghetti with Clam Sauce. The woman is not fond of clams. In fact, she is not as fond of this man as she once was. The man begins to twirl the spaghetti around his fork, displacing several clams. He is frowning. She thinks of the expression “happy as a clam.” How happy could a clam be? She tries to imagine what a clam might look like, happily swimming around the ocean with the other clams, but she can’t picture this. They’d need fins—or legs—to even crawl. Maybe they just bob around like chunks of carrot in a soup. How happy is that? She wishes she knew what clams looked like still alive in the ocean before they were dead on someone’s spaghetti. So many things she’s never thought to imagine. She would ask the man, but he gets annoyed when she asks things like that. Things she should just know. He is not a happy man. She’d like to ask the waiter, but the waiter isn’t looking too cheery either. She looks into the tangle of spaghetti, the juicy castanets in their parsley confetti. A gathering of smiles looking positively chatty! Still, she’ll Google it when she gets home. Clams swimming. She would like to know more about clams.
Masini’s sense of whimsy and her poems’ accessibility reminded me of the work of Billy Collins at times. But Masini’s voice is uniquely her own. And not every poem is as amusingly charming as “Clams.” Many have to do with the longing for a sister who, it is obliquely revealed, is no longer living. And a deceased father, and a mother suffering from dementia. “The Memory House,” in which Masini visits her mother who’s in a care facility, begins:
My mother wants to go home. She’s worried about the farm. What farm? In the country of compassionate deception I must not challenge her. Do you see chickens or pigs? is not helpful. Lovely, I say, pointing to the couch, and which is your favorite pig?
This poem, like so many others in the collection, is funny whilst also melancholy and mournful. Masini’s sense of humor nearly always shines through despite often dark themes. And the poems are pleasantly conversational, the reader becoming the other conversant party. Leaning on what we take for granted in our everyday lives for her subjects, we’re surprised by queries that prompt pondering the existential (and sometimes surreal).
In “Are You Still Working on That,” after a waitress asks a customer that very question and is told I’m not working, I’m eating, a discussion between the waitstaff, busboy, bartender, and line cook takes place later that night while the waitress is counting her tips:
Although thinking about it, the bartender said, filling the ice wells, to ask were they still working bestowed a level of dignity on it.
It’s a witty exchange that’s beautifully ordinary yet punctuated with verity and comicality. The reader gets to listen in on a conversation we’ve all had in one form or another; almost as though we’re there after our shift is over, joining in.
One of my favorite poems, “Midnight in the Pain Relief Aisle of CVS Thinking About The Cloud of Unknowing,” turns a late night trip to the pharmacy into a theologically rich bloom of inner thought. Having read the anonymously penned 14th century work The Cloud of Unknowing in grad school many years ago, I was tickled—and impressed—by the poem’s agile shifting between frustration at pressing a button for an attendant and headache-induced questions on the nature of God and existence.
(how did I get here?), punching in my customer number,
more important. What saints felt. A dreadful hunger.
If you need help, the self-checkout voice is saying.
Not every poem in Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? was a success to my mind (awkwardly sexual themes, some clunky conclusions), but most of them are deliciously jocund and playfully cerebral. Masini’s latest is a superb collection overall.
I still don’t know how clams swim, but I’m not sure I want to find out. I’d rather let it remain a mystery, along with so many other facts, figures, and things it’s better to simply wonder about.
