Category: Aquifer

A Game of Hide-and-Seek with the World

Wild Persistence by Patricia Hooper

University of Tampa Press, 2019

Paperback, 100 pages, $14.00

 

Wild Persistence

 

Patricia Hooper’s fifth book of poems, Wild Persistence, is a beautiful and moving collection, mixing, as it does, dark and light, grief and wonder, and engaging us in her world, which includes the world of nature. Her forms range from haiku with surprising turns to blank verse that is plain and elegant. Her range is unusual—she gives us graceful poems, witty poems, complex ones, and powerful ones.

 

“Sightings” is a poem that demanded my attention from the first reading:

 

The world leafs out again, the willow first

and then the river birches near the road

we’re driving down, you in your car seat watching,

for hawks or smaller birds returning home.

Two years have passed since you could walk or stand

alone.  The winter-damaged fields are sown,

and there, along the ridge, unraveling,

spirals of song birds, drifts of dogwood trees,

restored to blossom, beauty that breaks the heart.

And you whose spinal cord could not be healed:

you’re lowering the window, looking up

at miles of wings, your face alive with joy.

 

As we’re drawn into this car drive in spring, a bird-watching trip, the language is quiet, not calling attention to itself. Then those “winter-damaged fields that now are sown” make their entrance. The “you” is the speaker’s paralyzed grandson. Hooper has raised the stakes, and we feel her urgency with the “drifts of dogwood trees,” an injury that “could not be healed,” heart-breaking beauty, “miles of wings, your face alive with joy.” Clear images, deep feeling—the grandson’s wonder and the speaker’s joy and gratitude—this poem is also a gift to the reader in the way it finds beauty in the natural world even in the face of tragedy.

 

The word beauty sometimes takes a beating in the streets. I met a well-known poet who said in a disparaging way, Nay-chuh poems, as if it were a skin condition he thought had long ago been cured. However, Hooper’s poems go beyond the simple observational nature poem. Often, she starts with the plainest things. For example, in the book’s first poem, “Sketchbook and Journal,” she catalogues items found in her friend Dan’s freezer: “birds found dead along the trail / in snow ruts, autumn’s crevices, the wren / almost mistaken for a leaf.” The poem moves to Dan’s essays, other “sightings, swift details / that can’t be seen in flight, wild, secretive, / a voice, a look, a gesture half-concealed.” It ends with “wing-bars and stripes, the margins of a feather, / what the mind salvages to study later.”

 

In other poems, Hooper gives us an elegy for a son-in-law, a move from Michigan to the Piedmont, news of a grandson’s accident, a copperhead, nine birds, a spider, and an evening at a country inn. In a sometimes-witty haiku sequence, Hooper says, “I left those three crows, / the last corn in my garden, / and not one thanked me.” In “My Junco,” the bird has hit the speaker’s picture window with its “slate feathers and soft gray throat,” and she buries it by “those Whirlwind anemones / I planted under the oak tree / beside him— / next summer’s wings.” A hopeful, quiet walk-off.

 

In “August in the Little Field,” Hooper’s speaker addresses us and asks if we have “ever heard of a purpose as clear as this one . . ., the resolute persistence” of this goldfinch that all spring “flew back and forth over the meadow, watching,” then fed her offspring seeds all summer, as if knowing “the fields and their bright design. . . ,” / . . . her faith so simple / I could only wish it were mine.”

 

Hooper has aptly personified the bird and attached human fate to it. The poet Erin Belieu has said that Hooper’s feeling for nature reminds her of Mekeel McBride, who in fact provided a blurb for one of Hooper’s earlier books: “Craft and vision here, lighting from the inside the most common things.”

 

Hooper’s vision is complex, and this leads her to take a surprising point of view sometimes. In “Copperhead,” she writes in third-person about this snake about to strike in her garden—“its orange head lifted, / body a silk rope, / the hourglass bands around it like a bracelet.” These images are precise, almost pretty, but this speaker steps back for a shovel, thrusts it down, and the snake hesitates,

 

not long enough to see the rims of trees,

to see the houses leaning toward the hills,

to see the hills far off, the gray blue mountain,

to see the pink crepe myrtle in the yard,

to see the front porch with its pail of berries,

to see my knees blue-stained from berry picking,

to see the bare skin shining at my ankle,

to see, if it sees at all, the chance before it,

to see what I might see for the last time,

if no one came . . .

 

This is one of Hooper’s signature moments. The snake, almost outside of time, is allowed its point of view. The gaze moves to the sky, as if to evoke all the things the copperhead will lose. The feeling of distance here is odd, making the world slide sideways. The blank verse—easily readable and at the same time carefully crafted with alliteration, other sound ladders, and anaphora—gives an odd formality to the scene. The idea is complex, the language is plain.

 

In “The Spider,” we see “blowsy / overblown roses, heavy as hydrangeas,” then an empty spider web “tattered but glistening” in the speaker’s garden. “It’s strange, something dies, and the world stays,” she says. The speaker goes back in her mind to her childhood lake—not to the lake really, but to this moment after she, a girl, has returned to school in the fall and pictures “the dock, the sand’s hard ridges, and the waves still there without me, lapping at the shore.” This memory re-imagined, a frame inside the frame, gives this moment a poignant, unearthly quality.

 

Hooper has played this hide-and-seek game with the world throughout her previous four books. This strategy of up-close and far-away is a key to her craft and vision. In her first book, Other Lives, we have a surprisingly effective second-person point of view in “A Child’s Train Ride,” where the speaker is able to perceive the child’s thoughts about existence and non-existence. Now in Wild Persistence, we have “In the Clearing,” where Hooper’s speaker sits in the woods after rain, studying the light: “If I sit still enough / by the damp trees, sometimes I see the world without myself in it, / and—it always surprises me—nothing at all is lost!” No matter where she is in her own life trajectory, Hooper seems able to imagine the world without herself and her loved ones.

 

We also get powerful autobiographical poems mourning a loss, such as “After,” which begins, “After I left your body to be burned . . .” In a matter-of fact way, the speaker catalogues all of the details she has had to take care of. The poem ends with this speaker looking down from a great distance at all of the things in a house, as “if she were looking back from the next world,” an ending which seems to slam the door shut.

 

Sometimes her humor rests alongside solace. In “Sandhill Cranes,” two birds walk up to her window “in their scarlet caps.” The male sees his reflection and begins dancing: “his wings six feet across, / rose in the air / as he leapt in his black leather slippers, / his coat of feathers, / and pranced like an Iroquois brave to impress his bride.” The narrator expresses wonder and delight at their unusual “bowing and strutting” thinking “it was just in time / that they found their way to the house / in which I was grieving, . . .” gently reminding the reader of the poet’s loss.

 

There are some very witty poems in this book, too. In the heat of Hooper’s newly adopted South, her speaker says she sometimes thinks of “heroines / in southern plays or novels: sultry, steamy / women whose ways I didn’t understand / before—like Blanche du Bois reclining in a chair, / restless, desirous, half-daft, but barely able / to rise, to lift a hand.”

 

It’s hard to find any weaknesses to comment on, even beyond the particular aspects focused on here. Although I haven’t discussed Hooper’s poems that address the world’s injustices, they take their place in the story of her poetics and have contributed to the fact that her books have won a number of awards, including the Norma Farmer First Book Award, Bluestem Award, Lawrence Goldstein Award for Poetry from Michigan Quarterly Review, and most recently, for Wild Persistence, the Brockman Campbell Book Award from the Poetry Society of North Carolina. This book deserves such widespread recognition. And, perhaps, a re-examination of how far nature poems can actually take us.

 

 

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Cooing & Longing

Cooing

A bird perched on the fence for a minute—

its cooing brought me out of the house.

There was so much color on its feathers.

 

Its beak didn’t jut forward but bent downward

like in most of birds of prey, but this one didn’t prey.

 

I couldn’t feed it so it left sooner

than it used to when you were here, no grains

to litter the compound with, but then

there was no kind of fodder in the house.

 

It was the kind of bird that knew its beauty—

perhaps a special thing for its species.

 

I had thought it would cut me some slack,

but, like you, it didn’t, fleeing on instinct;

like you, it left a trail of leaves in its wake.

 

Longing

I remember the first dry season I spent

in that house you lived in until you died.

Harmattan almost bent you double,

dragging in its dusty perfume across miles

and into every room, sparing nothing

so much so I never knew I would ever

be so expectant of rain; even the birds,

the animals were having a hard time

of all the charade that was the weather.

Even the wooden shelves cried as they cracked,

their grains warping into undulant hills.

I was addicted to the city life.

I tried to hide my feelings because

somehow the weather benefitted you.

You had never so stood at the window

with such longing, in your eyes, to be outside.

I looked into your clear brown eyes and tried

to will the young agile person I knew

who would walk miles with me merely to see

what the landscape was like at the moment

because, for you, no one stepped into

the same landscape twice, for you the wind

was always changing something, eroding

either the soil, or the trees of their leaves,

the rain would always wash something away;

even the cities could not escape this.

It was like a process of aging.

Sometimes the wind brought more than dust

and its empty smell: now a sweet smell

but one which you doubted: maybe it was

the smell of bodies carried over miles,

maybe the dust was part of their bodies.

I knew it couldn’t be real yet I let

myself to imagine it, as scary

as it was, for didn’t we hear about how

the rivers, though how dried up they were,

still vomited tumescent bodies

from their silvery bellies, about how

the beggars didn’t wake up in the streets,

their stiff bodies curled up like balls of wool?

I tried to find things to love in this place

but couldn’t, rather reasons to leave

were monthly stacking. Minna was almost

like this and each day the people I stayed with

tried to convince me to cut the place some slack,

I took a piece of my clothing and quietly

folded it and threw it in my traveling bag

until one night I realized it was full.

 

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Evolution Kit

According to the manual, the “Theistic-Science World Building Kit” contains the following:

 

1. One forty-gallon terrarium (48″ x 12″ x 16″)

2. One shaker of “Evolution Mix” biosphere food (red)

3. One prepackaged rock to make the core

4. One shaker of “Planetary/Ecosystem Dust” (blue)

5. Something called “Matter,” which has the exact color and consistency of chalk dust

6. The Evolution Manual, as yellow and glossy as a school bus

 

The manual tells Katie that she should expect all life in her biosphere to map onto the evolutionary trails of Earth species. She can expect fish to crawl up on land, sprout into dinosaurs and birds: an inherited morphology spread throughout the ages.

 

STEP ONE: Pour Matter into biosphere and add one to five shakes of Evolutionary Dust.

 

STEP TWO: Begin.

 

Katie pours the chalk dust into the terrarium. She sprinkles a heavy dose of blue dust and a bit of red. It looks as though she has dumped food coloring into milk. The blue gains dominance, takes the red and drowns it. Katie imagines hydrothermal vents blasting within the rifts of the biosphere’s surface like primordial, cosmic wounds.

 

She does not regret her drunken purchase. The kit was purchased whilst shitfaced the night she got laid off. The package arrived on May 21st, which Katie remembers only because it was an ex-boyfriend’s birthday. The return address listed the town of Gammelstad, Sweden, but the box claimed manufacture in Stockholm, and the postage stamps revealed a journey from Oslo to Reykjavik to Paris for some reason to Reykjavik again to Halifax to Denton, Texas, where it found Katie’s front door. The return label said Play God Theistic-Science Company in block blue lettering, followed by a clip-art icon of a FedEx truck, even though the shipping service was a third party called Ilmarinen, Inc.

 

Katie adds more Planetary/Ecosystem Dust and goes to bed.

 

When she wakes, fish have formed in the theistic-biosphere. The terrarium is an aquatic underworld: jellyfish sway near the surface; shadowy agnatha—jawless fish—swarm at the bottom. Small, armored sharks with little plated spines of cartilage that the manual calls acanthodii appear. In the tank’s center, there is a tiny quadrant of shore.

 

STEP 3: So, you think you’re beginning to see fish.

 

Titaalik roseae, a four-limbed Devonian vertebrate fossil found in Nunavit, Canada is thought to be one of the first creatures to have walked on land from the sea. Both fish and tetrapod, the Titaalik supported gills, fins, a pelvic girdle, and partial wrists. Keep watching. The next step is dinosaurs.

 

Katie looks back at her terrarium. She wonders if the tiny creatures she sees emerging onto the shore resemble Titaalik, their toothy mouths gaping, marble eyes glistening like new olives.

 

The world around her but for these little creatures feels ill with the lack of hope.

 

It is sunset by the time there are dinosaurs. Evening coats Katie’s window in shades of blue. The dinosaurs are small at first, but by the time Katie is getting ready for bed, wings break through their scales in the most beautiful colors: Jupiter red, asteroid brown, Neptune green. Katie falls asleep in front of the terrarium.

 

In her dream a great wind blows through the house, far too powerful for her tiny dinosaurs to fly. To protect them Katie must huddle over the biosphere with a blanket around her shoulders, arms spread out like a mother bat, to block the wind.

 

When she wakes, the dinosaurs are the size of bumblebees, flying and bumping into the glass. One of them belches a candlewick cough of flame.

 

STEP 4: After archaeopteryx, notice mammals.

 

But there are no mammals, and Katie recognizes the dinosaurs for what they are: dragons. They buzz like trapped flies, spurting flame at each other. It is impossibly cute.

 

If any cryptozoological creatures appear, immediately implement World Extinction Kit (sold separately at a 15% percent discount with purchase of a second Theistic-Science World Building Kit).

 

Online, Katie looks up the Extinction Kit. There is a tiny rock that looks like an asteroid and a shaker of something called “Anti-matter.” There is no explanation as to why the dragons must die. Why can’t Katie have dragons instead of dinosaurs? She watches the dragons play with each other. They keep bumping into the glass. Katie opens the top of the terrarium.

 

One immediately begins to nest in the rafters. Another begins hoarding loose grains of rice in her pantry. It sits atop the rice as if on a bed of gold. Katie chucks the Evolutionary Manual in the trash. There is no real plan to a world, she knows this. Only chaos.

 

The terrarium is a dead planet now. No more creatures will appear. Katie wonders if the dragons feel like astronauts, like explorers. She wonders if they are triumphant or afraid. If the sound of her microwaving ramen sends a message of doom throughout the apartment. If they heave a tiny sigh of relief at the “ding.” She wonders what it feels like to have left behind the world of false order and live in the stars.

 

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The Murder Hornet

can fly sixty miles in a day

& decapitate its prey

quicker than licking

honey off a thumb.

Size has its advantages.
& its costs. My mom
told me early I’d pay

for the size of my heart.

You feel too much, she said.
You want too much.

In the Love Addicts Anonymous

meeting, a white man in a gold ascot

said, I need to be devoured by love.

Devastated, I added, swallowed whole.

Murder hornets are efficient killers,

but is any torture more elegant

than chasing what you’ll never catch?

There was one time in my life

my heart felt right-sized,

quiet, & I was so at peace

I was invisible. The robin

thought I was a chair or tree

the easy way she cleaned

her feathers near my feet.

More often my feelings swarm,

a storm surge, how water alone

can warp metal, level a village.

When I keep feelings at bay

I appear okay, recalling

how Gulliver’s giant size

made him too dangerous

to keep.

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Under the Shade of a Paradise

 

My artworks and projects focus on ecological subjects, expanding the uses of technologies and capturing environments that escape our sight. These images are samples of two bodies of works. One of titled Paradis, 2018-2019, and the most recent one Dusk/Daybreak, 2020. The images depicted in Paradis make us—the viewers—reconsider ideas of “paradise” with the use of images derived from tropical vegetation that intersect and overlap. Each print is carefully crafted through an experimental digital printing process. In Dusk/Daybreak, there’s an exploration of the landscape through a nontraditional photographic medium. Each print is made through a layering digital printing process. The images make account for the daylight transitions that allow for the visible and the invisible, uncovering mysteries along the Caribbean coast.

 

I create large-scale audio and visual installations, experimental digital prints, sound arrangements in space, and videos to recreate spaces, memories, and experiences using imagery of natural spaces as a metaphor to understand the complex and interconnected realities we all live. The sources that generate the artworks are mostly research-based in a digital form or archival material that serve to create the installations themselves. Images of obscure natural spaces and elements that define our intimate relationship to spaces—storage containers, sounds, voices, and songs of proclamations in the void—become the aesthetics of the work. Through my artworks and practice I am constantly confronting geopolitical issues, ecology, technology, the act of speculation about the relations that we create to spaces and natural environments. I am always underlining a conceptual framework that comes from my experiences as a Caribbean colonial and post-colonial being as it is in dialogue with the rest of the world.

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Tomorrowland & Man’s Dominion

Tomorrowland

I think it is equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on land.

—Wernher von Braun on humanity entering space, Los Angeles, 1955–1957

 

Some days after work, I’d rent a speedboat

from Long Beach and hop it out to Catalina

for an evening dive. What a thrill every

time, the chill of sliding through blue skin,

descending down the long teal folds of fulgid

kelp. A bright humming brain of gold baubles

lifting braids to the sky like a praising willow

swaying in the sugared light. I was almost lost,

weightless and wondering through the ocean

with no one following me but the moon as it

rose to look upon its navel. Omphaloskepsis: to

consider the divine inside the belly. When Jonah

was ankle-sunk in stomach acid, he was learning

the volcano’s wrath that gave birth to land. I could

spend hours floating in the whale constellation,

that dark, starry sea of seas. The umbilicus of space

that ties us to the womb of ocean. I wanted a rocket

to break through the egg with its tooth, dislocating

heaven and earth’s denotations. When we first

fumble around in the moon’s cratered belly, what will

we call our new lexis? How will we learn to be in

the universe but not of it once we leave behind our

world? The mystical isn’t in the ecstasy of floating

through space, our fragile bones eroding, but in

bearing the burden of our attachment toward a

center. Peter met Christ on the water because

he wanted to be like him. I designed Lunetta to churn

out gravity for the future to meet the cosmic Christ.

 

 

Man’s Dominion

And don’t tell me that man doesn’t belong out there  [space]. Man belongs wherever he wants to go—and

he’ll  do plenty well when he gets there.

―Wernher von Braun, 1958

 

Standing at the edge of the Yucatan

jungle, I felt an urge to just run

blindly into it. The adrenaline was like a

timpani drum roll, paving the entrance

for the brass. I hired a guide, and as we

pushed through curling palms, ferns, and

snagging vines, I swear I could smell the jaguar’s

urine on the trees it had sprayed, hear

echoes of the animals that had fled before it.

I could hear a mosquito filled with a pyramid

of blood. When we saw the jaguar,

I became quiet as space, holding every

sound against the butt of my rifle.

Like when I held the liturgy candle,

planning each step so I wouldn’t spill the wax,

trying to pretend no one was watching.

His fur was glistening jet oil, his gaping mouth

a range of snowcapped teeth. The God who

framed his symmetry pitch-dark dared to

lock my limbs into their grooves

as well. He meandered through the lushness as a black

hole against a canopy of stars, his gold eyes

moving like jumpy flying saucers

in a child’s sloppy flipbook. I aligned

the crosshairs half a meter ahead of him

and pulled the trigger like a prophet

releasing a message before the people were ready.

My throat felt as if I had swallowed too

much water. I strode through the mist

toward my trophy, the graceful carcass already

hazy with flies. I had my guide put it in the jeep

and drive me into town to have it skinned.

 

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from the Bird Journal Series

 

27 Years, 42 Years, Backbone, and Stitched belong to the Bird Journal Series, a body of work exploring movement and migration due to climate change. As the human impact on the planet increases and pushes the world toward ecological disaster, both animals and people begin to move around the globe in new ways. Birds’ migratory patterns, and even their bodies, are changing in reaction to rising global temperatures.

 

It is important to me that each drawing, sculpture, or process work be able to stand alone, yet it is in unifying them as one installation that they become stronger still. Similarly, we as humans can and must work together, acknowledging our interconnectedness with each other and with nonhuman beings, to protect the future of the planet.

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To the Elk

They were hanging it against the barn wall. The head limp to the side. With a snowmobile they had dragged the dead elk from wherever in the mountains the pile lay where it had been gutted. For this bloody spectacle.

 

“That’s a big fucking animal.”

 

The porch of the main cabin: Wyatt was there with her, and so was this man Dale from Seattle plus the three highballs in his veins. That’s a big fucking thing, Dale kept saying. This was at the ranch that was in Wyatt’s family. The Smith River was nearby. It was Thanksgiving night.

 

“They got one last year too,” said Wyatt.

 

“It’s bigger than a buffalo.”

 

Savannah was thinking of her father and brother and this same performance. They would return home to the triplex by the refinery, north-side Great Falls, with a carcass in the truck bed and blood dripping from the tailgate. And she was saying to herself, for this….

 

Up the porch steps came the hunters. They had been out all day and were covered in mud, and Savannah thought they smelled. Wyatt congratulated them and asked about the hunt. An uncle said they’d been lucky to shoot it from fifty yards. It ran a hundred and died, and a young cousin took the killing shot.

 

Wyatt’s uncles and cousins started applauding. They shook hands all around. Even in daytime she didn’t remember their names, and it was not daytime. The dark was long past gathering; it had mustered.

 

“Last year they got a bigger one,” Wyatt said.

 

By now the hunters had gone off to their different cabins to clean up.

 

“Bigger?” said Dale. “Bigger than that?”

 

“It’s missing half its rack.”

 

Savannah looked at the head again and saw only one antler.

 

“Do they spar?” asked Dale.

 

“I think they grind them against the trees,” said Wyatt.

 

“Not as impressive.”

 

“True.”

 

Speaking to her now, Dale said, “Let me ask. As a Western woman, does this arouse you? These men returning from the hunt?”

 

“I hope not,” said Wyatt. “I’m related to them.”

 

“I don’t mean the men. I mean the blood. I mean the sight of this big, beautiful dead thing.”

 

Savannah said, “I’m used to it.”

 

In fact by now—being from this region and educated in a different one (the opportunity belonging to so few from that refinery neighborhood)—she had a rule for herself: no dead animals or fresh-caught fish, not in real life and not in any photographs in any public medium, app or profile, or anything else. None of that spectacle would be permitted with regard to whatever partner or friend she kept. Wyatt’s pictures were full of other things: the neoclassical façade of the apartment building where he used to live in Missoula, an Old Fashioned in a bar in Chicago where his roommate from college played jazz guitar, a portrait in graduation robes and the sandstone arcade columns flanking him, that one now six years old and his hair (shorter back then) tousled from doffing the cap, the PBK cord helpfully around his neck in the foreground….

 

“Does it arouse you, Dale?” Wyatt asked.

 

“No, I’m so boring. No kinks for me. For me it’s all dollars and cents.”

 

“You’ve seen more blood than any of us.”

 

Seattle Dale was a political communications consultant. Fundraising was his higher function.

 

“Violence to me is writing a strongly worded email. But—I mean—you look at this, and you know these men can provide. I mean, this is vacation—it’s fun—for us. But—I mean—it’s something, something more.”

 

His tumbler was down to the ice melt.

 

“It doesn’t arouse me,” Savannah said.

 

A cone of light and warmth and festivity spiraled out like a dust devil when the door opened. A terrier called Sonny with long distinguished whiskers came out and trotted down the steps and went to piss on the snowy lawn. Inside, Wyatt’s aunts and mother, and his father also, were preparing the table. His father specialized in sweet potatoes.

When the little dog came back Dale went in for another drink and called the dog in using baby sounds. At last they were alone.

 

She watched Wyatt’s face. There was nothing there but anticipation for dinner and for his wine. She had looked at him before and had seen whole worlds where they would go together and more from which he’d come. A lick of dark hair came down out of the front of his cap. He put himself together well and tried to dress of his time, but it did not subsume him. Not too clean with the effort, his good shirt just a little too big. He liked big clothes. To have something fit perfectly—was that another of the things that would make him feel ashamed of his upbringing?

 

The glass against Wyatt’s lips now. Rare content passed through his eyes as he swallowed, the fire weeping in them. He made his deep voice go high and feminine. “Does it arouse you?”

 

“Ask me again,” Savannah said.

 

“As a Western woman?”

 

She moved to hit him, and his arm was around her.

 

“It’s cold.”

 

“I’ll get a fire going in our cabin.”

 

“That sounds nice.”

 

“Thank you for doing this,” he said. “I know it’s unbearable.”

 

“It’s not. It’s really not. I love them.”

 

There were many people she didn’t know. But at length you would know them. It was not being away from home, that wasn’t the difficult thing. Anyway you only had to get through dinner and then go to the little cabin and go to sleep. The drive had been beautiful, and they hadn’t argued.

 

She stood on toes to kiss the bottom of his neck.

 

“Do you really?” he asked.

 

Tears were in that question. Tears were good. And her rule was a good rule, a necessary rule to have for men. Education in history and politics had made her question whether it was for the better passage of life not to have relationships with men. That was a resounding theory up until graduation. Anyway, at minimum you had to have a rule you stuck with.

 

He went to wash his hands before dinner. When he was gone she admired for a while the dark mountain on the horizon above the ranch gate. The cold clean air touching her eyes, inflaming the veins. She didn’t look at the dead elk on the side of the barn. Then she went in for dinner.

 

—

 

The table was so crowded with people that her shoulders never relaxed. Her shirt went too low, she thought.

 

The food was very good. The green beans were perfectly seasoned. There were two turkeys; one was local and lean and the other was a butterball. They filled their glasses with red wine out of towering decanters. She was at the end of the table beside Wyatt. His father was at the head. She was across from his mother. It was a good meal. Everyone talked to each other.

 

“How come you didn’t want to hike,” the mother was saying.

 

“I thought I’d stay around and get something done,” said the father.

 

“Get what done?”

 

“Work. Caught up on emails.”

 

She watched Wyatt. He was drinking fast. She touched his knee under the table. His leg was vibrating under her hand. You could duck under these little breakers of talk like a child playing in the surf, but Wyatt was not possessed of that lightness. Later they would have to talk at length about it—whatever thing was said at the table that stood out to him as particularly abhorrent.

 

Things got formally quiet as everyone took turns saying gratefuls. The woodstove atmosphere and the gray iron of the gun barrels on the walls and the smell of the old rugs and leather furniture gave the quiet an oppressive quality like overwhelming heat, inescapable intimacy, absorbing silence into it.

 

From the other head of the table, “To the elk.”

 

“To the elk.”

 

“Beautiful. Just beautiful.”

 

“It’s special.”

 

“There are times you’re facing an animal and you’re not ready to take a life. It’s not an easy thing. To the elk. And to Harrison. He took the shot.”

 

She drank a little faster after the toast. When her turn finally came, she said, “Thank you for welcoming me. It’s a wonderful place.”

 

“To the ranch.”

 

“The ranch.”

 

They drank. All agreed—the ranch and the dead elk held all that was beautiful and dear. She didn’t look at any particular face; from having run meetings she understood how to look between people when addressing a table. She went on, “It’s been a good year. Better than I expected.”

 

Wyatt mugged for the crowd, and everyone laughed.

 

“Really, thank you for having me.”

 

Later they stood around the long kitchen island and ate the pie she had baked. She explained again to one of the aunts the decision they’d made to move in and what went into it. The uncle who had toasted the elk asked what she was doing for work and followed her answer with, “Do you work together?”

 

“No,” said Wyatt. “She works for a Dean. I work in Admissions. The worst office to be in right now.”

 

“It’s a good place to work,” she said. “I can do four tens in the summer when I want. The benefits are good. Campus jobs are nice.”

 

“When you add your union dues to the premiums you’re losing half a paycheck,” said Wyatt.

 

“But you can’t have one without the other,” she said.

 

“It’s beautiful how that works.”

 

“Can you run this up the flagpole?” the uncle went on. He had not listened. “Why the cuts to English? You can’t cut English. What’s the point of having a public college if you’re going to get rid of English?”

 

“English isn’t going anywhere,” she promised, wearily. Because she thought there was more than just the appreciation of literature in his concern for the survival of English.

 

“Well, run it up the pole if you can. It’s terrible what’s happening over there with the cuts. And Will Tunt retiring is a big loss.”

 

“It’ll get better,” she said.

 

“Enrollment always goes up when there’s a recession,” said Wyatt. “Folks would rather be in grad school.”

 

The uncle had taken several big bites of her pie. He told her how delicious it was and asked if she had made it herself, yes. After a long while the grown-ups were too drunk to stay awake and the teenage boy cousins had grown too weary for the world outside their heads and the girl cousins were sleeping in the corners cuddling with the dogs and it was over, she had survived it, and Wyatt was not saying anything else about the college where they worked and how it was a poor school serving poor students who were going to stay poor, and they were on their way out.

 

“Take Sonny with you,” said his father. Handed the terrier’s leash to his son. “Don’t worry, he’ll be good.”

 

Together they walked the little dog from the big cabin to the small cabin where they were staying.

 

While Sonny sniffed around at the base of the cabin steps, they sat on the porch, on top of a bench covered with a buffalo hide, and they looked across the lawn at the barn where the dead elk was hanging. Savannah wondered if it was going to start smelling.

 

“I wish I’d been out there to see,” said Wyatt.

 

“I don’t.”

 

“I mean to see it when it was alive.”

 

“I’m glad you weren’t there to see it get killed.”

 

They were holding each other. The wind moved over their faces, and they squeezed closer.

 

“Not that I want to hunt,” Wyatt was saying. “But you sort of wish that you knew what it was like.”

 

“I don’t. I don’t want you to be like,” she raised her voice and imitated Seattle Dale, “Harrison.”

 

“Me neither. I just wish I knew.”

 

“It was fun walking to the cliff,” she said.

 

The hike they’d done in the afternoon took them across the western expanse of the family’s great tract, past a tipi erected for ambience, to the edge of the river gorge. Fathoms down, you could see the frozen banks. In summertime you could swing from a hammock between two ponderosas with a cocktail in hand, maybe a book in your lap. This was how she imagined him.

 

Then she thought that the dead elk had moved, swung a little.

 

“It’s—” he started. “My dad didn’t know how to field dress an animal. His dad never taught him how to hunt. I’m not any better because I don’t do it.”

 

“It’s not about being better.”

 

“One feels somehow emasculated,” he said.

 

“Because you don’t know how to hunt?”

 

“Not exactly. I don’t think you’d get it. You remember Chuck asking what I do?”

 

“He didn’t ask you. He asked me.”

 

“But then he asked if we work together.”

 

“So.”

 

“I always have to prove my worth. That’s what I mean: I don’t think hunting is impressive. But doing something impressive is impressive. Knowing how to do things.”

 

“I don’t think that’s what Chuck meant.”

 

“I know my family.”

 

She didn’t want to argue. She said something about how it would be cold and unpleasant to have to go pee in the middle of the night, since the nearest outhouse was across the lawn, behind the barn with the dead elk. After that they went inside and got changed for bed; or, she did, and he started trying to make the fire.

 

The plush duvet cover was cold on her bare legs. The hairs stood up, and while she waited for the fire to start she was self-conscious of having prickly legs. Sonny was on the ground, sitting obediently and anxiously, watching her in bed. Wyatt was kneeling and using a hatchet to make kindling. Erratic banging shook the door when he wedged the blade into a crack and slammed a log against the stone base of the fireplace to split off flakes of pine. He built a pyre in the iron woodstove with newspaper and tinder and tried to get the flames started and took a long time to do it and tried opening and closing the flue and could not get it right.

 

“It’s so cold,” she said.

 

“Almost got it. I smothered it last time.”

 

“Maybe you could just get in with me.”

 

“No, I have to do this.”

 

She could fall asleep even when she was freezing, especially after enduring something. Enduring did make you tired, but it was alright to be tired because you could sleep easily. Her father had said to her once, do you sleep easy because you’re a princess?

 

She was almost in a dream and Wyatt was still working on the fire, and she felt Sonny climb up onto the bed and lay down on top of her feet, and her legs got warmer, and then she was all the way in the dream and almost asleep but still heard the newspaper flare up quickly and burn out each time he tried and tried, Wyatt still in the waking world.

 

—

 

Much later in the night she woke up because she had to pee. It was hot in the cabin. The fire was going, she did not know for how long, and the twin bed beside the queen was unmade but empty.

 

She pulled sweatpants on and went to the door and had to push it very hard till it flew open and slammed against the wall. No other noise out there. She saw the moonlight, bright on the snowy lawn, and the big cabin like an embalmed giant. She saw the elk, its fur matted and dark, and the tongue spilling out of its cracked mouth. Its open eye was black.

 

And Wyatt was sitting on the bench next to the cabin door. He was all in his winter gear, which he had formerly peeled off when he labored to make the fire, and his elbows were on his knees and his cheeks were in his hands, and he was undoubtedly facing to look at the elk.

 

“It’s cold,” she said.

 

“It’s not too bad.”

 

“Do you want to talk?”

 

“About what?”

 

He wasn’t wearing shoes. His bare feet were on the ground, his toes a few inches from the pastry-thin ice. He had taken off his thick wool socks and left them between his feet, inside out.

 

“What are you doing? Come to bed.”

 

“I can’t,” he said.

 

“Come on. Don’t do this.”

 

“I’ll be in later. I’m sorry.”

 

Savannah recalled that she had to pee. Without answering the apology she went down the cabin steps. The sudden reminder, the pressure in her stomach returning to the front of her conscience, was as heat coming back into a room after a door is shut against winter.

 

She walked out over the snow. The dead elk grew larger and larger in sight the closer she came to the barn. The texture of its fur was nauseating, more than the smell of the outhouse.

 

Sitting down, she hated herself for the lapse. It wasn’t useful to be bitter about anything, but it had gotten to you anyway. The transference: you’d caught it just as it was done.

 

When she returned he had already gone back in. The socks remained. She picked them up and shook a little ice from them. In the cabin he was lying flat on the twin mattress, with hands folded on his chest. She got on the queen and pushed all the bad air from her lungs.

 

“Come on up.”

 

“Just calming down.”

 

It was the same thing. Civilized men would kill something, civilized men would watch. In his pictures the elk was there. Strung up between the arcade columns, its outline and ghost.

 

“Get in with me.”

 

After a minute he said, “Alright.”

 

There was love too, that was true. He was the product of a rule, an algorithm that had narrowed so many variables to her preference. They resisted the same things. Like the logs and pine flakes and newspaper it would keep the fire going, but also they would be consumed and used up. There was no rule concerning what to feel.

 

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An Array of Possibilities

A Brief History of Fruit by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

University of Akron Press, 2020 

 

A Brief History of Fruit

 

My copy of Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’ A Brief History of Fruit soon ran out of page corners to dog-ear. After reading each poem, I had to read it again; I didn’t want to misread any lines or miss any new words. And when I finished this collection, I returned to all the words I had circled, delighted not only by the poems in what has become one of my favorite collections of the year, but by how much they had taught me. A small sampling of the words this collection added to my vocabulary:

 

corrugate

brackish

bougainvillea

aqueous

whuffling

misprisions

copula

 

As I searched for my circled words, I found myself rereading each poem, and then the entire collection, in its entirety. It is a collection that rewards re-reading. Andrews signals her attention to the meanings of words—and asks for readers’ attention to the same—in poems such as “n: Shield, or Shell Covering”:

 

Swaddling provides a newborn with a sense of the womb’s safety.

I fold countries around myself, false familiarity, some serene carapace.

 

That “carapace” is the noun from the poem’s title: an object with a protective function, a kind of casing. But Andrews finds the tension between a swaddled baby and a suffocated self in a suffocating country in a way that feels both heartbreaking and necessary. The poem renders this tension using a series of long couplets drawn across the page, with the second line of each couplet pairing carapace with a rhyming, rhythmic, hypnotic sequence of modifiers: crystalline, serene, unseen.

 

In “The Collapse,” Andrews combines her playfulness about the meanings of words—“Ravine (n): a place where it is difficult to build condominiums”—with a formal inventiveness that uses the page as a way to think critically about what white space means in the poem and in the world. Through these formal choices, Andrews makes the connections between whiteness, capitalism, and ecological disaster both evident and non-negotiable. The poem opens with an epigraph about Manila’s infamous mountain of garbage, the collapse of which killed hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the summer of 2000. Andrews, though—whose mother was born in the Philippines—follows the epigraph with a passage that suggests an impatience with the need for storytelling as a rhetorical device:

 

Is it alright if I just go ahead and say

that the moral of this story

will have something to do with the scourge of capitalism? Will you keep reading?

 

This poem is frenetic and challenging, cataloging Manila’s financial growth and environmental ruin with an anger that at times transforms into reverence: “all hail the need for condominiums / all hail Manila’s 10,000 tonnes per day.” These images, stacked one on top of another, threaten their own form of collapse, mirroring the compounding pressures of capital and climate change.

 

If there is a feeling of helplessness that comes from the magnitude of the current disaster facing us, what Andrews does so well across the collection is face these impossible catastrophes. She arrives to the page with new ways to communicate loss, absence, and grief. The language with which we understand the climate change that may destroy us is also the language we use to understand the elements that give us life. Andrews converges these lexical groups in “Pastoral,” where words such as “environment” and “field” and “America” can and do hold a number of meanings:

 

By field, I mean both the expanse across which

[] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] []

and the sum of all possible relations between a person

and the objects in their environment

 

The punctuation of a double bracket [] translates to an array in JavaScript, and I think of array here as a kind of absence but also as the formation of possibilities, answers, and meanings—a box to be filled. The poem does not concern itself with sense so much as it does with sound, which props open the door to the poem. The arrays provide the fill-in-the-blank-ness necessary to push the reader toward a range of meanings:

 

By America, I mean the sighing sense of moving from body to

[] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] []

 

A Brief History of Fruit is inventive, textured, and deeply interesting. One of the many powers of this collection is the way it navigates possibility. Andrews writes into questions such as, How do we name ourselves? How do decide who we are? How does one name and navigate the world? These poems are fervent explorations of the capacity for language to name what can’t be named and to help us understand tensions that, as argued by Diane Seuss—who selected the collection as winner of the Akron Poetry Prize—do not “resolve; [because] to resolve would equal self-abandonment.” And to pretend to resolve the questions at the heart of this collection—for one, “What does it mean to live in a country?”—would be far less interesting than what Seuss rightfully says that Andrews does so well: to “inventory a parallel history.”

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