Hey, y’all!
I’ve been working through Carson’s translations of Sappho. For me, working through a text is something more closely aligned with being overcome by it, the language grafting into my mouth in conversation and the sweetest images more real than those taken in by my steady gaze, cast over the page in those plentiful moments of beauty. With Sappho, beauty is so terribly present; yet, by the nature of the fragmented form and the way in which the words dissolve into the blank space (by no means, a space void of meaning, though) the beauty seems distant, unapproachable, and I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to feel anything more wholly.
Perhaps, it is in this way that I came to liken the places of absence in Sappho-either in form or Self-to a memory I have of a sermon given in my grandparents’ church. One should know that my grandparents had been raised devout, loving, God-fearing Christians, and, as such, the Church of Christ remained close to their hearts. Being with them meant loving the God that dwelled in their home, the force which-in the South-seemed to me the most inescapable manifestation of sorrow I’d ever known. I saw, in them, the idea that the body and soul were riddled with wounds. I imagined that if I stood long enough behind their bodies, I might see some tremendous light flooding through the chest wall-a brightness in the space where the lungs would normally press back and forth into the ribs. My thoughts of what it meant to be “Southern” by the age of ten were confined to a state of lack, to the desire to be being filled with something so large and so dominating that I, too, might be illuminated. To be loved by something which could inhabit the interiority…absence and all.
I’ve envied the relationship my grandparents had with God-for the reverence they had in the Southern identity as an innately sacred experience. I worry about what it means that I don’t feel that as a truth in my own life? How I’ll retain the lineage and culture without feeling like a fraud. Maybe, poetry is that substitute. Poetry, I hold, often negotiates a divine connection in our lives-whether or not we call this “God.” I recall reading Neruda for the first time, and how I desperately needed the world of his poetry without even knowing it. Looking back, the poetry became not so different from the sort of quiet retreat which, so often, found my grandfather waking early to read the Scripture and tend to the garden, motioning to his finches and phoebes.
I feel less inclined to sadness when I think about these things now, more inclined to write through them…to be overcome by them. Tonight, I’ve begun a series of fragments. They’re unified, perhaps, only in their common theme of place, childhood, and a culture which draws on the heritage of memory and faith. I’ve included the written presentation (as they are now-unedited) and a recording of them, too.
Fragments
I.
what moves through you—
slake rudiment elegy
course
in the uppermost
ligament
II.
Tess and I tell each other at age twelve
we’ve never been engulfed in the deluge
during the same touch we see his face—
uproot
in the ashflake Tess and I at age twelve
tell each other we’ve never been dead
like the body of a boy from the Eastside
staggers
from his head nine miles to rest
at our feet Tess/I have never been dead
III.
: eternity is more like the ruffle of a dress than anything else
let what moves be foliage asunder
gathered fraternal love of uncommon eyes,
earthward glance to the hemlock, or else
our mother might move through you
as I through middle dark in Wheeling, West Virginia
sick of little light
carry the deer to brush beyond mile marker 36
IV.
I’ve asked you
in the worst winter to strike
Appalachia country
in twelve years
how I’m supposed to tell her
I won’t stay
if not for lines weighed lax: ice, cluster of house sparrows
—tendril ribbons
hung from locked-foot—
I am sure you would’ve answered
V.
the origin of blindness overtakes
a horse in rain
at the closest edge of the field;
where, presently, you call my name:
I—hesitant and drunk—
in the company of others
speak of low-lying stars over Memphis
doubt absolution bonerattle
of a body falling
away from us—
the closer edge of a field
in rain a horse alight, as a tipped coffin
VI.
I am doing this wrong
not the written thing
before this moment, this moment/splitting
stem ledge
we’ve been doing this,
for some time, had we strung water
under soft stone turned dove
in the axial wellbody of division, this dry season from the one in which the crops died—
delta parched from Baton Rouge to Mobile
its alluvium breathe a tin-type photograph of our mothers’
incantatory hands, slaughtered hog hung awkward against the rail,
a prayer we learn as children to distinguish the spotted spurge
among the chickweed overgrown in the Pryor lot, still hearing him
speak of Job on a Sunday morning in Searcy, still speaking through smoke
that this is the best fucking idea we’ve ever had:
to love what cannot love us in return
