March 2023
Zoeglossia Poem of the Week Series: Swarms of Grace: On the Poetic Gifts of Day, Tyler, Klein, and Monet
Curated by Ricky Ray
There’s a school of thought that says poems are spells cast to conjure hidden alcoves in mystery, alcoves we mightn’t otherwise access or know existed. A school that says, having imbibed these “poems,” these actively evolving generativities, we are thus drugged with their starsongs, their many-billion-year-percolating rhythms and valences. A school that says these spells are animate presences entwining with and enlarging our own, encouraging us to more deeply encounter ourselves and our arrangements under their influence. A school that says poems are existential assistances, little guides and guardians turning on lights and tuning in darks to help us survive and experience revelation. What that school is, and whether anyone actually went there, I have no idea. I may have just made up the school and its premises, but let’s pretend, given that belief is primarily the art of pretending—perhaps?
What am I talking about? I’m writing an essay on the fly, and I’m meditating on the work of four very fine poets and the processes by which we get to participate in poetry, and I don’t know where I am or who I am or where I’m going or how I’m going to get there, is the point, and I think it would be foolish or delusional to pretend to know, so I want to proceed from a foundation of unknowingness, of moving slowly into familiarity by small accretions, getting lost and finding myself, lost in the work and lost in the woods (i.e., my thickets of mindheart), and lost in feeling, then finding my bearings, and finding meaning, and finding my way into a memory of the shape the experience of poetry holds, finding my way into a sense of the shape I hold, which serves as an intimation of the shape that holds me—don’t we want that, especially when we’re at an existential loss or impasse, as I am often these days? Don’t we want to find resonance, and to have that resonance sweep our feet out from under us, but also catch us, and lower us to the ground, kindly? Don’t we want to feel that at some level—however far down in our veins, however far flung where the sky wanes—we are deeply, tenderly, Universally held?
I do, and I did in these four poems, and I’m sure I’ll feel that way in them again—not always, and differently each time, but often enough and pleasurably enough that they become not only figments of my consciousness, but consciousness of which I am a figment, that is, a friend. Over the past month, these poems have become my friends, and it is with the full admiration and trepidation of friendship, that I have the pleasure to explore them here at length, and to introduce them to you, dear readers and listeners and Earthly companions, and I hope that you might find your own path to poetic illumination and friendship in the encounter. And to maybe one day pay it forward. For it’s not just the author and audience that want pleasure in the reading: I deeply believe the poems also want to be of pleasure in the mindheart where they unfurl: why else would they seek lodging there? Why else would they become such intimate, heartening guests?
I say the poems became my friends. But did the poets? I hope so, I would like to believe those friendships are now taking root and winding deep, yes. And I also think the poems are the poets, the way the moments of our lives are comprised of us and sweep out beyond our human forms or fields of perception, enlivening the world in ways and wheres we can’t imagine. But to think of them, from time to time, these gifts of self we find and shape, give and share, and pass between us, to know our lives are now residing in the mindhearts of others, and holding them, and being held—well, isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it beautiful that we get to do this, to be this, to share in these hidden alcoves, to taste these spells, experience their magic, that we get to take care and take part?
I don’t know what beauty is on its own terms, but the arrangements of being and meaning that sing in poetry and turn up the heat in our often-chilly veins, they feel truly beautiful to me. Which is important, vitally important, because beauty saves me daily from desperation and anguish, it saves me from depression and futility, it steps in to take the hit from excruciating nerve-lightning: beauty saves me from dread, the kind so deep and dangerous it’s better not to follow that line of thought. Beauty tethers me to a sense of importance and a sense of hope, and it gives me a reason to continue. It gives me a reason to get out of bed. A reason to love someone and something every day, because that feeling, even if I’m the only one who ever feels it, is life-savingly beautiful.
All of which is to say I’m utterly grateful for these four poets: Meg Day (March 6), Bethan Tyler (March 13), Frances Klein (March 20), and Arianna Monet (March 27). And I’m grateful for their poems: “On the Day I Buried My Singing,” “Bad Gardener,” “Another Life,” and “sometimes maggie rogers is the only thing that makes sense”—notice how just the titles themselves begin to weave an incantatory magic. And I’m grateful for all the poets who submitted to my open call whose work I didn’t publish. Sometimes a line from a poem that doesn’t work is the very thing that saves me. And I’m thankful for the poets whose work I hoped to publish and couldn’t. Sometimes a poet doesn’t have a poem for you, but they have another poet in mind and send you seeking, and the other poet’s work sings to you in a key that fits even better than the poet who recommended them. The mystery reveals itself in the divine line, and the mystery guides us through the dark, knowing us better than we can know ourselves, and the mystery—thankfully—always stays mysterious, a path that could lead anywhere at any time.
While I was reading through the submissions to my open call, for instance, the poet Sage Ravenwood sent two lines like weirdly benevolent wormholes coursing through my mind:
This world still chews on pieces of me.
Kindness slips in between bites.
I mean, with that first line, oof—she seized reality by the collar and nailed it. Notice how much work seemingly unassuming words are doing: this world, of how many and which others; still, as in the world has chewed me for a long time, or has come to chew me again; and pieces of, as if the pieces of us the world chews are deliberate targets, or deemed worthy to the exclusion of others, or the unfortunate sites of circumstance: are the unchewed pieces lucky, or missing out, or a strange mixture thereof? But Ravenwood doesn’t just nail reality, she inquires into it, offers it a moment of grace, if grace it has to offer, and it does: between bites, between blows, kindness slips in and softens us, steels us for the next bite, makes it endurable, maybe even enjoyable, to be chewed, and worthwhile. Such dynamism, such beauty: yes, thank you, Sage: you save me.
The poet Catherine Garbinsky equally softened, soothed and ignited my days, writing lines that, entering my eyes, seemed to know the state of my spine, which is to say, the state of some of the darkest recesses of my soul. She says “my spine twists / and twirls away from me” in a “muscle jerk cricket song” and it feels like her hand has taken my twisted spine out of my body and laid it out under the sun or along some swampy creek-side where it can spasm and croak and unravel while she sings to it, preparing it to reenter my skeleton, a kinder demon than it was when she took it out. I read those lines and I knew immediately that she knew how deeply spinal agonies can barbwire the muscles, the will, the senses, and that she had formed, like most of us spinal suffers (out of necessity), a few forms of magic for tempering its tantrums. And I knew she knew the utterly exhausting vigilance that spinal maladies require: “Track your triggers, / remember your nightmares and their mothers.” Every time, that sentence gives me chills. Why track, why remember? Many reasons, but the one that skewers me now: to study the lineage of your torturers, to make a practice of remembering them, is to continually improve your understanding of how to handle their attacks. Catherine, your lines, they make me feel more than seen, more than understood—they defuse me, they arm me, and they do the nearly impossible: they make me feel felt.
Do you, dear reader, see what I mean about poetry as an animate force, a spellcasting, an existential assistance, a soul magic wherein other lives take up residence within and improve my own? At times like these, I recall that life and Mother Earth and Grandmother Universe are nested processes of auto-poeisis, that is, they’re self-generative creativities, embodying and transformative, in which we get to participate, a little human lifesong in the Earthsong in the UniVerseSong that transcends whatever we might call it—the All-Song that gives rise to music, playing our cells and senses and the celestial spheres with equal dexterity and majesty and worth. I’m flying out on a limb here, but that’s because poetry gives me wings, and it connects me to the continuity to which we all so miraculously belong. And when I’m feeling lost, I know no better medicine than to be reminded of the enormity of that membership, this immanent and ever-present kinship called creation.
As Meg Day so beautifully says in the opening stanza of her poem, “On the Day I Buried My Singing”:
I came from the mouth of the universe,
arrived quietly like a door that shuts gentle
into its latch.
I love the way Day’s work feels so open, magnanimous, so at home in its mystery, an invitation to mean as much and as complexly as possible, an invitation to be, writ large. Her I feels spacious enough to include whatever happens to reside there, or whatever wants to, and its presence, in my mindheart, flows until it arrives in one form, and then unfurls and flows unto another, arriving eventually in the human, the I’s energy settling into the organism as if clicking into its latch, a perch, perhaps, from which to feel this world—its love its pain its compulsion to break down or rise into the light and sing.
But Day’s tale is not merely the tale of the ability to sing, it’s the tale of how one goes from singing to burying one’s song. As a deaf poet, Day knows all too well that song sorrows and suffers us as much as it uplifts and exalts. And her insight into sound is so intimate, so deeply embodied, it’s revelatory: in an interview, she speaks of sound the way the hearing speak of sensation, as the way a poem feels in the mouth, the way its music plays directly into her body from the mouth’s vibrations. Let us sit with that for a moment: that sound is, beyond its aural capacities, the way song feels in the mouth, that sound is the feeling of song moving through our bodies, throughout and beyond the frequencies of so-called hearing. As a sufferer of hyperacusis myself—extreme pain induced by certain frequencies of sound—Day helps me face the danger and fears of damaged hearing:
When the earth came close
to my ears, they filled with the rumble of its axis
turning, the static & sighs of gnawing gears.
I emptied them of metal & found myself
warbling along, mouthing out a jawbone full of hum,
some garbled ballad.
With the earth by the ear,
I marched us silently into the woods. There,
we pressed our hands to the ground.
Day’s language feels both ethereal and gravitational, the story both specific enough and mysterious enough for us to experience what happens without quite knowing how it transpired. I ruined my own hearing my going too far and too loudly into a certain genre of music, and it seems a near-perfect metaphor to think of such calamity as coming too close to the sound of the Earth turning, a sound we may not be equipped to hear, or may hear only by feeling the way it moves through our bodies, perhaps not ruining our hearing in the process, but transforming it into something more primal. And here’s where Day’s genius shines: undergoing a transformation is one thing, realizing it and participating in the transformation quite another. I love that she marches her-and-Earth-self into the woods to listen by hand to the ground, where she calls for Earth to sing from the ground back into her hand and body, calling for Earth to reveal her its ways of singing, which extend far beyond those of the tongue:
Show me
the need for sound in this forest, the voice of rivers
rocked & boughed by time.
Draw me the song
that sings the sky stifled, make a map in this dirt
leading the way to a name that isn’t smothered
by the voice that speaks it, a cloud that doesn’t
evaporate with every attempt to call out
its lining as your own.
I didn’t fully grasp the transformation in Day’s poem before I wrote this. I grasped it as I was writing, as if in writing I was feeling my way through understanding, hearing the meaning of her music in my body. The music that takes the song out of the sky and puts it into the blood. The music that names things not by speech but by attention. The music of rivers carving forests and feeding their thirsty flights into the heavens. The music that helps me move past the pain of hyperacusis towards the pleasures of being a vibratory medium. The music that buries one’s singing in order for the song to emerge from the soil as a far-more-complex means of hearing. This poem, my dear reader, is for me a transformation, an awakening into a deeper existence.
An existence full of meaning, and an existence full of mistakes. Bethan Tyler’s poem, “Bad Gardener,” could equally have been torn from a page of my life: I suck at gardening, and our garden beds are generally more weed than vegetable by the end of the season, more wilderness flourishing under failed intentions than careful nourishment approaching harvest, but by then, I’m usually spending more time admiring the wildflowers than wishing I’d managed what I set out to accomplish. Tyler’s poem feels to me full of the poet’s fondness for the off-kilter, the strange, the half-accident, the slip-up, the fortuitous but simultaneously devastating distraction:
The rain tells me it comes by mistake,
it cannot heed my wanting.
Will you be here tomorrow?
No,
I was mistaken.
I’ll come back yesterday.
I’d asked after it a dozen summers, blamed it for my failed vegetable gardens,
my slug-torn cucumbers and sad spinach, but no.
Today it makes its mistake all over the lawn,
dissolves blossoms as though they were without substance,
just air in pink dresses and ballet shoes.
I love her uneasy footing: how can rain come by mistake? How can it be heedless of desire? Easily. Let’s say that the life of a garden, or the life of a blossom, or the life of an intention, would be best fed by a certain degree of rain under certain timing and conditions. And say the rain doesn’t meet them. Say it comes too late and the garden dies of thirst. Say it falls too hard and kills the blossom. Say it comes to serve intention in the form of motivation, but too seldom, and too few drops at a time, so intention settles for attention, which, thanks to rain’s wrongness, can actually be quite a nice consolation prize:
I know it means no damage, means nothing at all,
and for this I want to embrace it,
want to hold its welling and pooling, its sliding and drooling,
its constant thrum on the greenhouse like a timpani or a tired dancer.
Tyler’s desire to accept the rain in its wrongness, and to undo that sense of wrongness, feels like my own desire to accept my failures when they run some vector of my life into ruin. But adding another failure, when I can’t undo the guilt of my wrongs, and when I can’t undo the neglect of my weed-haven garden, and when I can’t managed to see the rain as anything other than an uncooperative nuisance. This failure to accept failure or misfortune can also be annoying, exasperating, a feeding of irritability:
Still, I blame it for my own unhappy accidents,
the diversions and distractions that turned the tomatoes sour
and the cucumbers to flutes, all holes for the wind to whistle through.
I love, I hate, the same thing spins on a wobbly axis
and my imprecision calls it by new names.
Tyler’s poem feels like the push and pull of my own battles with guilt and acceptance, ambition and laziness, gratitude and despair, the ceaseless trying and failing that approaches the moment where it becomes too painful to bother. Were it not for a wry sense of humor that helps shoulder the weight of my human failings, were it not for an understanding that commonplace mistakes (and hen’s-tooth miracles) are the way nature proceeds, are the very mechanism of evolving, I might get stuck in that pain, I might play it on repeat, mistaking mistaking mistaking, forgetting to laugh, forgetting grace, and getting dangerously close to becoming the dissolving blossom:
The rain keeps making mistakes and so do I. But I
don’t get the grace of no tomorrow,
I will wake up to the sound of someone repotting my raspberries,
the guilt will crush me, I’ll be flat on my back
like a blossom slurried by rain.
I say like, but it’s a different thing entirely.
I like that Tyler goes dark and stays there, that she finds no easy out, no redemption to offer, just the crushing of guilt, duty, disappointment and failure, no resolution but her ability to withstand that suffering like the blossom, except it’s not like that—it might end that way, but there’s a crucial difference: while the blossom’s done, and while our days full of mistakes are done, we’re not the blossom, or the past, we’re the root, the plant that can be knocked flat on its back, then pick itself back up and grow again. Or not—Tyler doesn’t say: and that feels to me even truer than the thought of the root: to be crushed, laid out, knocked flat on our backs, waiting for whatever comes. Another life might be nice if it shows up around the corner.
And “Another Life” is precisely where we encounter another meditative poet: Frances Klein, full of motherhood and sensitivity, seeing and dreaming, she watches the way Day listens, for any deeper sense the world might make. Her eye sees in such detail it seems to slow time:
Public Works is deconstructing with mathematical precision
a massive maple that threatens the telephone lines, branches
leaning in to eavesdrop on million-dollar deals and petty gossips.
Men stand at the base, arrayed around a machine thrum-rumbling
with hungry insistence. Their eyes guide the loop that will steady
each branch for the saw, moving easily as a needle seeking thread.
My son watches this nature video in reverse from his perch
in the bucket swing. He gives equal attention to machine,
loop, and saw, to the limb that slips its binding and daggers earthward
toward one of the men, the young one who keeps tucking dark curls
under his hardhat only to have them escape time and again
like unruly children. The man dives out of the way just in time,
coming to ground in a fountain of mulch.
On the surface, Klein’s vision could be called a simple matter of witness. But the depth and sensitivity of her witnessing is anything but simple. Notice the way the tree isn’t being “cut down,” it’s being “deconstructed,” a sly use of the negative that brings to mind the artistry of its construction, the way it grew strong enough to threaten whatever stands in its way, and the way it grew to listen into the human conversation with a kind of hearing we can scarcely fathom. Notice how the tree’s threat moves out of the nebulous future into real time, nearly impaling one of the men who brought it harm. And notice the way the scene unfurls like a dangerous world closing in on the precious and vulnerable life of her son, as if any one of these dangers might suddenly change direction and make him its target. Notice the quiet worry and vigilance that’s never spoken, but almost unbearably loud. It’s enough to induce a psychological implosion:
There are seven alternate universes where the tree flourishes,
left to its own devices. Generations of children trying and failing
to achieve its upper branches, dozing between cradling roots,
saying marriage vows in front of its broad trunk, leaves throwing
themselves from their branches in celebration.
There are twenty-three worlds where the man is fixed
like a showcase beetle to the earth, twelve others where
the bucket swing I push is empty, my arms wrapped around
my hollowness. Am I weeping? I am weeping. I wanted another life,
but this one has a dead stump, a living boy. This one sends the man
home to his husband, sheetfaced, to be kissed back into our world.
Klein’s bomb of observation seems to blow her apart into seven, no, twenty-three, no, endless versions of herself and the world she inhabits. In one life, the tree flourishes and humanity gathers in its branches as members of its extended family. In another life, the tree dies and the man dies and Klein’s child died or never was and the hollowness carves her out. In yet another life, the life she wanted might be happening without her. In all of them, she’s feeling the weight of it all and weeping, weeping, the force of her feeling gathering her scattered filaments of attention back into her body, her present reality back into her line of sight, as if she were a nature video in reverse herself, one where the tree that survived dies, but the man that died survives, and her son survives and that’s enough grace, for one day, to kiss her back to her given life, a life full of the vision of what could happen, and what could be happening, and what is happening—a life full of care for the tenuous tethers of this world.
Sometimes, Klein’s moment of weeping, or Tyler’s moment flat on her back, or Day’s moment with her hand learning the music of the ground, is the only thing that makes sense. Sometimes, or a lot of times, life is a search for one sense-making moment amidst the madness, a few of them strung together keeping us continuous and sane. Arianna Monet is a poet who artfully teases sanity while she courts it, finding reasons to keep living in the things we often overlook, or not in the things but in the grace they offer, a grace that requires a grace in our own perspective in order to see it, receive it, and hopefully, give it back. The sense-making moments of grace are rare, I think, but they’re receptive to cultivation, receptive to a willingness to find them in the oddest of circumstances and intuitions. As Monet says, “sometimes maggie rogers is the only thing that makes sense,” and figuring life out is first a matter of sifting through the onslaught:
a year ago i had it all figured out:
a somedaydream flecked with mica.
rose quartz frogs.
raspberries & landlines.
now look – a closed door and the redwoods are burning.
i sing to my coffee plant.
i talk to the moon.
there are seventy-two swans in the park & they teach me all their dauntless.
a bluejay be way too loud in the dark and, y’know, i get it.
Such sifting can take a long time. The last time life made sense might be an hour ago, a year ago, or seemingly never—has it yet? The circumstances of the moments of grace stick like residues, the memories serving as reminders that grace happened once and might again, and serving as clues of where to look. It could happen in a daydream flecked with mica, could happen in frogs whose tongues are raspberry landlines. But the reveries themselves aren’t the answers, or necessarily benevolent—they can also remind us of the repeated falls from grace, the closed door, the way the redwoods are burning, the way our lives are burning day by day, ever more rapidly, and we can’t get them back.
So what do we do? We spend a great deal of our lives finding the medicines that save us. For me, it’s poetry, it’s reading and writing, admiring and listening to the Earth as she whispers in my blood. For Monet, it might be what happens when she sings to her coffee plant, when she talks to the moon, when she counts the swans in the park and learns the language of all their dauntless. But it’s not just what grace is that matters. Monet teaches us that it matters just as much to pay attention to what grace isn’t: it isn’t the bluejay blaring way too loud in the dark, even if we blare right along with it, even if we want to blare so loud and long the ache that ties us in knots eventually wears out.
When that happens, when we exhaust ourselves and take a breath and emerge stunned and tenderly quiet from the exhaustion, the senses get a chance to reset, and the grace we didn’t find the last time we looked gives us another chance to try again:
i start by counting the miracles.
strawberry leaves.
neon acrylic.
a ball of focaccia dough on the counter
unbaked cloud rising in a glass bowl.
my favorite peanut butter gets discontinued & finally i understand loss.
What are the graces? Let’s see and let’s be:
The strawberry leaves offer themselves as a scripture of miniature miracles. Neon acrylic conjures notions of the music played by shifts in hue. Focaccia dough in a glass bowl raises the cloud of nourishment from blessed field to blessed counter, soon to cross our blessed lips. The discontinuance of a favorite peanut butter feels like the loss of an old friend.
Sometimes the graces arrive in abundance, like swarms of light, little sparrow-flights of illumination that fill the skies, the ground, our pockets, our secrets, our wishes, the park benches. In those moments, existence itself, from the infinitesimal to the infinite, seems to be one fluid dancing, and whatever alights in the sweep of life feels supercharged with sustenance and importance, even the lives that are dying out and giving up one form in search of another, as we ourselves may be giving up the form of our persons and species:
the bottles keep filling with dragonflies.
all the seesaws are out of order.
a sunbeam swallows the ocean. every monarch is sunk by the light.
It seems to me that Monet delivers us grace and the means of discovering grace to ease the constant troubling of consciousness, but she also eases us into the idea that unconsciousness is a grace unto itself, a grace awaiting our inevitable, human-relieving transformation. Her discovery of miracles in the microcosms takes me back to the miracle of our cosmic genesis, and it sunbeams me kaleidoscopically through the full flight and sorrow of this fourteen-billion-year song. And her tenderness towards the ends of things makes the whole journey seem filled with a kindness that slips in between bites.
Monet reminds me, and poetry reminds me: the light began to sing from the darkness. The light ignited everything in its song. The light burned away everything it ignited. It was beautiful, it was terrible, it both gave and relieved us of beauty, companionship, suffering and self. For the past month and a half, this self has been visited by four graces: Monet’s poetry, and Klein’s poetry, and Tyler’s poetry, and Day’s. They feel like swarms of heat encircling and penetrating and warming my soul. They sing to me, and they take up residence in my mindheart and sing from me. They teach me, they trouble me, they save me, they become my friends. They deepen my appreciation of existence, and they give me a moment when everything just shimmers, when there’s a beginning, middle and end of things, and that seems right, a gift so right there’s no need to ask for anything more.