Danielle Lapidoth

Biography

There is nothing as misleading, as distressing,
as a photo caption reading “K picnicking
two years before her death.” As though

she could peel a hard-boiled egg
beneath the weight of such a sentence!
Of course, like you, she knew, but what

had that to do with the crumbled yolk
on her fingers, yellow dust on grass
flexed by April winds? Biographies should end

unexpectedly, like life: the reader fooled
by an inch of white behind the text,
all that’s left unsaid, all of a sudden.

Companion Piece

“Biography” was written in no time flat and then tweaked over a period of weeks. The first lines came complete and set the tone for the rest. It was inspired by a caption beneath a photograph in a biography I was thumbing through — I don’t remember whose, I just recall the grainy texture of an old 30s or 40s black and white snap. Neither do I recall if the subject was truly picnicking or engaged in some other lighthearted activity. I may have chosen picnicking myself because it has carefree associations for me.

The caption bothered me for a number of reasons: first of all, it bore no relation to what the subject was doing in the picture — she had no idea she was going to die in a year. The caption made her life seem irrelevant, and the photo made her death seem irrelevant,. Why not write beneath a baby picture, “X sucking his thumb seventy years before his death”? Maybe such a caption is born of an unconscious impulse to inspire Schadenfreude, or to remind us, as the Bible does, that in the midst of life we are in death. My mother had just passed away suddenly — no year’s notice — and I was feeling this before-and-after rupture keenly.

The caption also bothered me because it demonstrates that one knows less of the trajectory of one’s own life than any biographer working after his or her subject’s death. Autobiography is by definition incomplete, and biography complete, and that makes of each life a Truman show, where the audience possess greater knowledge of the scope, if not of the meaning, of the subject’s circumstances, than the subject does. This implies a lack of control over one’s own story that I find disturbing.

So this poem treats my discomfort with death and the partial unknowability, relative to future generations, of one’s own story (the end), while poking fun at biographers — maybe by being a (partial) biography of a biographer. I often write series of poems, so perhaps there’s more waiting in the wings. I can imagine tackling “Autobiography” next.