In the eighth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus performs one of his most perplexing miracles. The narrator tells us that, after a blind man is “brought” to him, Jesus “put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him.” But the miracle doesn’t seem to take. For after Jesus asks the man whether he can see, the man replies, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.” In response, Jesus lays his hands on the blind man’s eyes once more—a kind of second go at it—after which, we are told, “his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.”
This story comes to mind, unbidden, in the reading of G.C. Waldrep’s The Earliest Witnesses — the poet’s seventh collection — not only because the book speaks candidly about the deterioration of sight (among other bodily maladies) but also because Waldrep’s poetry mirrors the slow and partial revelation of sight that we find in this miracle. These poems both obscure and disclose: in some lines they show us “everything clearly” — in others, “trees, walking.”
“I strode into the woods in a brute faith,” reads the first line of the first poem, “certain the forest / would give me what I needed.” Then, in a characteristic move of obfuscation, the speaker withdraws into occluded seclusion, as if from fear of speaking too plainly. “If there was a mathematics / I was all for it, math being hunger’s distaff cousin.” Here we find that tension between clear vision and partial sight that marks both our opening miracle story and so much of The Earliest Witnesses; however, in this instance, we begin with sight, only to have it dimmed immediately.
This delicate dialectic — which weaves from candid confession to obscure association and back again — never resolves into tidy synthesis. (“The epigraph was from Hegel, I recognized,” reads the first line of a later poem.) The poems in this collection both reveal and revel in concealment, at times within the same line. And yet, the more familiar one gets with the places of this collection — its forests, chapels, orchards, cathedrals, museums, cliffs, plains, and ophthalmologist’s offices — one finds that the line between what’s clear and what’s opaque isn’t so clean, after all. As in these lines from “Pentecost, Risby”:
… I wish music were the friend (to us)
it pretends to be. Such vagrant architectures. Captain, we are
very small, our ships have been examined by eminent physicians
who find no fault.
These lines startle but do not yield their secrets — at least not until, six poems later, we find the following:
… Recall the tabulation of the saints,
& their stippled reliquaries; let them bask in the late morning
glow, like music. (Like music only the blind can hear, I almost
wrote.) My little ships — sight, hearing, the organs’ lordly drone —
goodbye, goodbye.
Here, with a wry humor that marks much of the collection (note the double valence of both body and instrument in “the organs’ lordly drone”) Waldrep provides a kind of gloss for his earlier image of the “ships [that] have been examined.” The speaker’s ailment has, it seems, progressed. That the “eminent physicians” found “no fault” with these “little ships” seems, unfortunately, somewhat expected from the perspective of a book that notes, just a few pages later: “We lived in the age of explanations, then. We mistook them for light.”
But this poem doesn’t end with resigned farewell. After reflecting on the as-yet-unknown site of his own burial, as well as his “little misplaced faiths,” the final lines of the poem find the speaker turning his imagination from the “little ships” to something larger: “The shore / makes the loneliest sound, independent of the succoring sea.” While these lines read as a kind of comfort, it’s unclear why. Despite the “succoring sea,” the shore is both “independent” and (perhaps, therefore) lonely. But the shore also “makes” its own “sound” — that is, it does not, moon-like, merely play host to another body’s noise, another body’s light. In a collection that contains such confessions as “I could throw myself / into music,” this small reality—the fact of the shore’s “loneliest sound” — reads like a kind of willed victory.
This tension — between loneliness and independence, between the song of mourning and the song of praise — characterizes much of The Earliest Witnesses. Throughout, Waldrep’s speaker retains absolute control over his language, which — despite a later protest that “I wish we didn’t have to speak. Or, that we had not spoken” — he has crystallized into an almost mineral hardness, an almost unnerving accuracy. Nowhere is this clearer than in “Never-Ending Bells,” the collection’s most striking poem. The poem begins with the speaker observing “Peeping Tom,” which the (oftentimes wry) notes inform us is “the local nickname for the medieval church tower at Hartland, Devon.” Waldrep writes:
Peeping Tom through the gateway arch, above the combe,
from the cliff that hides the sea’s advent. We are made
of stones today. It is a difficult office but no more
difficult than some. The stones grind against one another.
You can hear this sound. It rides above the sea like a blind
halo.
The poem continues at this confident pace for ten stanzas. In these opening lines, as in the rest of the poem, the images suffuse the scene with an emotional depth — a deep sadness, even — that the poem itself cannot seem to articulate fully. Elsewhere, Waldrep writes that he is not “unhappy / Only devastated.” This poem bears witness to that devastation, even when it aims merely to describe: “The tower risen like a planet, unblinking / above the horizon’s inverse swell.”
The final lines, too, speak to a sorrow and joy that are mutually constitutive:
And I would remain a man, turning again in realization
it was not some other world I’d thrilled to. It was this one.
In a later poem, Waldrep writes: “The truth is, I never wished for any higher office than presence.” In these lines, his poetry achieves that “office” — which we might describe (in this instance, at least) as a near-perfect fit between emotion and language.
This fit — which Jacques Maritain (borrowing from Aquinas) noted as a kind of “connaturality”—marks the best moments of The Earliest Witnesses. Throughout, these fine-tuned images and statements cluster and radiate across the pages: as when, in “North Walsham,” the “dark water” is left “somehow lighter” by the sky, “as if possessed not of phosphorescence / but of resistance, a thunder-fetter.” The influence of Hopkins in that last phrase — “a thunder-fetter” — is palpable, which helps to explain his explicit presence in more than one of the poems. But the catalogue of interlocutors — call them “saints,” call them “witnesses” — extends past Hopkins: both Simone Weil and Hildegard of Bingen speak in their own voices; both Plato and Whitman find themselves called to the witness stand.
In “Denizen (West Stow Orchard),” Waldrep nods to the presence of these figures. The poem begins in isolation: “On the postcard I etched a brief grief; I signed my name.” Whether this “brief grief” is, in fact, the speaker’s name remains unclear, though the semicolon does seem to nod its head in silent affirmation. “But we are handled,” he continues later, “the / saints brush each of us, little lessons in gravity they apparently / need.” This vision of a material communion with the “saints” serves as a salve for the opening line’s loneliness. Despite the “brief grief” of our isolated existence, there’s a comfort in knowing that, somehow, the saints need us.
Here it might be worth returning, briefly, to the passage from Mark 8 with which we opened. For though the passage’s most memorable moment occurs halfway between blindness and sight, the story does not end there: Jesus does not leave the man with distorted, partial vision. He gives him sight.
In a similar emotional trajectory, Waldrep does not let the sorrows and pain that both attend and define this book — the sicknesses, the surgeries, the omnipresence of war, the loneliness of the “tourist” — have the final say. Despite the temptation to dwell within the space both between and before the miracle (that is, respectively, imprecise vision and blindness), The Earliest Witnesses chooses clarity — which, in this case, means faith.
“Some things are built to fall into ruin — / Faith is one. The body is another.” In a way, these lines from “[Llandyfeisant Church (1)]” contain the entire book. According to another poem, “‘They’re / only ruins if one wants them to be. They can be other things, too.’” This vision of the world—which dares to imagine ruins as “other things” and claims that “rags are sacred objects”—both names decay for what it is (sin being a good candidate) and also refuses to bow at the altar of despair.
Throughout The Earliest Witnesses, faith and brokenness cohere — more than that, they coinhere. “Abide with me. Zion is wasted and these mowers / move each like an abandoned church across this grass-scape,” read the opening lines of an early poem. In the antepenultimate poem of the book, Waldrep speaks as directly about faith as he does in the entire collection. He writes:
In the end everything is rendered magnificently intangible. This is the
logic of the Mass.
Here I feel only the lack of my love for God, whom I love. Here in the
melisma of absolutes.
The paradox here should be familiar not only to the reader of faith but to any reader who has known love. Although Waldrep’s speaker feels, “in the melisma of absolutes,” only love’s absence, he knows that this feeling belies the truth. For, like any lover, he loves even when he does not want to love.
[Published by Tupelo Press on January 1, 2021, 130 pages, $18.95 paperback]