Tag: lyric essay

evergreen

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[The Artist] Took This Portrait of Herself By Means of an Ingeniously Devised Mechanism.

—original caption below an image of photographer Margaret Watkins

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Restored over the past four years, Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari can only be described as light made manifest. Painted in 1515–1518, it is Venice’s largest altarpiece, spanning twenty-one cedar planks. Oscar Wilde called it “certainly the best picture in Italy,” even as others balked at its dramatic scale. In perfect harmony with the surrounding architecture, one can see the panel silhouetted even from the first step inside the church. It proceeds to grow and grow until the viewer is dwarfed before Titian’s ascending Mary, hovering in the clouds with arms upstretched, heavenward. Angels jostle at her side, putti, as the disciples marvel below, speechless. Sunshine streams through adjacent windows, creating the goldest gold I have ever seen. Supersaturated, dazzling, it evades documentation.

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Emily Dickinson writes of the “noiseless noise of the Orchard”—the perfection of utter paradox.

“Then there’s a noiseless noise in the Orchard – that I let persons hear – You told me in one letter, you could not come to see me, ‘now,’ and I made no answer, not because I had none, but did not think myself the price that you should come so far”

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Travel Journal, October 9, 2022, St Giles Cathedral: “Absence makes no sound for it is every sound… Unfathomable loss cannot help but be fathomed—even the acknowledgement of the lack of measure is a measure. A stream bursts because it has no other language.”

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The center of the painting is shaded red in anticipation. Wings fade. The sun is fractured light. In front of Chagall’s Fall of Icarus (1975), I wondered aloud which is the greater tragedy: to fall with the townspeople watching—to be mourned, to die within a community that can grieve but ultimately do nothing—or to perish utterly alone, falling into the sea on failing wings. You do not speak. When I step backwards to gain a better view, tripping over your shoe, you catch me.

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“In the shadow / of an unattainable heaven, / burdened by a memory / of perfect orchards trimmed by unseen hands. / Maybe being winged means being wounded / by infinity, blessed by the ordeal of freedom.” —Li-Young Lee, “Tethered”

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Walking home, an egg carton rests in the crook of my arm. There was an absence once, once and for a long while. I didn’t crave the taste of eggs again until after sitting on that apartment floor, feasting. We played music all evening after months spent miles apart. Another dear friend, another apartment: eggs served scrambled. Quietude of shared sleep. I felt like a child then, tucked in together with a tenderness that asks nothing, this web of trust we bind and build. There was rain and then no rain. Blackberries, almond butter, elderflower. I pray for safe passage; I carry what I can.

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“Late in my life / in the numb elegance of this city, / I made a decision— / or the decision / shining in the soft, brutal darkness / took hold of me— / to live. / Often I am peaceful / I never imagined that.” —Joan Larkin

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The girl from the bookshop assessed me briefly, furrowing her brow, “So, are you one of those poets who hates everything, or are you a romance poet?” The chasm of an impossible binary.

Travel Journal, July 31, 2022, Nice Cathedral: “There are many paths but only one reality. I need to get over my own inadequacy. I need to get out of my own way and stop fretting. All I can speak are the words given, all I can do is act with the greatest love. If I am thought a fool, then I am thought a fool. It doesn’t mean I am one for a moment.”

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In Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Franny, on the verge of an existential crisis, writes in a letter, “I think I’m beginning to look down on all poets except Sappho. I’ve been reading her like mad, and no vulgar remarks, please… ‘Delicate Adonis is dying, Cytherea, what shall we do? Beat your breasts, maidens, and rend your tunics.’ Isn’t that marvellous? She keeps doing that, too” (5).

If Sappho were not left behind in fragments, would she be loved more or less?

“Leave Crete and sweep to this blest temple / Where apple-orchard’s elegance / Is yours, and smouldering altars, ample / Frankincense”

“as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch / high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot – / no, not forgot: were unable to reach”

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December’s snow departed. It deliquesced, vanishing with the alacrity of a dream.

It winked. It conspired, with and against me. It transported.

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Sitting in the cold kitchen, I am eating cranberries. The bag kindly suggests, “Stir into yoghurt or sprinkle over cereal,” but I do neither. Outside the window, a crow perches in a tree autumn-bare like an exoskeleton. The bird tilts its head, observing me closely through the portal of the window. We quietly take turns eating small red berries—first them, then me. Commensality. A word remembered from college. The act of eating together, a form of communion.

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I sink into the field, watching the sky turn opaque lavender. There is only a sliver of moon aglow, more beautiful for being spare. Dappled snow hides cradled in treeshadow. The inevitable voice: “You can tread this ground over and over, but the landscape has changed.”

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“The anchorite wanted most to know what the bear felt like upon first awakening from his hibernation. When Mary asked him to elaborate, he replied, ‘That is precisely the question I have in mind: is it an elaborate moment for the bear, or is it essentially spare?’” —Mary Ruefle

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I think of Anna Akhmatova every winter: “I taught myself to live simply and wisely, / to look at the sky and pray to God, / and to wander long before evening / to tire my useless sorrows.” During her lifetime, she was labelled “half-nun, half-harlot” by those who wanted her dead. Her images rebel with a crisp finality: “Wild honey smells like freedom, / dust – like a ray of sun […] / Honeysuckle smells like water, / and an apple – like love. / But finally we’ve understood / that blood just smells like blood.”

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In Italian, a word for happiness is spensierato. It is almost a synonym for carefree, meaning something like “without thought” (pensare – to think).

My friend says this is why poetry cannot help but be sad; it is full of thoughts.

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I am meant to be reading about ecology in nineteenth century France but am instead looking out the window, transfixed by melting icicles dangling from the roof’s edge. They make diminishment beautiful, forms passing into a crystalline nothingness. Am I more sensitive to the tug of the past than others or simply less strong? When I drive, I think of the book we discussed in TechnoTexts, evening gatherings at the top of the art building, in a room populated with a sagging couch and Orthodox icons: Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Each hill and river defined by its given name, each landscape shrouded in stories overlapping, of peril and devotion. I am here now as I am here five years ago and fifteen years ago, and these selves are narrating all at once—this noiseless noise.

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“but something sustained me, / and when you greeted me, / I was paid fully / for the long search / and the meagre lamp; / there was no ecstasy, vision, trance, / no years between, / only an end to the whole adventure, / it stops here; / there is no striving for strange ships, / Adamic delights; / I have tasted the apple.” —H.D., Hermetic Definition, 26

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In the story of Tabitha, I find most arresting the image of the widows gathered, weeping, in the upper room, clutching the garments Tabitha had made. Look, she made the world beautiful for us, they seem to say. Though she is gone, look at the work of her hands (Acts 9:39).

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The human condition: why long for orchards that perish and never the evergreen?

Why be fated to crave that which can only leave?

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I sit with my friend on a bench in Les Arènes de Lutèce as teenagers shout and play soccer below us amid the Roman ruins. She pauses in her story, “I’m sorry,” she says in English, thinking through the order of events. “I’m lost in chronology.”

bildungsroman

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Transmuted. I am simplifying its weight. I am subtraction; I am a sum. Mary Oliver’s words come to me as I gather up the rippling landscape of sheets, hem in hand: “I don’t want to lose a single thread / from the intricate brocade of this happiness. / I want to remember everything.”

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The old man, Alan, sits beside me on the beach. I’m disturbing your reading, he says. A statement, not quite an apology. I close the Fitzgerald novel and place it beside me, It’s alright; I’ve read it before. He looks at me as if afresh. Your face is thin… Vous êtes très élégante. You look a bit like my mother. She had long fingers. She played piano, you know.

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When a journey has charted its route, then comes the moment of clarity: I was singing my goodbye every step of the way. A petulant thistle scratches my ankle each time I hang laundry in the garden to dry, an ever-misstep. These patterns reek of constellations, mistakes yet fluttering like benedictions. Alison Brackenbury writes, “Geraniums / crumpled, brilliant, soaring out of water, / all sprigs which I have sliced off by mistake / in careless gardening, Now they thrive for days, / things done in error, the odd corners / of our lives, which flower and flower.” This is an ode to freshly baked buns and loaves, plum windfall, the pleading meow outside the door. This is a tender farewell. Here and no other, I awakened to light streaming through gauzy curtains while, outside, branches (their shadows) danced.

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“You changed me, you should remember me. / I remember I had gone out / to walk in the garden. As before into / the streets of the city, into / the bedroom of that first apartment. / And yes, I was alone; / how could I not be?” -Louise Glück, “Seizure”

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I dreamt again for the first time in ages, color after nights of blank darkness, a yawning abyss of rest in which to sink like a stone. The you that wasn’t really you, just a figment, you, they, looked into my eyes and asked softly, desiring nothing, Are you okay? The day that followed, I glimpsed the fox again, perhaps the same one that once startled me in the garden, peering intently through my kitchen window at night. It paused before crossing the road in the August dusk, waiting just long enough for me to catch sight. Summer had fled without reproach, and I was draped in my wool coat. When I beheld my friend again earlier that afternoon for the first time since January, we ran a little into each other’s arms. It was like that, I think. Immodest joy. We had weathered barrenness, the bleak winter. Look at us! she said. We made it.

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“All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking… / Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances… / There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. / Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, / saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.” -Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

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In the dead of night, before the royal coffin journeyed from Balmoral to Holyrood, a small mourning procession disturbed my sleep: a black car and kilted soldiers, trailed by policemen on horses—hooves ringing out over cobblestones. I lay abed, insomniac, thinking in fragments of Plath, “Love is a shadow. / How you lie and cry after it / Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. / All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, / till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, / Echoing, echoing.” Always this poem, an elm expanding its roots.

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“I / enter, without retreat or help from history, / the days of no day, my earth / of no earth, I re-enter / the city in which I love you. / And I never believed that the multitude / of dreams and many words were vain.” -Li-Young Lee, “The City in Which I Love You”

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How many raindrops ’til rainfall? Passerby barrel past, chins tucked in upturned collars. How many brisk and misty days until summer surrenders to autumn? O, fickle gradient of seasons. Such obscurification from the thing itself—an image of an image of an image. Robert Hass penned an explanation to Czesław Miłosz on the poetic difference between o! and oh!—one being an invocation, a declaration of wonder or fierce longing, and the other a thought cut short in a moment of consuming surprise.

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“In a dream, rain ran past me. / Half-shouting, half stumbling. Tripping over its dress of rain. / Beauty always seems to rush straight through me. On its way to someplace else… / In a dream, I walk across a plain carrying books filled with flowers. / People in books carry tulips and secrets and handwritten letters to each other. / Maybe my life is trying to tell me something. These days, / I want to wander. But the past still needs me.” -Hua Xi, “The Past Still Needs Me”

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The night before leaving the coast, I hardly slept. Scrubbing and cleaning and packing away memories, followed by tossing and turning with dreams of overflow, too many possessions. I do not want this many things to name me, a small lopsided kingdom. In that kitchen, a friend said she believed love was the center of everything. In those months, I grew accustomed to seagull chatter, corpulent spiders, and the rickety dresser. I read Dickinson’s envelope poems and knitted hats. Students would go skateboarding down North Street in the wee hours or singing merrily offkey. My world turned there, found its axis in a hospitable solitude.

A year ago, when the man of kindness dropped off the last of my things, he enveloped me in a warm hug at the threshold before he turned to go. I think you will be very happy here, he said.

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“I grew up with horses and poems / when that was the time for that… / Women have houses now, and children. / I live alone in a kind of luxury. / I wake when I feel like it, / read what Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva, / At night I watch the apartments / whose windows are still lit / after midnight. I fell in love. / I believed people. And even now / I love the yellow light shining / down on the dirty brick wall.” -Linda Gregg, “Staying After”

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The German word Bildungsroman means “novel of education” or “novel of formation.” A common variation of the Bildungsroman is the Künstlerroman, a novel dealing with the formative years of an artist. There are four traditional stages found within a Bildungsroman: loss, journey, conflict and personal growth, and maturity. The Bildungsroman traditionally ends on a positive note, though its action may be tempered by resignation and nostalgia.