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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819572035 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2012 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 59 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Calling Her
First Tractate
That the soul got to choose. Nothing else got to but the soul got to choose.
That it was very clever, stepping from Lightworld to lightworld as an egret fishes through its smeared reflections —
through its deaths —
for it believed in the one life,
that it would last forever.
When she had just started being dead I called to her.
Plum trees were waiting to be entered,
the swirling way they have,
each a shower of What.
Each one full of hope,
and of the repetitions —
When she had been dead a while I called again. I thought she was superior somehow because she had become invisible,
because she had become subtle among the shapes —
and at first she didn't answer; everything answered.
Tell now red-tailed hawk
(for we have heard the smallest thing cry out beneath you):
have you seen her?
(Red hawk) Thrush walking up the ragged middle:
have you seen her? Mockingbird with your trills and scallops, with your second mouth in your throat of all things tell us:
where is she whom we love?
I closed my eyes and saw the early spring,
pretty spring, kind of a reward;
I opened them and saw the swirling world,
thousands of qualified pinks, deer feeding on the torn changes
and I wanted to go back 'from whence' I came.
Up the coast,
along sandbanks and spillways,
the argued-about bays, spring came forth with its this 'n' that, its I can't decide, as my life had before she died: preblossoming:
cranesbill, poppy —
and I wanted to go back "from whence" I came.
Heart that can still see our heart Heart that will not let us rest
February evening —
young mothers in the drugstore with valentines all of which needed to be used.
Packages of plain or lace ones
stuck together. And the mothers proud of themselves for remembering,
the valentines slumped down so the red merely looked promising but pressing up bravely anyhow —
the awkwardness of what's here,
ceaselessly trying to arrange itself;
I went out in the night, I called out,
I felt along the edges of the panel:
without her,
everything seemed strange to me in this world;
just the taste of oranges: imagine!
And all of this compared to her seemed bulky.
For weeks this was true.
As if only being dead were the right amount.
Only being dead were fragile enough for what the earth had to say.
Clumsy. For a while. Clumsy. For a while it was too much to go on living.
Roadside acacias —
I could not bear them. All unzipped,
like meaning.
The ostinatos of the birds.
Magnolias — dogs'-tongues — curved to spoon up rain. Too much shape.
Even that which was only suspected of having it: the iris that lay in the ground with their eyes of fate.
And then the other voice said
You who long for things who can't understand borders who like to spread your magic and your blame forgive yourself.
She'd given you an impossible task:
she said to follow and you intended to.
But you'd come to a place in the forest where there weren't any tracks —
Much Hurrying
— So much hurrying right after a death:
as if a bride were waiting!
Crocuses sliced themselves out with their penknives. Everything well made seemed dead to them: Camelias. Their butcher-
paper pink. The well-made poems seemed dead to you,
only what was vastly overheard would do,
you had to say something so general over the edge that everyone could hear — the guests,
the bride — though the edge was specific to you, the edge was inside —
Secret Knowledge
At first I was able to speak to her quickly just by closing my eyes.
She had died in the first week of quinces,
when things put forth their secret knowledge:
fiery, random blossoms are allowed to live,
and robins don't seem all that common as they swing at the tops of cypresses through new song;
and I wanted to hear just one voice but I heard two,
wanted to be just one thing, but I was several;
I called her more quickly,
told her how much I missed her,
pausing at the edge of the screen
that kept me from her in all the awkwardness of living,
and she said it was not up to me to live without her or make the voice be single,
she said every voice is needed.
Every voice cries out in its own way —
Holding Her
— Then the owl came back the druid the helper and you asked,
Where is she whom we love. Who-who,
it said, who-who, matching sets for you and her —
you who had sought distinction in the pronouns found they were all the same —
but wasn't that death a gift to you as well,
just as the life had been?
Now you got to hold her by yourself, for the first time —
Near Jenner
I asked the mind for a shape and shape meant nothing;
I asked the soul for help, and some help came:
some wedding-band gold came around the edges of a sunset,
and I knew that my bride could see forward, behind it;
and all the women I had known came back from their positions where they had been hanging the silk laundry of heaven upside down by the elastic;
they'd help me find her
though they looked slightly faded from being dead,
as the first wildflowers here —
radish, and the ones they call 'milkmaids' —
look faded when they appear on the shoulders of the Pacific —
Visiting Creature
— You think about a poem too much.
Like Spanish moss,
it starts killing the tree!
Look: Berkeley spring. A mockingbird has chosen you. Try to follow his new short songs: buree, buree, cheat-sheet, and the one that sounds like maybe I will and maybe I won't do any such thing.
Each time the gray feathers on the throat part it looks like another mouth as though the song came from that.
But you? Your friend has been gone such a short time you can't keep her voice in you yet.
Who is noticing her now? What is this to her?
So many shifts in that bird's style —
yet what a pleasure to watch him getting drunk on juniper berries,
resting lightly on his wing bars.
Pretty soon the borders won't bother you either.
Pretty soon your loved one will speak forward: into this world —
Seated Bride
She had died without warning in early spring.
Which seemed right.
Now that which was far off could become intimate.
I said to the guides, let's stand very close to the mystery and see how far she's gone and whether she is still our bride
(imagining no one fails in this)
because of the sense I had that she sat parallel to us.
Not above, or below: beside —
The Panel
— No, the upper heavens wouldn't do;
she couldn't manage stairs. Why not keep her here,
just separated off a little bit?
So you thought of the moment of death as a kind of panel or screen behind which she might join the watcher
and the watcher did not change. Phenomena streamed by in circles,
and the watcher did not change —
but no. That heaven was boring and besides. What lived lived on both sides. What lived
went back and forth: across the panel —
Writing Her
Yellow Tractate
Smart daffodils! They waited till the cold snap was over, then brought themselves into the corridor, like lamps of pity —
they'd help me find her.
Well, actually ... I didn't want to.
I wanted to be What. Lost in her. Infinitely lost in her dead life so my life no longer showed;
but I feared I couldn't draw the line around her, then!
Spring swelled sideways, its yellow crescendo,
tall mustard flowers, warblers the same color;
spring opened like autobiography and everything shimmered from the inside out till there were three types of endlessness: life death or both which was what she was:
endless. That frightened me.
So I studied the lines around the daffodils,
wanting to see how they could be and not be at the same time,
die at the right moment as she had then go on living with force, exactly as she had said.
But anything that had a shape was cheating her.
A minuet. The dresser for example. An afternoon
at the DMV — such shape! The living have such shape in them!
The official taking the multifoliate forms and pressing down with his ballpoint hard, harder, and the pen maintaining smooth shapes for him.
Patient people in line with their hats and scabs and skin holding them in as they watch each letter being made —
no wonder conquerers come forth! — and outside in the parking lot where the cars are being tested by young drivers spring draws its yellow crayon around everything.
What shall be safe from the anguish of borders.
Can Monday? No. Sunday smears forward into it.
Can March? No. February pushes because its yellow has already started.
And the poems:
things kept getting into them.
Sometimes the poems were active and dead,
sometimes alive and not active, like my friend —
One day I watched a Japanese lady working the gift-wrap counter. The regular was sick. The sample gift wraps all lined up above her
and I noticed that, in its separateness,
each sample seemed to hold its own surprise,
like minutes,
though the boxes of course were empty:
"Wedding," "Birthday," the masculine sportsman's type of gift wrap with crossed rifles and golf clubs and the paisley princeton type — I thought,
these boxes do their jobs because they have borders;
I need some too.
The lady took such central care to curl the ribbons —
took her about twenty minutes really —
I loved her hands as she debated how to put the foolish little windmill on
(that broke my heart.
The insistent shining of it whirling around on the red stem)
and all I could think of as I watched this whirling was Where is my dead one?
Shape makes life too small.
But I needed borders to do the remembering,
needed them to get the package out of there.
Who would get the package out if I had no borders. I needed them in order to be anything at all —
Reverse Seeing
— A fox ran across your path — pure totem!
You would never see it again;
likewise the loved one:
you stared hard into the rusty aftermath.
But things kept coming through the panel of death:
doves took off outside the window: click click click,
(click) — gosh, their wings needed oiling — then
no more them!
You want to be like your dead friend?
You are like her. Writing is dying. But the war was not about borders it was about surrender —
Possible Companion
The mockingbird stayed for months in the legustrum —
blips and screams,
I couldn't get a thing done;
and though I know control is an illusion I'd go outside and talk to it in the sort of shallow sun.
Week after week of helping it along in the powdery white tree like helping the new kid in seventh grade —
that awkward mix of sympathy and greed that always rises from the deepest place —
and I thought I could help my dead friend too though her new dead voice was terribly full
but I feared I was controlling her even in heaven;
that her voice had had to be stopped for me to speak at all;
that death did not subtract, it added something,
her death made me whole —
A Dwelling
— And in the central valley,
people were dreaming of peaches.
Starlings ate the scalloped edges off new blossoms.
In the night orchards,
the dreamer walked over hot coals with the poems and made creation seem effortless — there!
What do you fear in a poem?
(I fear the moment of excess, as in March,
when oxalis comes out all in one day.)
What do you fear in the poem?
(I fear that moment of withholding —
especially inside what I thought was free;
and I feared the poem was just like her,
that it would abandon me —)
— So the poem is the story of the writing of itself.
In the white tent of the psyche or out there in the normal fog:
the mockingbird all spring:
she looked just like a note herself,
each bit of music slipping past her till it stopped —
each time one note missing;
it wasn't exactly failure on her part,
she just needed something to do tomorrow.
Same thing with the poem. Perhaps an idea came with it, an idea of fourness, the yellowness of spring, a certain belief in the completion of a plan. Not so now. In your dream of wholeness, death began.
So, put yourself in the way of the poem. It needed your willing impediment to be written. Remember the lily,
growing through the heart of the corpse?
You had to be willing to let it through the sunshine error of your life,
be willing not to finish it —
Losing Her
Split Tractate
But I feared that her soul didn't miss me. Didn't miss spring. That she was pre-
occupied, like a tourist, maybe not moving around in the mind of god but in the onyx market, which was the exact same thing —
Help, mockingbird! don't say no!
Maybe she has forgotten us,
she has given us this priceless gift,
she has let us go.
I looked for her in anger,
behind sunsets,
along the iron tracks of the personal;
I looked for her in planes of agony and she was quite close by.
They said I had to let go of her.
She said so too. Let go she said from the What.
The screen between me and her.
But still I held on; holding on is my specialty. I held on to her image,
to the moment of death, to the problem with pronouns; maybe I'd learn.
Spring could let go couldn't it.
Vireos hung upside down from the cottonwood.
The old calm towhee at the feeder — it did not tarry.
Beautiful, average mornings: the scattered actual: grief changed them only slightly.
Mornings waiting for the triple A,
of neighbors standing by their cars and chatting,
one pink kleenex in the street — or is it a camelia —
then a man climbs up the shining ladder to a phone pole,
takes the spool of insulated wire and threads it —
Where?
To the heaven of messy souls behind the bright new consciousness or to the old Baptist heaven with its silverware —
so many heavens! Which was she in.
I wished she'd speak more clearly when I asked her who was noticing her now.
What was "this" to her.
And the mockingbird stayed all morning with its row of checkmarks and the verse that sounded like teacher-teacher-teacher police! police!
Maybe that bird was her —
so versatile; it did not cling —
let go said the What.
Let go said everything
Sweet afternoons of exhaustion. Trips to the library with the other moms. Taking the books to the chrome mouth of the book deposit and hesitating before letting the slender paperback slide down on its very own bardo journey;
Maybe I should have warned it not to attach itself to its travels,
not to identify with the suffering,
that is the main thing.
What is this so-called death anyway. Fat chickadees hop up the "dead" fennel. A little cowlick sprouts from the 'dead' place in the pine. Petals die and in a day, what looks like mascara brushes fall from the birthday tulips.
Is the falling or are the tulips it.
What is this so-called death what is it.
Let go said the so-called What.
Let go said everything.
Even the poem said it.
Said it would come in its own good time as I leaned forward to see death's face though there was always this gap between my hand and the page,
I had only to trace the pen over the words;
the poem was already written —
Excerpted from "Death Tractates"
by .
Copyright © 1992 Brenda Hillman.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
A Note about the Book,
Calling Her,
First Tractate,
Much Hurrying,
Secret Knowledge,
Holding Her,
Near Jenner,
Visiting Creature,
Seated Bride,
The Panel,
Writing Her,
Yellow Tractate,
Reverse Seeing,
Possible Companion,
A Dwelling,
(untitled poem),
Losing Her,
Split Tractate,
Random Order,
An Entity,
Winged One,
Finding Her,
Sideways Tractate,
Keeping Watch,
Divine Laughter,
The Guides,
Subtle Body,
Finding Her,
Black Rose,
Quartz Tractate,