On "Mock Orange"

Poetry Aug 8, 2024

by Austin Segrest

They were born a year apart, 1943 and ’44. Both girls had the one sibling, a younger sister near-in-age, with whom, vying for a domineering mother’s approval, they had strained relationships. Their fathers “wounded” them when they were very young. The nature of this wound was likely sexual, but we can’t know for sure (Mom went over and over it in therapy). “Long ago,” Louise Glück writes in her most biographical collection, Ararat (1990), her sixth,

I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was…

Their talented “buoyant” mothers let themselves be “held…down” by disappointing, unworthy husbands. Both girls’ homelives were animated by a determination “to suppress / criticism of the [father]” (“A Novel”). Their mothers shunted their disappointment into criticism of their daughters. The eldest wrested back control with eating. Or not eating, both Glück and my mother nearly dying as young women.

In “Brown Circle,” also from Ararat, Glück describes unwittingly turning the magnifying glass on her son.

I thought I’d be
the lover of orchids who finds
red trillium growing
in the pine shade, and doesn’t
touch it, doesn’t need
to possess it. What I am
is the scientist,
who comes to that flower
with a magnifying glass
and doesn’t leave, though
the sun burns a brown
circle in the grass around
the flower. Which is
more or less the way
my mother loved me.

Overborne, the brown circle surrounds us, trouble, mental illness, obsession: an anti-halo wherever we look, daughters, mothers, sons. We struggle to get out from under the beam our own wounds magnify.

Driving back home to Birmingham, Alabama most weekends, my plan was to transfer after my freshman year at Auburn University. I managed, barely, to cross state lines—to Emory University in Atlanta. My anxiety was through the roof. That first year at Emory, convinced I was a “good school” imposter, I got busted for weed and accused of plagiarism. Back in Birmingham, Mom took my trouble personally, as if it could be traced back to her. As if my trouble were her punishment. Doing what she could to intervene, getting me a lawyer via a rich cousin, how could she let the trillium alone?

Dr. Bugge emailed me—it was 1999, I had just started using email—that he suspected there was something I needed to tell him about my paper. In fact, he was sure there was. There was? On the phone, Mom flipped, like I was done for. Wait. Expelled? For what? I don’t think I knew the word plagiarism. My suitemates were like, shit, dog, you got busted. No one seemed to care I’d written the paper. A Classics prof goes, how can I say this, you don’t look as thoughtful as you are?

How did I look? A little rough-around-the-edges? A little sulk? My long neck thick from high school football. A little twang. A little brother with a big chip— or so I’d heard most of my life: conditioned to hate my dad, who fulfilled the prophecy, letting the grass brown.

Our men were neglecters, wounders.

After Bugge had me sign something and gave me an A, he explained that my essay was, in fact, bad—just bad in a specific, writing-on-the-internet kind of way. I didn’t use the internet for anything but email, and that, so poorly I didn’t realize I needed to log out, which led later that year to a late-night computer lab troll emailing my friends and family nasty messages.

I Google “Dr. Bugge Emory University.” He was killed in a bicycle accident 19 years after that semester, age 77. One year younger than my dad, who also had a serious bike accident about that time, lucky to survive. “Bugge suffered from severe brain injuries and cervical and facial fractures” (The Emory Wheel).

Maybe it’s time to forgive poor Bugge, smug as he was. After all, it was while we were breezing through our Poetry 205 anthology that I was exposed to my first favorite contemporary poem, Glück’s “Mock Orange” (1985).

The poem’s trouble had a familiar tenor, a familiar complaint. Its teeth-clenched, strict precision reminded me of Mom enunciating “asinine,” a word I’ve never been able to use. It begins with the moon, only to dismiss it: its romance, its honey, its cycle are not the cause of the speaker’s frustration and likely insomnia.

It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.

I hate them…

Minimalist, no contractions. Elemental, all-or-nothing verbs: to be, to not be, to light, to hate, to mock. The all-pervasive flowers are at once reflectively bright, bridal white, and, as we come to see, loud in the speaker’s mind. As loud as they are cloyingly fragrant, redolent of the blossom they’re a mockery of.

Maybe it’s not the moon’s, but the mother’s influence, her sublimated desires transmuted into concern over her daughter’s prospects. Urged on by the mother, the marriage is a bust, a burnt circle in the grass, which, for Mom, lasted twenty-seven years.

For the speaker of the poem, sex is a silencing and paralysis. Like that “worse-there-is-none” experience Mom would sometimes allude to: her anesthesia awareness.

The man’s mouth
sealing my mouth. The man’s
paralyzing body—

Even her body betrays her, its

…cry that always escapes,
the low, humiliating
premise of union—

Mock orange. False “union.” False “premise.”

I hear the question and pursuing answer
fused in one sound
that mounts and mounts…

She goes round the burnt circumference, the snake with its tail in its mouth, pursued like a girl in Ovid. Or by Ovid.

I loved the poem’s ending: the finality and authority—the disgust!—of the coda.

And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.
How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?

She has been violated before she knew what was happening; fooled, as Plato writes, “in the most important part of [herself] about the most important things.”

Ever the restless poet and critic, Glück, I hear from my fancy poet friends, came to hate this poem. Who wants to be known as a sex hater? I imagine that her disowning of “Mock Orange” placates some of today’s poets, for whom the reclamation of sexiness is tantamount to self-esteem. I, for one, think it’s a testament to the poem’s power that it continues to slay, even while forsaking the key to all sales.