a light aslant

8. Our Andromeda, Brenda Shaughnessy (2012)


I already gushed about Brenda Shaughnessy last week, and here I am again to tell you she's an incredible poet, sometimes funny with her wordplay and then just as suddenly she'll gut you with something. Last week I quoted a good bit of her Liquid Flesh, which really spoke to me about the kind of agony of depletion and confusion with a newborn, tiny self alone with a tiny self. The reviewers are right, there is also a lot of good stuff in here about sisters, lovers gone, her family, but the strongest section to me was the last section, eponymously titled with its final and longest poem that is also the name of the book, Our Andromeda (something about this name within name with name was deeply satisfying in the same way her poetry was). The whole section is about her son, Calvin, from different angles, all about his existence, his traumatic brain injury (a midwife birth in a hospital) that rendered him unable to walk or speak, his early life, and her imagining of alternate worlds for him and for herself as a mother. (You can read a few more details about it in this excellent interview with her and her husband, the poet Craig Morgan Teicher.) In Our Andromeda (the poem itself) she eviscerates herself for naivete, her friends and family for being distant, god for being evil, probability for being cruel, but there's so much more in this poem that I loved, it's not all bitterness, there is excruciating love, too. One of my favorite lines: The truth is you are the truth, / a child born to a liar who is learning / to change. Or how about the long list of what exactly would I be blaming God for, which inserts among mundane administrative missteps the line Setting things in motion so that / this poem would be written? There's a lot more in this collection than just motherhood, that's just the bit that speaks the most to me right now, of course. Highly recommended.

fixed-syllable (per)


per our old walled land lies a spill by
hour need in sight of salt and pith and warp
seed eight fish dead in a corn row even or
ate long strides through a wood at the dawn
long head or nose or lank gold ears
heed thoughts of split things all split
though herds sunk in mud are not seen are
heard longed sensed un split like wood
lagged ate sung slept sunk in mud
ate seed or bird wing or gall or pith
need hour long pond waves or tide years
our one wall lies down in a red split mud

[sun falling across my eyes in this bed
like a hot cloth, a warm blindfold]

-

what you want is the branch-dancing wind
to come through the window to you,
with that staggered thrash and dip of limbs

you want a hand of winter wind to reach in,
jove's chill palm
freezing the flesh from you

pale finished chrysalis,
stale moth's shell;
a hand to push down the shelf of ribs

to the jut of hips and
empty the bowl of your bones
(upended pitcher

dry river bed,
abandoned nest in a high tree,
spindle of cold)

you want wind to scatter self
like ash from an open flue,
a flickering immolation

on this sun that pierces, pierces,
impatient vividness,
brief and heatless winter light.

it lies around us like a cloud
a world we do not see.
--harriet beecher stowe


the world is well-timed.
you should know this by now:
the bell of glass that cracks in your hand,
in the sink, slippage and impact,
a brief spill of shards.
you should know by now the tricky feel of soap,
the way friction can loose glass from the hands
in a half-second, a momentary pause.

you wake from what you do
to the sound of sudden fracture.

in weak steam under the lukewarm tap
you wait for the blood to well up
from hidden cuts, but there is nothing,
and you gingerly gather the shards
in your water-warm palm.

you listen to the world
which has gone silent at your unharmed fingertips,
at the invisible lull before the brittle invasion of breakage.
hushed water resumes its whisper in your ears
with that sound as it hovers in the air.
but shhh hums the water steadily into the drain,
silencing echo's thin cacophony,
the burden of sound and its slow ebb
in this space of water and glass.
there is still a forest of abandoned wine glasses
remaindered from other evenings;
in each cupped bell the desiccated dregs
dry coin-drops of merlot that startle the water pink
even after so many days of neglect
in this house, your distraction.

you begin again, rinse and soap their thinness,
silent transparent rims and stems,
their blind glass curves.

the well-timed world resumes with your breath,
a remembered background,
a fine, uneven wash of sound.

writing bland, unnecessary and indistinct poetry to calm my veins. i feel i am walking on stilts. my eyes weakened under these lamps and my fingertips scarred, numbed, from nothing at all.

tuesday/summer

i.

from lips and hips
forth through my sleeping skeleton rises a brief passion
in the unsure gleam of unawake, the bright bubble that breaks
easily on the light's sudden glare.
on waking i see i am utterly and blankly unknown on my tossed bed.
i am awake and nothing wakes with me.
i leave dreaming aside, meaningless, mute.
instead the unanswered day is waiting, alarmed, on the bedside table
at precisely seven forty-five in the sun bleached morning.
the futile ringing church bell on the street
melds indistinctly with the rush of traffic,
and i can see the indistinct late summer branches
dropping seeds futile, constant, on the barren infertile bricks.
a subtle wind disturbs them. i get out of bed
unable to grieve.

indistinguishable from others i walk a street hemmed by concrete,
the gutter basins filling with unwanted late-summer leaves;
a man at the church looks me unsteadily in the eye
he knows me, uncanny and suddenly: knows our shoes step
along familiar and in opposite directions,
he to the church door from the corner, i to my house.
where am i?
i reside in a city that is without walls, without commentary.
i live unshadowed in a late summer that floats barren seeds down on me.

ii.

we laughed, dark and sheltered and dim-lit in the bar,
a woman sung her song and then slammed out verse
until we cried, we shuddered with longing, laughing.
with your beer in hand i watched your profile,
thinking who am i to know another person?
in nothingness, with abandon and empty anonymous laughter,
i erase the idea of a city that does not know me.

in my bag unseen and cradled were lorca, jimenez:
the translations, unfamiliar, pushed me towards the past.
where are those pages i once knew?
gacela of the dark death breathed insistently into my ear,
clogging me with the escaping impossible past.
in silence i walked behind you, the narrow binding sidewalk,
to my apartment where we finished dinner and spoke of darkness.

and the telephone, cradled in the bed, spoke no words to me.
echoing in my ear like near-deaf ringing
i dimly listened instead to echoes
of the petty and beautiful brief hours:

they did not card you at the bar and that left me suddenly young,
poor, lacking sustenance. my knees slack and my nails
suddenly too long. obscene and unnecessary.
i gave you my other shirt to fend off the chill and instead
i sat there freezing, feeling my shoulders uncertainly wide,
my back exposed with discontent to the other women behind us.
leaning forward, leaning back. unsure of the proper posture
to receive these dark amplified gifts of verse in the night.
with the nervousness of the dark smoky air in my teeth
i bit off all my nails, suddenly, brutally. i tore away the evidence
of my own unseeing self.

iii.

and where were you that thursday? in fear i waited, unsustained:
there was no telephone ring, no answer.
i was twenty-two and friendless. empty as a quarry.
with the distinct sensation of growing ever younger
i resolved to not care, although the day stung me
with my own empty heart.

a copper taste filled my mouth and i was aware of not eating
for days, unsure of food and where it might take me.
in the mornings i held my own hips and sighed.
the mirror hated me back, blankly:
my curious self reflected dusty and slanted
in the old rejected mirror.

when i walked to work on the commentaried streets
there was nothing left of familiarity.
i looked directly into the eyes of the man beside the church,
who waved his cane indignantly at my retreating back.
i did not care. free and unfettered limbs followed feet
and there was nothing to see in my emptiness.

and down the street birdsong followed me gently
as i trod down into the bricks blindly
the many useless infertile seeds of the trees above.