When the ice thins.
After the long search, hungry; after securing the space and leaving the guards, after the long drop into winter shade with your muted heart, wake. Now emerge. Watch as you enter this peril to begin again, your life.
***
Inspired by this article about findings from recent studies on hibernation habits among bears and other mammals, with particular focus on adaptations to global warming.
Eschrichtius robustus
Grey whale sounds in the bell
of its gaze a wide doorway
to ancient lines of unknowns
too abundant to hold and
immune to abstraction.
Infinity accommodates
the witness, its abstraction
a handle to grip. This is
something
else.
Seen at a distance, near the shore.
Not yet. Sea from sky
wrinkles grey. They
neared the wave,
paused, the sky
cleared bars of
white flaming red.
Burning incandescence
became transparent,
rippling until the dark.
Now the light, one
bird, a pause. Chirp,
by the bedroom window,
this blind, blank melody.
***
Virginia Woolf died on this day in 1941. Her writing is celebrated for the layers evoked in her stream-of-consciousness narratives. Her work left a lasting impression on me, and I am eternally indebted to her for illuminating possibilities within language. The above is a found poem gleaned from the opening section of Woolf’s novel The Waves.
For Francis Ponge.
Let’s go to the mute world of things, beyond the reach of the tyrannical hordes and the hordes of tyrants-in-training with their drums set to the old standard, Idea! Idea! Idea! always keeping the beat of self-proclaimed righteousness.
I’d rather listen to the drum before it’s conscripted into the service of some march or another. After that, I’ll go visit with the soap, whose songs are vivid with suds, its cheeky humor always slipping through the grasp.
I speak for no one and would never presume to ventriloquize one of these––or anyone else, for that matter. But I am drawn to their ripe quietude, each like a waiting page, like the open hand of a familiar stranger, inviting the next dance. I am, after all, a creature of language, bound by fate to remake each daily scene one day at a time, and my humble purpose is for noticing what happens at the interface between these winking syllables and these never-ending odds and ends, waiting to be new again.
***
This morning I learned that it was the birthday of French writer Francis Ponge (1899-1988), an essayist and poet associated with the surrealist movement, who famously reimagined the inner lives of ordinary things in his work. I admire the gentle playfulness and generosity of his spirit.
An animal wail.
A howling. Hunger
or grief? Dog or man? Unclear
now, which morning sounds.
Years ago, amid a different terror, one concern was a sort of numbness. I remember what the poet said about attention to the senses. This is an act of resistance, he said. To survive the war and still do poetry, this is defiance of the death machine.
It can be done without a pen. You want to know what poetry in motion looks like? The poet asks. A man walks to safety from an active bombardment zone. . . His two cows walk with him.
I am thinking of this as I am noticing how there comes a point of being saturated with images of shelled buildings, bodies in the street, and I observe the creep of a familiar numbness. I walk from the screen to put my nose in the fur of our cat, run fingertips across my daughter’s watercolor painting. Birds at sunset. A mind can say live, but a body needs so many reminders, all of them in the senses: this is why, and this, and this.
When I return, it is to celebrate a mother who lost her father the day before the invasion, who drove with her husband under sirens and past tanks, making arrangements until it was time to leave with the children and the dogs. How they left the car to walk the last ten miles, how the walk was hard on the oldest dog, Pulya, who kept falling. How she carried Pulya, how he let himself be carried over her shoulder, with silent acceptance. How the husband stayed behind in a village with no water or food, using firewood to heat the home, tending for the old ones who can’t leave.
It is our love, this woman said, that gives me strength now.
***
Inspired by the wild love of those persisting in the face of horrific violence, and by poet Ilya Kaminsky’s recent observation about poetry in motion, italicized above. I first encountered the story of Alisa Teptiuk, who carried her dog to safety, in this article.
Open mouths, long lines.
History was the broken lines between mouths and the breasts they once held before they knew the word for danger. When was that? We couldn’t remember. It was a story vague as Genesis, but some of us carried it on the road. There was a line of thought we wanted to follow, because we knew it before we knew thoughts should get in lines and it was this: once it was good, and us with it, and then came everything after, and then a long dark and at the end of it were these mouths at our breasts.
To hold against this.
Fire from the sky, man thunders again.
Why do you scream?
To check that I still live.
Hold your head. This will hurt.
Ground is what trembles us.
Will you go under it?
Is that where it trembles less?
No. The windows will shatter next.
See the child, carried through smoke.
Children take the blasts for granted,
learn to wait between them.
We cry out, throwing signs against
the noise when we see no target.
What is another word for too much?
We try blood, fire, smoke.
We try terror, revenge, help.
Oh God, we say, touching a wound.
Oh God, we say, unable to keep
from testing for some other now.
A poet’s manifesto.
“We do not fly, we ascend only such towers as we ourselves are able to build.”
Osip Mandelshtam
When it comes to discussions of art, let’s balance our excitement with restraint. A worldview is a hammer, but not the end. Use it to shape the art. The only pride, for an artist, is existence.
In a poem, the reality is the word, and yet. Consider how signs and symbols so often fulfill their purpose without words. Let’s have the word no longer creeping on all fours, hulking accepted logic on its back. Let it rise, instead, to enter a new age.
The architect must be a good stay-at-home, having genuine piety before the three dimensions of space. To build means to hypnotize space against the dreaded emptiness. Consider the anger of the bell tower, as if to stab heaven.
To love the existence of something more than itself––including your own––here is the highest commandment. A poet’s greatest virtue is the ability to feel surprised. If logic is the kingdom of amazement, let us dance to the music of proof.
***
The war in Ukraine has drawn me more deeply into the poetry of one of my favorite living poets, Ilya Kaminsky. I’ve been following his regular updates about the needs and concerns of his family, friends, and fellow poets in Ukraine. At his recommendation, I have been reading Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, composed during Stalin’s Great Terror. Akhmatova was part of the Acmeist movement, and this morning, while reading Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa, I came to “Musica Humana” (an elegy for Osip Mandelshtam, a leader among the Acmeists) and realized I wanted to know more about Mandelshtam, and found a translation of his Acmeist Manifesto. This morning’s post collects ideas and found phrases from this text, as translated by Clarence Brown.
Mothers in wartime.
Speaking of the universes inside us now, of silenced griefs, do you wonder if this new fear has come to meet our weak refusals to acknowledge its magnitude? An inherited idea: us as defenders of the first official bodies of an emerging something––and yet, we couldn’t see it, not all the way. We missed the point, didn’t we, when we called it safe.
They gave it borders and called it done. Who could blame them? Had I known better, I might have done the same with my own form when I could, but even a broken body can learn, when it comes time for offerings, to be one.
You can hear the official mandates all around: ours, ours, no trespassing, but try claiming something from a body whose primary substance is the fluid it sends and receives, through these acres of unknowns, and eventually we challenged them to go ahead, see if they could find a place to plant their flag. This took no words; just as well when these were the first to flee.
***
Inspiration: On March 6, 2022, Krista Tippett, whose excellent On Being Project I have long followed, tweeted: “There is a universe inside each of us now of unarticulated fear and unmarked grief.” As with many of her observations, this one resonated a particular truth of this moment.
And of course, the images we all know by heart now, and in our bones, of mothers in wartime.
