Month: March 2024

The Mountain and the Door

With Jean Valentine.

No, I don’t want to do it this week, any of it. So this morning I linger here, taking in the well-kept secret of you, hiding in plain sight. You worked with what you could not understand. Your work was translation. You threw most of it away, keeping only what continued to kick after the scratching out. You moved a lot. Said later, it was probably preparation. For what others called your tough strangeness. Of Dickinson, you remarked: Happy are those who can choose their refusals and survive. Considering Plath, you wondered over the thin line between the subversively unconventional and despairing state. How close you were to the edge. You feared its pull, that you might leap, but your friend, a nun, understood what you were, reminding you back. Write every day, she told you. That is your prayer, your health, your everything. 

***

I have been spending time with Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain (New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003), and this morning I read Amy Newman’s 2008 profile of the poet in Ploughshares. Today’s post is assembled with phrases from Newman’s article, which includes quotes by Valentine.

Saturday Afternoon Sirens

Life in limbo.

I was driving to get cash, listening to a story and missing many key parts because it was in French. In the gaps my mind would turn over certain questions. Like how will I ever?––etc. And possible responses, like when there is time. From this blurred body in what the nuns would call limbo, somewhere between living and dead. That was before zombies started having their moment. Well, flood me then, I thought, in a manner of praying. I walked back with the cash, having gone inside even though there was a drive-through with no one in it, because I do not like the feeling I have in the drive-through, low in the driver’s seat, having to reach up while the monitor face smirks down. Before me, I watched a woman crossing the street, carrying flowers. She wore something like a tracksuit, and I only saw the back of her. Her hair had no visible white but there was a certain halt to her gait, a learned care in stepping, the kind that suggests the bones are becoming more bird-like, emptying themselves of themselves. I thought: a new grandmother! I watched her with a smile, in astonishment at what must flutter in her heart as she carries them to where she is going. That such moments still happen. I started the car, returned to listening to the story. It is always a war story. I cannot remember another kind. This woman with flowers is not another kind, that’s the wonder of it. How she rushes to see the new baby. This woman who will hold the new baby, born of her daughter, and coo, hello, little one, as the sirens wail.

Valley

And the road.

We were missing the inner music.
One held a bowl of earth. It blazed.
We wondered of the steam.
When did it rise? And does it relent.
She knows something but will not.
How long the road. I am done, one said.
Our heads, the eyes. It hurt to look.
We used to hear what would play––
to ease the burden, brew the blood.
Not done, came another, saying wait.

Force Like Water

Upon arrival.

Sometimes, with the predictable mess already seeming to be written as it laps with greedy lips at the attention of the assembled, hungry for confirmation of certain known pillars of popular opinion, it is easy to miss the appearance of this other thing, which will show itself sometimes to those who are tired of looking, of taking in the spectacle of predictable tropes. Today, for example, it was a creature of spectacular plumage, resting its wings in the rafters in the dark, its feathers so bright they glowed. Looking down between bouts of casual grooming, the creature had about itself such a stark matter-of-factness that my first reaction was to assume that my mind was up to one of its old tricks, dreaming or conjuring this image from fatigue or delusion. Delusions, as anyone knows, are always reluctant to give themselves up.

Veiled Life in Five Acts

For Ophelia.

It was said of the jailer’s daughter that she sought the flood, that she might be saved by the man who came calling, before she returned in her trembling weakness to the river to sing a song whose words she mostly forgot. 

No, it was not deliberate, her fall from the branch of the willow where she sat. Neither was it abrupt, after long schooling in the art of locking her in, to study what will shapeshift and erupt in the steam of her laughter over the prize they would have lauded her for becoming, if she kept on. With these men who cry at her breast while wondering what to do with themselves. To be? Or not? Me? 

A mind unbalanced by grief, her physician decreed––for the father, no doubt, they declared. Or Laertes on his high horse, tossing advice to the ground, or Hamlet so eager to seed her that he burst into her space, who then complained it would not cost her a groaning to take off his edge, his constant edge. 

And always the question of what to do with it but remind her back to his need, singing? 

And he sings. O sister when I come to knock at your door, may you be no stranger to knowing where the cuts are meant to happen. To her, but for himself: O sister, o daughter, o mother, o wife––it is your breath, your blood, your only life.