September 2023
Audio
Zoeglossia Poem of the Week Series: Webs of Longing and Love
Curated by Gaia Thomas
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Zoeglossia Poem of the Week Series: Webs of Longing and Love
Curated by Gaia Thomas
Calling back the dead, or simply calling to the dead. Or maybe just cursing the dead. In any case, this series deals with the tin can phoneline to the other realm. What parts of us are on the other side? Let’s begin at the ending. The swan’s wing in Elizabeth Meade’s (Sept. 24) poem reminds me of the swan’s wing burial site. Six thousand years ago, a Danish mother was laid to rest beside her infant child on the wing of a swan. It’s thought the bird was chosen for its ability to transcend the realms of land, water, and air. In my imagination, the wing acts as spirit boat for her journey with her child to the other side.
In the movie Impromptu George Sand is listening to Chopin play the piano. She asks an onlooker, “Madame, do you pray?” The woman says, “Yes.” Sand continues, “And do you ever hear an answer?” “—Well, no.” “Madame,” she says, “There is your answer.” Sometimes we find our cries answered in the love of the people around us.
What happens when we are not met, when our worlds fail to meet us? Meade’s poem gives witness to the alienation faced by disabled people. Waking up in a world that does not recognize you. Or a world that has been conditioned to tune out your truth. Leonard Cohen said, in a world where we cannot meet songs of love are protest songs. Her last stanza reminds me of another Zoeglossia Fellow’s poem, Margaret Ricketts’ The Mansion. “Zoeglossia/is a mansion, a house of kindness/built by every single one of us.” (Wordgathering)
I used to dream of crossing the water in a raven’s costume. We have different reasons for crossing into the space between worlds. Sometimes the reason is revenge. Or to avenge and recover drown parts of ourselves. Ava Cipri’s (Sept. 17) poem reminds me of this kind of reconnaissance mission. I have been thinking of the muddy in between places where we must go to find our younger selves. There is hope there, although it is dim and spooky. Perhaps power is a better word. There is much power to be recovered at the bottom of the well. Enchantment is a dark and lovely grace. “I want to be the space/between/their electric breath/between the longing/it’s dangerous, here.” Desire is a tightrope walk across the forest of betrayal. It gives us what we have left.
When I was recovering from my brain injury, Christine Robbins (Sept 10) sent me Lorca’s essay on Duende. In it he writes of the “arsenic lobster” that can fall on the head of any unsuspecting passerby. I puzzled for a while over the dead pigeon in the middle of her poem. Much like that arsenic lobster – it arrests. “A pigeon on the porch/Left by someone else’s cat/The dead eye open mirror”. We need these kinds of awakenings.
She writes:
“If I’ve opened
A portal in my mind
I mean to close it now I mean
To staunch the haunting”
One year into the pandemic I started bleeding interminably. I ransacked the web for a reason or a cure. Consulting Traditional Chinese Medicine, I found it is believed that the heart breaks sometimes and can no longer hold back the flow of blood from leaving the body. Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences. This poem deals with what happens when the beloved does not answer back. How we are shaped by intractable losses. Pour yourself a cup of tea and sink into these mesmerizing lines. She’s weaving a ribbon of gauze around the deserted trees. She’s walking the fragile perimeter of loss and reporting back to us the ache. She holds a candle out there on the edge of night. She is Holden (from Catcher in the Rye) when he says:
“... I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.”
And now, folks, I am going to cry, so I can’t write any more. Because she caught me once upon a time. And I brought this collection of magic weavers together because I believe in the strength of crip webs. I believe we are held together by fibers blended of longing and love.