Attending to her father’s final years prompts several poems in Marsha de la O’s subtly interwoven fourth collection, Creature. Her attentive presence calls her to revisit the past, as in “Our Father Transfigured on His 91st Birthday”: “How are you, Katelyn? he croons, Are you fine? Can you say fine? / This tenderness we do not remember — it must have once fallen on us” (italics original). “My father died in the fullness of spring” indicates some reasons for this response:
I never saw him cry until very late. He could keep it soundless.
Control his breath. Be silent,
as a tear rolled down his cheek.
Then another, and another.
In this drought, I save every drop for my flowers. Some last only a day.
He didn’t acknowledge weakness. Or complain.
But, over years, would not tend himself,
body and mind, a forgotten garden.
Fullness of spring replaces time in the Biblical allusion; corresponding with the emphasis on new life, this is no Edenic garden, but home to another sort of knowledge, an understanding of internal and interpersonal emotional connection. Crucially, this involves witnessing interior division, as enacted in the split line’s separation of internalized edict from the body’s expression. The speaker’s associative response in rationing water for flowers presents both an affinity and counterpoint, her self-discipline grounded in valuing connection to other lives despite the ultimate transience of such connections. This garden’s lessons about death foreground life and love, its witness to the father’s losses of inner connection receiving his quiet expression of grief.
“Forgetting to Eat” deepens this sense of morning for the father’s separation, “now that his hunger is for heat, for the warmth / inside of light, the want that carries him out back / to sit full in sun, and almost hear the birds.” Again, metaphorical loss of connection to the natural world correlates with inhibited connection with body, self, and other. The speaker’s empathic orientation presents the opposite difficulties, maintaining boundaries while offering compassionate attention: “It’s easy to forget to eat when I’m with my father, / I subsume myself in him, his diet of dust and crumb.” “Late August Garden” revisits these entanglements in a scene with the mother:
Oh, Marsha, where did our lives go, she exclaimed.
It wasn’t long after her diagnosis.
Vines sprang up
and clung to my walls,
and brambles covered my eyes.
Why is my life over too, I thought, why must I go with her? (italics original)
Natural imagery expresses intuitive emotional defenses here, interior boundaries also evoked by split lines. In this context, however, they reveal a more complex and objective truth: The feeling of loss and the instinct for self-preservation are intertwined in their deep roots.
Part of the cultivation of consciousness necessary to arrive at this balance of critical self-reflection, intuition, and empathic awareness is traced in “Indelible.” The poem’s distinct sections form a meditative progression that recontextualizes and transforms apprehensions of revealing experiences of trauma and misogyny, ultimately recognizing the speaker’s ongoing resilience as an empowering ground, both the wounding and the speaker’s selfhood “indelible.”
The opening observes that discussing events long held within “means you’ve been / carrying a bag of silence laced all over with veins / the whole time, it’s you, your blood pumping / through what happened.” The overflowing of sentence boundaries evokes the anxiety caused by realizing the meshing of repressed silence within the body, like a tumor. Additional roots of this fear involve internalization of the social opprobrium focused onto others who spoke out: “Their laughter’s / thunder, it means they’ll attack you, track you / down and stand under your window.” A subsequent image traverses this complex of fears: “Once I stepped through a door / in the air and the house didn’t exist.” This elegant departure captures the full paradox of the fear underlying both ideations — both its presence and insubstantiality — thereby taking the first step beyond its control.
This breaking from culturally conditioned assumptions intuitively prompts recontextualization: “Question: What has to happen? Question: Why?” The following section dramatizes intra-psychic connection — and “argument with the self” — by answering questions of greater necessity with personal empathic witness:
Oh, don’t ask why. Girls die
every day for no reason.
You have a few seconds.
There’s concrete, and a race a girl might win.
And you do. And two weeks later,
you open the Herald Examiner.
The girl who died in your place
is Vietnamese, there’s her photo:
The non-specific “a girl” distances the past self’s experience of potential as general, and shifting to second person subtly includes the reader. The living, together, then bear witness to the “girl who died in your place.” Collective empathy replaces collective judgement based on cultural assumption. Yet, the limitations of such witnessing are part of its pathos: “The journalist snapped the shot / and she flew into the ether to die / on and on around the world.” A moral aspect of bearing witness involves acknowledging differences between experiences and perspectives. The speaker’s objective understanding involves recognition of her own subjectivity as both a window and a lens.
Like another step “through a door / in the air,” this understanding opens an atemporal mythic perspective from the apparently isolated personal level:
They say for the dead to fly
the wick of pure loneliness
must stay lit.
Or ghosts plunge from the sky.
Paradoxically, seen from a mythic perspective, what can feel like isolation seeds compassion for the voiceless. The passage further indicates how this “loneliness” also fosters humans’ continual contemplative renewal of the mythic perspective itself. The confluence and juxtaposition of the “race a girl might win” and the girl in the picture who “flew into the ether to die” open one such inquiry into Daphne’s myth, beginning with a creative allusion to it in an eco-memorial: “If we planted a tree for every / dead girl, we’d live in a forest.” The speaker’s own witnessed interiority fosters connection to it:
I carry my fear, it’s portable,
the better to wander
among a scattered congregation
of trees.
The created, living forest meshes with the silenced suffering, connecting the trees with “every / dead girl” similar to the earlier imaginal tumor. Yet, the honored trees play a healthy role in the life of the planet, the forest more like an organ within its body. Likewise, the speaker’s “portable” fear implies a healthy boundary of self-knowledge, allowing perception of the similar but distinct “scattered congregation” — gathered by the space of witness between them. The rebirth of myth in tree planting befits the core paradox between metaphor and material: “Each tree an absence.”
Such space, paradoxically, has all along been the seat of the poem’s genesis. It’s ending turns to reflect the transformations of consciousness it makes possible by transforming the metaphors though which Daphne was originally transformed:
But I
could still feel the strong blue
stare of light. And a secondary
light of understanding. Now
that god could not hurt me,
the world was out there,
like a book, something
I could learn to read.
TThe transformation into a tree, when reflected by the metaphorical distance it implies, blends its traumatic features with those of self-discovery, specifically, the discovery of a self who can be perceived in perceiving the world—the spaces between paradoxically deepening by providing opportunities for conscious connection. Objectification dissolves on this level of consciousness, which understands distinct physical entities as interrelated in psyche.
Whereas the sections of “Indelible” function like meditative pauses, indicating more psychic space across connections and perhaps more time elapsed between them, “Creature” narrates a brief, dramatic epiphany, perhaps prepared by such meditations. The speaker opens observing the apparently outside world:
On the other side, hummingbirds zoom
and pause, a midair blur of motion
and stillness, sipping the last few blossoms
on the lankly butterfly bush, long curved
sword flowers gone black and crumpled
before they fall. A small insistent wind
flows through the partly open window.
The world can enter, I’m not trapped
in here.
The peaceful mood, underscored by the phrase-stopped lines, indicates an equilibrium between what is “inside” the glass and what is observed externally. Even the phrases crafted by lineation resonate with quiescence despite the sense of impending change. In fact, the speaker is comforted by the relative transience of the “insistent wind” through the “partly open window,” perceiving in this permeability a freedom realized in welcoming the other, the world.
The meditation moves naturally into this freedom and its implied limitations of perception — even the ultimate lack of stability in the objects of perception themselves:
The glass is flawed. All
is quiet change. Flecked patterns of
moving shadow. The rise and fall of wind.
Vagaries of dust. All is quiet. The sun is
doing what it has done from the beginning.
The lineation again enacts the feelings that correspond with these thoughts, the breaks less expected, jaggedly altering the flow of sentences. “Flecked patterns of / moving shadow” could apply equally to the speaker’s visual experience of objects or to the sentence fragments themselves. The interesting correlations across form and content befit the prevailing sense of peace within this uncertainty.
In the poem’s first turn, a hawk finds itself trapped in the speaker’s house, injecting a terror of the other shared by bird and human:
in a paroxysm of fear, led astray into the
human, our box-like rooms, our prisons,
bewilderment cloaking both our minds.
And here we are, the bird and I,
in different and staggering worlds
where transparencies are impassible.
How many times have I sensed myself
as though behind glass, my isolation
excluding others, and always,
it seemed, the real world just beyond?
The line break between “the” and “human” perceptively captures first the bird’s confrontation with the completely unnatural and then the generality of our “human” assumption that “box-like rooms” are a normal place to be. In her imaginative compassion, the speaker reflects how constructed our ideas of normal can be, how alienating from the “different and staggering” ways other places and their creatures may wish to be seen. The final question’s lyric gesture enacts the very duality of consciousness in the scene it arises from: on the one hand, the separation between poet and terrified “creature,” on the other the poet reflecting upon herself as such a creature. Here again, the question arises as a natural self-reflective response to what the speaker is viewing externally, and, in increasing depth, part of what she is perceiving is herself.
A context for the episode emerges in a recollection from a therapy session in which the speaker declared: “I’m willing / to do the work, but don’t ask me to pray —” The statement seems to reflect a prior, unidirectional conception of prayer, given the familiarity with meditative groundlessness that opens the poem. The conclusion, rather, relates an epiphany not of a deity to whom the speaker may pray, but of her simple need to do so:
But standing, shaking in the garage,
it must be a god I’m praying aloud to — the life force
itself whose name is creature — saying, creature,
you can do it, you can find your way, creature.
The prayer counterintuitively, or perhaps organically, addresses the one who is to receive intercession. The accompanying psychic miracle, enacted in the same lines, is a rediscovery of the symbiotic interrelation between the speaker’s own “creature” self and the self-reflective consciousness of the lyric movement, without which the insights in the opening scene would not have been possible.
This sort of reverent interdependence appears in many of the poems’ interactions with natural life. “Trail of One Hundred Giants” finds both imaginatively transcendent and existentially familiar connection with Sequoias:
Suppose god exists, and they are wind
in consort with evergreens.
The sighing body, singing body. Roar and
hush, motion and stillness that enters the breastbone.
The giants declare their holiness
by living. Their roots spread ever outward.
I passed miles through blackened remains
of the southern Sierras to stand here.
They’re searching for water.
As the apparently stationary trees serve as paradoxical journey guides, recurrently featured dragonflies offer insight into vision: “Did you know that dragonflies see more light than us? Their eyes absorb colors beyond our range. And the catch the image faster (a ripple in the amplitude of air). Their brains evolved to process light.” “The Seer and the Seen” honors literary forebears, in this case Hopkins, for parallel tutelage in learning to perceive:
If Plotinus was right, then he is right:
Desire is seated in the soul,
and iridescence dwells
in the retina.
If it is not possible to distinguish
between the seer and the seen,
then god must be present
both in the world and our gaze.
Attention’s lifted and carried,
a man gathered into the visible so utterly,
landscape unladens itself,
love loosens,
that’s it: the new word is inscape. (italics original)
The pun on “the new word” moves from Hopkins’ vocational gospel to his poetic one, at the same time opening the esoterically connective functions of poetry to the reader of this poem. Correspondingly, the passage synthesizes the esoteric and scientific, the wisdom of ancestors of letters and of evolved bodies. In both views, the non-duality of god mirrors the concurrent potentials of mirroring and witnessing between humans and the natural world, perceiving and perceived creatures. This is, indeed, a collection with which to experience such uncertainties as if they were sacred.
Because they are.
[Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on January 9, 2024, 93 pages, $18.00 US paperback]