Plundered Hearts (21 page)

The first section is set in Chicago in the late 1960s. Three raw recruits, or boots, from the Great Lakes Naval Training Center get drunk one night and end up at the local tattoo parlor—or tat shack, as it’s called. Flashes are those predesigned emblems one can choose. A sleeve is a tattooed scene that covers one’s entire arm, wrist to shoulder. The third sailor gets one of these, and by flexing a muscle or moving his arm, he can make the tattooed underwater scene come to a strange life. I should add that the first of the recruits has what used to be called “unspoken desires” for the second.

The third section takes place in late-nineteenth-century New Zealand. Maori chieftains used to have extraordinary facial tattoos,
geometrical patterns that covered their whole heads, as a symbol of their authority. Authority has always depended on impressing one’s friends and frightening one’s enemies, and these tattoos were meant to do just that. In the poem, a chieftain’s eldest son is having one of these tattoos cut in. Toward the end of the procedure, the pain is so great that he lapses into a delirium in which he reimagines the Maori creation myth—which holds that Father Sky and Mother Earth were once a single entity, driven apart by the sons they carried in the darkness their combined bodies had created.

“Sorrow” is the name Cio-Cio-San gives to her child by Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton in Puccini’s opera
Madama Butterfly
. Abandoned by her lover, who with his new American wife plans to take the three-year-old child with him back to his homeland, Butterfly is preparing to commit suicide when the boy rushes to her side. She takes him in her arms and begs that he never know his mother killed herself for his sake. Before blindfolding him, she asks that he take one last look at her face so that a trace of it will remain in his memory.

The poem imagines that boy decades later, living in San Francisco and having himself fallen in love with a Japanese-American girl who has been interned in a Wyoming camp during the war. Frank—improbably described in the opera as being a blond, blue-eyed child—has escaped the fate of fellow Japanese-Americans, perhaps all the more to be haunted by a past he can only dimly recall. Dwight Eisenhower’s brother Milton, as director of the War Relocation Authority, supervised the transfer of Japanese-American citizens to remote work camps. After 1942, 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were, for alleged security reasons, forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast. They were first taken to “assembly centers”—often fairgrounds or racing tracks—and later assigned to one of the ten relocation centers. Heart Mountain, a treeless plain between Powell and Cody, near the Shoshone Rover, eventually housed 14,000 people in hastily constructed barrack buildings, where the internees organized a school system, a newspaper and movie houses, farming crews, sports teams, and scout troops. Not until December 1944 did
the Supreme Court declare it illegal to hold American citizens in camps against their will.

In the sequence’s third and tenth sonnets, which both view the story through the lens of Japanese legend, for the final couplet I have substituted a rhymed tanka.

Each of the poem’s three sections is named for a famous overture—by, respectively, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Suppé.

“The old pilgrim” is Dante, in
Purgatorio
XXVI
.

The title is from
King Lear
II.iv.

New poems in this book were first published in
The American Scholar, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, Raritan, The Times Literary Supplement, The Warwick Review
; in
Art and Artists,
edited by Emily Fragos (Knopf, 2012); in
March Was Made of Yarn,
edited by Elmer Luke and David Karashima (Vintage, 2012); in
Crossing State Lines: An American Renga,
edited by Bob Holman and Carol Muske-Dukes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); and in my
Seven Mozart Librettos
(Norton, 2010). Susan Bianconi, Deborah Garrison, Jeffrey Posternak, and the Knopf production team have all been stalwart friends of this book and of its grateful author.

J. D. McClatchy is the author of seven collections of poetry, and of three collections of prose. He has edited numerous other books, including
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry,
and has written a number of opera libretti that have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala, and elsewhere. He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters, where he served as president from 2009 to 2012. McClatchy teaches at Yale University and is editor of
The Yale Review.

POETRY

ESSAYS

AS EDITOR

(
WITH STEPHEN YENSER
)

AS TRANSLATOR

LIBRETTI