Hinge

Another wonderful book by Molly Spencer, Hinge (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020). Its eerie cover is a doorknob in the shape of a human hand. When I woke this morning at 3:33, something I do, I came down to read the rest of it, begun yesterday, falling asleep again with this hand at my breast. A bad dream woke me, seeming in keeping with the darker themes of the book, the Grimm fairy tales woven in, the myth of Persephone and Demeter, the body wracked by lupus, the cold houses, one full of moths...

Reading If the house and Hinge together in August was good. It reminded me of Molly Spencer's big year of awards: 2019--with the Brittingham Prize for If the House and the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award for Hinge, written first, published second, after 100 rejections, which should inspire us all!

And, of course, I found August: "The slow ambush / of August / heat..." on p. 31. Late in the book, the gorgeous "Elegy" has August in it, the speaker addressing her former self:

                           Girl I was,

     you keep asking the way
     fledglings beg at an empty nest. Go back

     to your shirtless, half-boy, August afternoons.
     Go to your footpath, your hill of shade.

I'm glad of the helpful notes at the end (as I always am, when poets provide them!), with sources for epigraphs and imbedded lines, erasure, overall intertextuality that engages me in other poets' work as well as these poems, a great reminder of community and, perhaps, especially given the myths and tales, the collective unconscious. And/or maybe I'm just validating my dream on the couch...

I was struck by "Most Accidents Occur at Home," its Adam-and-Eve, Cain-and-Abel resonance in contemporary domesticity. "Nobody tells you this: / Every day is a creation story." And how "Girl with Book and Angel" is a kind of annunciation story. Then "Girl with House and Lost Boys" brings us Peter Pan, Neverland. Childhood, darkened by later experience, rolls over these poems until the light breaks in, and luck, and resilience.

Also, though I am immersed just in the reading now, and in things going on in my own family life, these are the poems that make me want to write again. Thank you, Molly Spencer, for these books and your little-room-for-poetry-and-the-writing-life blog, the stanza, of the past.

If the house

Molly Spencer is a poet I've admired for a long time, and I loved reading If the house (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) here in August, for the Sealey Challenge. 

Of course, I encountered August in actual lines of the poems! First, in the poem "Bridging": "You've been trying to get this right--August / evening, ten o'clock and the sky / still rinsed with light." Gorgeous, huh? And again at the end, the very last poem, "I Talk Myself through the Facts of Each Day," and I must include the fact that I have just picked peaches in my parents' back yard!

     Here is a peach
     fat in my hand. This means
     it must be August.

Indeed. I loved these quiet, lonesome poems. It's a sad, gray book with snow in it, sorrow, the loving care of children, and the wisdom (and beauty) of not crying over spilled milk.

I found other coincidences beyond August. Goldenrod will be blooming here soon, and I love these lines from "Meadow / A Reckoning":

     Girl, you have burned yourself out. Goldenrod
     Rusts at your edges, the dazed sky sharpens
     Its blunted blade toward blue.

As I read these lines during the August evening, in the poem "Disclosures / If you are aware of any nuisance animals, such as crows, chickens, or barking dogs," "The crows will go on gathering / inside you," batches of crows were flying overhead, congregating in the north by northwest...very Hitchcockian.

I loved the two poems, "Conversation with Glass and Joist" and "Conversation with Windows and Green," that show the basic incompatibility of a married couple. The silence, the distance. By chance, I had just seen Aloha, and its scenes with a silent husband (sometimes with subtitles) and his yearning wife, though these involve some comedy, and Spencer's poems have no such comic relief; instead, a gripping intensity.

The sadness is relieved by fierce honesty. Titles still laden with sorrow begin to quiver with hope: "As if life can go on as it has" and "Even so, the first bird." I woke before the first bird to tell you so.

Patient Zero

Recently I dreamed I lived in a waterworld, and now this cover!--art by Jeremy Miranda, Searching--for Patient Zero by Tomás Q. Morín (Copper Canyon, 2017). And I kept intersecting with the book as I read along. The title poem, "Patient Zero," which makes you think of AIDS, or Covid, or the movie Contagion, is really about love as "a worried, old heart / disease," quoting Son House lyrics to lay out a theory about humans and animals stricken with "something...divine and endless." Love.

The book includes a translation of Pablo Neruda's poem "Calle a Calle," that begins, "So I am tired of being a man." It did seem in a different voice in a way. A dreamed voice? An underwater voice? 

In "At the Supermarket," the speaker imagines himself into a Rockwell painting with others in line with him at the cashier, leading to the fabulous closing lines: "the girl totals and totals what we owe, / as we inch and inch toward the infinite." [Intersection--I have a supermarket poem, too! "Grocery Store at Night."] In the wonderful "Carità Americana," he retells a Roman story about milk and generosity to include cows and a cowbird [where I intersect again with poems of my own] and pity, which may be a kind of love.

There is a remarkable long poem called "Sing Sing" about a prisoner who keeps drafting a letter to her parole board. In it, I learn that "Sing Sing" must come from "the Sint Sinck / tribe who fished and camped // the shores..." Indeed, looking further, I find that Sint Sinck means "stone upon stone," and are the white stones of the famous prison at Ossining, New York.

I connected again and again with poems in Patient Zero, but I'll leave you with some lines from "Stargazing":

        ...There was a way
     I moved then, prehistoric
     you might call it, that I don't move now,
     not since life taught me patience
     never filled a hungry stomach or slowed
     the sure fist of a bully...

That rang so true, and made me sad, until I went back to the first line, to track the prehistoric, "I used to walk like a sloth," and smiled to think of the sloth in Zooptopia.

Only As the Day is Long

Only As the Day is Long, by Dorianne Laux (Norton, 2019), is a big book. It had a bookmark* in it, so it's part new read, part re-read, and I've read many of these poems earlier, too; she's a poet I've admired for a long time. The bookmark was at "The Orgasms of Organisms," about insects mating, and as I read it, cicadas were loud around, my husband reading in a hammock hung from our sweetgum tree and half-dismantled swingset-fort contraption left by the previous owners of our house. 

We are living a long, perfect summer day together. I've been reading and weeding. He's got the electric mower charged and parked out here as if he's going to mow. It's still Sunday...but I won't finish this book till Monday, as I can read "only as the day is long" and then no more.

*a Jesse White, Secretary of State, Illinois Center for the book bookmark!

How I love "Savages," about four boys reading poetry on the floor of a bookstore. "Democracy" gives me her political insight: "You can feel it now: why people become Republicans," but she isn't one, evidently. There are poems about the homeless, the poor, the troubled and disadvantaged, the hard-working class. Waitresses, nurses.

There are poems about trees. "Cello" is also about love, music, transformation...and about "a dead tree...fall[ing] into the arms / of a living tree," coupled then forever. Poems about birds, starling, raven, crow. About men, beloved, remembered, soldiers, musicians, Mick Jagger, Philip Levine.

I find my coincidence, the phrase "Against the insomnia of August," while reading, awake, in August. I find many a favorite stanza. Here's one, from "Late-Night TV":

     We know nothing about how it all works,
     how we end up in one bed or another,
     speak one language instead of the others,
     what heat draws us to our life's work
     or keeps us from a dream until it's nothing
     but a blister we scratch in our sleep.

Often I say to myself, I am never lonely, or hardly ever, I say today, Blue Monday in the blog, but yesterday afternoon, I was strangely lonely, and called some friends, and turned again to poetry, this book, an open-hearted, yearning, sometimes lonely book, and it helped.

I saved the last section, the new poems, for today, Monday, Sealey Challenge, Day 16. But yesterday I let the long day's shadows fall over me on the weathered wooden glider, softened by an ivy-print comforter (since I can't find any glider cushions at Bed, Bath, and Beyond...and don't really shop anymore, and now this is just like a diary, this reading/writing practice, sorry...), and I rested.

Ah, but the new poems, read early on this Blue Monday, are mother poems, death-of-the-mother poems, beautiful with complicated grief. Piano music poems, for the mother played. With touches of bedroom slippers, a metal collander, Route 66 as the Mother Road. Another favorite stanza:

     There will always be
     silence, no matter
     how long someone
     has wept against
     the side of a house,
     bare forearms pressed
     to the shingles.

And here, in "Letter to My Dead Mother," is a couplet I recognize as similar to something my own mother has told me:

     You told me when you were 72
     You still felt 25 behind your eyes.

A Plumber's Guide to Light

Oh, my! A Plumber's Guide to Light, by Jesse Bertron (Rattle, 2021) was the perfect book to read today! I read it right before church--Zoom Church. It had occurred to me when I woke up that maybe I should have saved Holy Magic for today because of the word "holy," but instead it's a holy Random Coinciday in the blog because

1) today's Zoom Church readings were from 2 Chronicles 34:8-12, 14-19 about repairing the house of the Lord and "On Houses" by Kahlil Gibran

2) A Plumber's Guide to Light is all about the building trades (and so much more!)

3) one of the workers in the book is actually named Antonio, like my actual husband, who is a carpenter with electrician and plumber skills, too, as well as being a visual artist, the way Jesse Bertron is a laborer as well as a poet!

I connect with so much in this book! In the very first poem, "Shorty," the speaker does his work "with Shorty sitting / on a  five-gallon primer bucket" supervising. Same scene described to me by my husband, doing some labor with a retired but still licensed plumber at hand for his expertise. 

I've heard the refrain "Good enough for government work," from the poem "Slop," repeated by members of the extended family. And I give you these great lines from "Slop" (in addition to the ones about shoddy work on a toilet that mean "when the wax ring goes, // a little water mixed with human shit will leak onto the floor / with every flush"):

     Never buy a house built on a Friday, is something Jacob said
     on a Friday, as he walked away from a bad solder.

     The human race: built on a Friday!
     That's what Genesis says--a book of the Bible that I love,
     starring as it does an expert working at a speed

     that may invite disaster.

See what I mean? Perfect for a Sunday. And also a perfect blend of humor, reality of the working world, and religious philosophy.

I connect with the actual labor, having helped my husband lift and move heavy things (scary on the stairs), sand hardwood floors, grout bathroom tile, and paint porches. "Antonio loves to work..." begins  a line from the poem "Orientation," but when I told my husband he should read this book, he said, "I don't like plumbing much." (He's working on a bathroom right now.)

And there are beautiful, devastating poems about the mother here, losing her memory. In the poem "Dust," the mother forgetting her plan to "end her life" before her mind gets worse was strangely comforting to me. And "Telephone Crew," with the mother having to fend off the archer who came "with the crew...to shoot an arrow tied to high-gauge fishing line / above the trees, and use that line to string the cable // to her house," was altogether marvelous. First, who knew? How ingenious! Second, what a strong woman.

So! I love this book! I leave you with two central stanzas from "There Was No Assignment but There Will Be a Test":

     It has been a hard year, so I want to tell my neighbor's kid
     that the most important part of a story
     is someone you love will ask for what they need
     and you'll fail them in a way you have prepared for all your life.

     The only way you'll see out of the cell
     of your regret will be
     to hold the splintered thread of the everyday
     as if it were spun gold.

(See spun gold electrical wire above. Plus a toilet wax ring. Sigh....)