Blog

Language of Inquiry

With Lynn Hejinian.

You disbelieved both borders and endings, knew a word to be something bottomless that drew you in. In one dream, you would write a single long sentence in a day, uninterrupted on a thread of rolled paper, chasing thought down the pier with your thinking hand, its bride. By your constant attention on the grace of shadows, you kept your world lit. Those who knew your light were restored by its nourishment. They found something in its playful dance that made it possible to return, even in the days of death, to the living.

***

Inspired and with collected lines from Remembering Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024) in The Paris Review, which came out in the wake of the poet’s death in late February.

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.