In August
1996, on the morning after my family buried my younger brother, Brendan, I
drove, sick with grief, the eight hours from my parents’ New Jersey home, to
the Fine Arts Work Center in Cape Cod to work for a week with the poet Yusef
Komunyakaa. Only months earlier, in February of that year, after a long,
anxious wait to hear whether or not I had been selected (on the basis of 10
poems) to be one of the fifteen poets chosen for Komunyakaa’s workshop, I had
finally received the happy news. Now, having lived through the shocking
prognosis and dizzyingly swift death of my sweet and funny brother, the
workshop seemed insignificant to me. It
was only because of the loving insistence of my mother, brothers and sisters who
printed out driving directions, packed my bag and quite literally pushed me out
the door (“Brendan would want you to go”) that I found myself heading northeast
that morning.
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| Larkspur, Joni's Yard, 2012 |
Most of that long drive through upstate New York, Connecticut
and Massachusetts is a complete blank to me:
I don’t remember if it was sunny or rainy, whether the traffic was
moving or bumper-to-bumper, or whether I ever stopped for lunch or a bathroom
break during my journey. And how I followed the driving directions and map is a
mystery to me. I assume I was in shock, navigating on autopilot. When I think back on it now, I am grateful to
whatever spirit guided me that day and helped me find my way, without injuring
myself or someone else on those highways. Besotted with grief, my mind was
erased for hours, until I finally began the drive up U.S. Route 6, the highway
that wends its way up Cape Cod, ending in Provincetown—the furthest point east
in the United States—and my destination.
What penetrated the fog of my grief, as I “woke up” on
that highway, was the brilliant, corporeal essence of light. It poured through
my windshield and glittered on the banks of white sands along the road’s
shoulder. It was a quality of light I’d never registered before, active as an
echo, reverberating through the air in heightened, “louder” repetitions. As I
progressed toward Truro, it cascaded off the dunes that banked the road. Maybe
it was my state of grief, but it seemed a tactile presence, otherworldly. Sunlight
as a living, breathing body. The dunes quivered with it, shimmering like hills of
crushed, illuminated stars. Everything was hyper-clarified and outlined—more than itself--dune grass, car hood,
my white hand on the steering wheel. It was a light that held you steady in its
gaze. And I followed it like an answer to a long-held question, up to
Provincetown. I thought of Edward Hopper’s painting, “Cape Cod Morning,” and
how that early morning light in his work gilded everything it draped. There was
something ineffable and lonely in that light, as there was on this highway. For
the woman in Hopper’s painting, light was playing a Siren song. She stretches
herself out the window toward its embrace, slightly dazed, but ready to face
the mystery of the day. I have never
forgotten the substance of that Cape Cod light. It intertwines now in my remembrance
of my brother, illuminates his memories within me.
**
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| Kitchen, Summer 2012 |
This summer, 2012, as sunlight pummels the parched yards
of Pittsburgh, and leaves us walking in a stupor through the 90+ degree days, I
find myself thinking a lot about light: how it’s affecting my newly dug
gardens, how it overwhelms my apartment, which still lacks blinds and curtains,
and how it shapes and colors all that I see. Coincidentally, I find myself reading
many poems, mostly poems by women poets, which juggle the whole spectrum of
shade and blaze.
Inside my new apartment, still sparsely furnished, the
light takes on a range of characteristics, as morning turns to early afternoon
to late afternoon to dusk. Each afternoon, around 5:30 PM, the light pours in
through elm branches, through screen and through my rotating fan, and projects
a film, an exquisite geometric pattern of shadow and sun, which captures kinetic
life unfolding. It’s a sort of documentary short. If I am home at the time, I often
stop whatever I’m doing and sit for a few minutes in the 90-degree living room
to watch it flickering on the far white wall.
It is mesmerizing, and sometimes leads me into meditation (or sometimes a
nap because of the heat!) Breathing deep, my hair stuck to my damp neck, I
watch the interplay of silhouettes on the wall: the leaves sway and dip behind
the oscillating roundness of the fan. And overlaid on this, the screen’s orderly
scrim of tiny squares. The light acts as white space in this dance of moveable
shadows. And lately it’s inspired me to read and re-read poems about the light
by Mary Oliver, Jane Hirschfield, and Susan Hutton. I want to share two of the
poems here, now.
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| Coneflower, New Garden 2012 |
In Susan Hutton’s exquisite 10-line poem “Wujakari,
Yartijumurra, Arawunga, Tokwampari” from her book On The Vanishing of Large Creatures
(2007, Carnegie Mellon University Press), she talks of an incalculable
loss, something that disappears from our world with little fanfare or grief:
Before a language dies we record the
last speaker
to capture the sounds of the words.
When he dies
we go on living, and the world is
not different.
Hutton’s
poetry may not be filled with images of a literal light, because her subjects
are not nature-focused nor about paintings (though both may get referenced.) But
there is something in the illuminating intelligence of the poems, which is
echoed in the clean block typography of some of the poems (perched elegantly in
a sea of white space) that fills her whole book with light for me. Unlike Mary
Oliver, whose poetry plumbs the natural world of the Provincetown coastline
where she’s lived most of her adult life, Hutton’s mix of beautiful, quirky
facts and lyrical observations lights up the complicated world of our inner lives.
And in this poem, Hutton shows us the poignancy of what
“the children of Bathurst Island,” the next generation, stand to lose when
their culture’s original language dies out. Choosing the words of the title as
an example, Hutton translates that they will lose both the idea of and the descriptions
of light, in all its nuances and subtle changes. Here are the remaining 7
lines of the poem:
There is always rain, whether it
falls on the grass, on the roof,
or far out to sea. There is wind,
though it sounds bigger
when it rattles the windows, whips
the trees.
But the children of Bathurst Island,
who now sleep inside,
can no longer say when it is first light before sunrise
or when it is the darkness before daylight, when it is
early
morning before dawn or early morning
when birds sing.
 |
| David's Rooftop, 2012 |
In our ever-glutted world of new product, cheaper
product, faster product, technology replacing itself at warp speed and trying
to sell us the newly updated I-Pad, cell phone, whatever, this loss of language
may seem trivial. But, as I often tell
my high school students, to lose language, to choose to only use the words we
knew in third to seventh grade and refuse all new vocabulary, is to choose to
narrow your ideas, and thus, to narrow your understanding of your world. The beauty of this lost language of Bathurst
Island becomes clear, because in naming the subtle differences “early light
before dawn,” vs. “early morning when the birds sing” demonstrate such an act
of attention to the natural world of the island that the original people
settled. They knew the sky, the sun, the water, the whole of their environment
so intimately that they put in language each shift and particularity. And with this loss, it might be suggested,
comes a loss of that intimacy and awareness of the natural world.
The light in Mary Oliver’s poem “The Terns” (House of Light) is a literal, witnessed
light. Here, she describes the daily ritual of sea birds diving into the
Atlantic searching for food:
The birds shrug off
the slant air,
they plunge into the sea
and vanish
under the glassy edges
of the water,
and then come back,
flying out of the waves,
as white as snow,
shaking themselves,
shaking the little silver fish,
crying out
in their own language,
voices like rough bells—
The
light is everywhere in this poem: the air is “slant” with it, as the rays slice
through and land in the sea beside the terns. The water has “glassy edges,” and
the birds are transformed and illuminated by their journey and “come back…as
white as snow.” The hapless fish, taken
from their lives and soon to be a quick meal forgotten, are caught in the
sunlight’s net, also glimmering “silver” in their final moments. There is something airy and elegant, slim and
bejeweled in this scene, punctuated only by the cries of the successful
scavengers, their “voices like rough bells,” another image that peals metallic
and silver, Cape Cod’s amplified light playing a surface to corona.
 |
| Monumental, Painting by William DeBernardi, G-Square Gallery, Ligonier The surprise in Oliver’s lit images is that it leads her, initially, to this observation: |
This is a poem
about death,
about the heart blanching
in
its fold of shadows
because it knows
someday it will be
the fish and the wave
and no longer itself—
She has introduced us to the rich darkness, the concept of “duende,”
of which the Spanish poet, Gabriel Garcia Lorca wrote. Oliver’s lines are duende in action, the shading that balances the stark light, adding
dimension and depth to the scene. Here, the heart loses all color, and like the
birds lifting from the waves, it becomes “blanched,” or bleached white “in its
fold of shadows.” The fish is eaten. And by implication, Oliver is reminded
that “someday” every living thing in the scene will be gone and “no longer”
themselves. She might have stopped there with her textured “painting” of light
and shadow interplay, but Oliver turns again, illuminating our own day with
this finish:
This is a poem about loving
this world and everything in it:
the self, the perpetual
muscle,
the passage in and out,
the bristling
swing of the
sea.
And in her words, she has captured the mysterious nature of
light. Like all ephemera, it is meant to be savored in the moment and loved for
its palpable presence in our days. Light clarifies everything we gaze upon,
coloring it, shaping the substance of our time indoors and out. And Oliver
urges us to also love our “self, the perpetual muscle,” as we hopefully make
our own days something lit and meaningful (though, at other times, something
shadowed) as we navigate the “bristling/swing of the sea.” We are out in it now, past wading, deep and shimmering,
and trying our hardest to be the light we see.
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| Backyard Stoop, Garden, 2012 |
July 9, 2012
Nicely written.
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