[Reprinted
from the original 2016 publication by Lunar Chandelier Collective]
Gradiva
She who walks
walking,
the woman who walks
that woman
walking,
the splendid one
unreal twice
over
thus real, who walks
with her sisters,
the three who walk
early, in the dew.
The dew, called
“what is it?” called
Dieu,
the teaching water,
drops of the night.
She who does not stride
who does not go dreamily
who is real, who walks
with naked foot
who lifts her foot
and sets it down
sets her heel down
in wet grass
she whose toes, whose
arch, the arch of whose foot
whose foot lifts
and flexes, whose toes
press the earth
whose heel is firm
she who walks
walking ahead,
even of her sisters.
Across the wet field.
She who has risen early
who hears the owl
and the mourning dove.
She who lifts her skirt
who lifts the heavy cloth
the folds of
the stuff of her skirt
who gathers in her hand
the soft cloth of her garment
and lifts it from the ground
walking with wet feet and
ankles
with cool feet in the dew.
With warm thighs under her
skirt
under the cloth, her warmth
as she walks, as she walks away
from chaos, history, obsession,
she to whom the walls of the
city
are as mist.
The rhythm of sisters
rhythm of hips
deep socket of the back
the sway of hips
spine rising
from the cleft of her buttocks
her torso rising, uplifted.
Each step lifts her.
It is a rocking
and a sailing
a moving forward
while hovering.
The unthinking acts of her feet
knees and hips, the hinges, the
slip
the synovial fluency, the slip
of
thighs overtaking each other
the genital slip, the smallest.
Unreal
twice over,
therefore real, she walks ahead
of those who imagine
remember, deny
and pursue her,
who are perplexed
refreshed, comforted
pleased, vexed, shaken by her,
who confuse her with her name.
She slips away.
She balances,
acquiesces,
moves forward.
Her gaze is a sailing ship.
Her foot on the earth
pleasures her, the earth
pressures her, answers her.
It is her pleasure.
The moist cloud
of her breath
and of the earth,
her own perfume
in her skirt
in her armpit,
the perfume
of her sisters
of the grass
even of her name,
all these are in the air.
The dew is in her skirt
her cloth, her clothes
her hem heavy with dew,
it cannot be helped.
That she is free of us,
free of our supplications
our promises,
free of our books.
Her wet skirt is her book.
She who resolves
absolves and reveals
wrings out the solvent
from her own skirt.
Her hem rains,
love doctoring love.
Our father the owl
our mother the mourning dove
our sisters the laughter of her
sisters.
The sun and moon are in the
sky.
The morning star is in the
sky,
a wet flame. How pale the moon
is.
How at one everything is in her
gaze.
You walk with her
wait for her
marry and abandon her.
She heals the letters of your
name.
You dream you are her only
errand.
She leaves her footprints in
you.
She who slips between columns
who advances, who rises
and walks on, splendid in
walking.
********************************
[Note by
Robert Kelly]
What are we to make of such
grace?
The great poets of the last
half-century rediscovered for us the musical power of the poetic line, the
actual line in an actual poem. Not a
counted beat but a rhythmed tune, a muscular (the heart is a muscle) limb of
sound. From the line we make music, and
we shape lines by the silences between them.
We learned from Creeley and
Duncan and Williams (for me, in that order) how the interruption of syntax
indulged that deepest of all qualities of poetry, what Shklovsky and the
Russian Formalists called ostranenie,
its strangeness, its subtle or not so subtle difference from ordinary
speech. From that strangeness our poets
made music.
When I read Billie Chernicoff’s
work, though, for all its quiet, tuneful suspensions of syntax over visual
gaps, I’m conscious of something else at play.
I want to tease out here, if I can, what that difference is. Or not so much difference (from what I and a
million other post-New American Poetry poets are doing) as something added to
that process, a different way the music is being used.
Provisionally, I think it is a
mode of making visual. Look at the
longish poem in the middle of the book, “Gradiva.” and you’ll find a
scrupulously lucid description of the image of a ‘walking woman’ — which is
pretty much what I take the Latin word to mean.
That poem, its summoning of the image, is my clue to what’s fresh, very
fresh, about Chernicoff’s work.
To say it as clearly as I’ve
been able to think it, she’s trying to turn the hesitant, graceful movement of
music into a visual apprehension of physical movement. The silences at the ends of her lines are not
just rests in the musical score, rests in the measure, they are the geometric
points that outline the shape of a person, or a Chinese bronze— it is as if the
shape of the poem says: when you see
this, know that there is a curve, a salient, a deep embowerment in what the
sound of me is summoning you to behold.
Something like that. I feel it in the persistent visualization
that goes on in Chernicoff’s work — things say look at me. Even when they seem to say touch or taste me,
I see more the hand reaching out to caress, rather than the feel of bronze or
flower beneath the fingertip.
In this sense, Chernicoff’s
work is profoundly shaped by, part of, the visual culture we more and more
inhabit. She casts the image on the
mind’s eye — as poetry has always been doing, that’s what an image is —
Brakhage’s ‘eye-mage’, Pound’s phanopoeia, all that. But Chernicoff’s process is not to cast the
image by describing it in so many words, but by setting the name of it in
supple motion in the silent air around the poem — we see the shimmer.
Something like that,
again. I started out by noticing the
grace, the dance–like suavity of her tunes, her sequences, especially the order of things she notices for us to
observe or inhabit. Quiet, slow,
unhurried as any object, the spectacles her poems unfold are sumptuous in their
giving.
The book’s title itself starts
us off with just such a seen silence.
The waters of. Of what? Of Babylon where we wept, remembering? Of
Siloe, where we hold our tongues and meditate? The Housatonic that flows
through her neighbor fields? Sea that
washes all away? That of makes us see something, a place or
word, just as so often the line will end, startling as a knock on the
door. We hurry to open it to see who’s
there.
No comments:
Post a Comment