Our unusually virulent, globally-warmed gales, reeking of burn and bile, put me in mind of the biblical whirlwinds. In a gust of halitosis, my Hebrew school teacher, Rabbi Mann, would warn us kids, “They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.” Those stern words evoked only the hot air rushing by my terrified face while riding the roller coaster at Paragon Park. Isn’t that why we sow the wind? To be shaken? More from King Solomon: “When the whirlwind passes, the wicked are no more, but the righteous are secure forever.”
I’m still that boy, now thinking: when the whirlwind passes, the wicked believe it is passing, while the righteous are fated to exhale its humid scent over the passing of one’s life.
I think of Lisa Wells as a poet who has passed through, been marked by, and while grocery shopping gives off a whiff of the whirlwind. She writes out of a vast uncertainty buttressed by a contentious genius for containing it. To write after the whirlwind is to utter with amazement – of having seen, been harshly exposed, survived. Punctured — but now, various sounds spill out, the youthful expectation of a singular identity has been abraded and a many-tongued tough-love oracle speaks up. First books by poets usually wave one flag as signature; Wells is simply both more desperate and non-compliant.
She opens her first collection, The Fix, with a poem about a mundane but necessary task, taking out the trash. “The Chore Wheel” puts everyone on notice: she will not strain to establish her virtues for an audience inclined to endorse its poets’ values in advance. Selecting her materials as if carefully sorting the recyclables, she seems determined to slow things down, assess and brood. “The Chore Wheel” begins:
Consulting the pie of pastels I discover
it’s Monday. The garbage bin is tipped on two wheels
and driven down the walk by the grave
valet – in pajamas, pale blue silk
stuffed into my boots and zipped into the down
parka, an ambulatory cloud.
I don’t care what the neighbors think.
I will meditate long on these pubic weeds
tangled on a mound of hollowing snow.
There is an insinuation that the making of these lines is yet another chore. When she says, “I don’t care what the neighbors think,” she is narrowing the reader’s options: either come closer or fester on your own side of the fence. She presents herself as unpresentable, a walking fog. Suspicious of the exhilarations of insight, she deals in modestly lit diminishments. Exhaustion and disappointment make it ridiculous to serve the market for clarities and claims. She will live and work within certain limitations and curtailments.
But self-portrayal gives way to sibylline pronouncements in the next two poems, both ekphrastic. The first, “’Cain Flees,’” is a rough guide to managing one’s wild insularities, the stuff that creates visions like Blake’s pen-ink-tempera image. It is advice spoken to herself – and to how she wants us to read her work. She writes:
If these transients rise oracular at their bench
if they slur against your cower
remember when you’re sore afraid:
even the prophets pissed their shifts.
Her diction, admitting both the archaic and the street-wise, not only looks over her shoulder to the classics for guidance but aligns itself with the perennial pleasures of sound, a check on the arrogance of sense. Then comes “Lake Havasu,” the first of several poems that reflect an adolescence and early personhood.
Detectives discovered a divot in the sapling
where the killer tested his garrote —
improvised from baling wire.
He’d been casting for necks when I stepped off
the bus this morning, moist towel of Dramamine
girding my brain. I was sitting in the Travel Center
dining room, near the wall of shotguns
and plasticized bass, when a child came to offer me
the leash of her balloon. Lake Havasu Sunrise
Rotary Dance & Derby. My reflection in the Mylar
and that of the girl — were bent.
I remembered you slept at a rest stop
off Hwy 40, in the backseat of your mother’s car,
teeth eroded to nubs by all the scavenged
citrus fruit. I’d like to say, kissing you
stalled the wonder if
my mouth could stand its own endurance. I’m sorry
I mistook you for a killer. All my life
I’ve been confused. A man moves his quaking hand
inside my tights and weeps — don’t like the thing he does
but I eat the Poptart after.
The final lines may sound like a #MeToo moment, but Wells isn’t recruiting comrades. The Poptart brings a taste for self-indictment. Wells is insistent on implicating herself in every crime, excess and blunder, and her poems are full of them. There is a whirlwind moving through this world, ungendered. Then the genders do their thing. In “Theory of Knowledge”: “So I whipped a boy at school with my windbreaker / and where my zipper caught his shin, he split.” In “Saddle Shoes,” there’s huffing “in the bedroom of the trailer”: “The prettiest of us had babies / with three different dads, she manages // an all night IHOP off the interstate.”
About a third of the way into The Fix comes “Up,” a poem that suggests the circumference of the work as a whole. It starts with a crushing, mordant blow – “No more infinite opening.” The poem concludes:
Into the witless dim
I go, into my own
development
where a wayward Ruffles bag
wefts desiccated grass.
The sensual world
builds cells in the mind
— false-paneled, hatched,
the tongue and groove
limns my limits.
I don’t grow, anymore,
by the inch. I gain
ground. I tone down
the stimulants.
Wells has shaped The Fix to indicate a pivot point, a leaving-behind for uncertain destinations. But there is an intuited potential on the cusp for “gaining ground.” On what? This is a poetry struggling to peer at what may be coming into view, but also re-estimating the worth of materials collected thus far. Her self-narratives comprise a hybrid of the residue of experience and propelled myth, as if neither memory nor archetype alone are sufficient to offer explanations. A sort of toneless self, created from scratch on the page, allows personal history to merge with cultural sprawl, and a third thing is born from language pared to the bone.
Resurrections
We lived on earth, were prone to pack
like dogs, my friends and me.
We die like dogs while milk sings
in somebody else’s mouth.
You want to talk about redemption?
Go tell it to heaven
freezing in space. Tell the Father
with his hopeless charge – Heal the sick
Raise the dead
I am a beast
there’s a wound in me
and everyone knows
you should never trust
what comes to you limping.
The corrosive edge of her speech is a warning to herself not to make things too easy for herself. There is no patience here for facile mash-ups of aggrieved op-ed, autobiography, and groping for tropes. In the final third of the book, she approaches the break-up of a marriage: “I loved my husband best when he was spent, / slicked with sweat, delivered shirtless / from the yard.” It is not his absence but “rotors / roaring in my forehead” that present the current danger. “To endure this / apparatus // all I have to do is last.” The poem embodies the lasting, which is a desire to discover and know one’s true nature. Below, the third part of a sequence titled “Under the Water, Carry the Water”:
He often brought me flowers.
I thought of their struggle
from burial to the thin
air of the world
into color
how they were severed,
scattered across our table
the calm unraveled
the mind pursued its dim
circle of light to meaning
everything ends.
He married a mind like that.
Like a mole
dark and small
but tenacious.
Undermining every happy lawn.
C.D. Wright said that Robert Creeley once told her, “Writing could be an intensely specific revelation of one’s own content.” Creeley says “could be,” not “will” or “must.” A looming maybe. In other words, each of us brings our personal narrative to the table, but standard grooves of memoir aren’t sufficient for poetry. We can be original in our work (at rare moments), but only in spite of ourselves. How we wield, winch and loosen the language may reveal the more telling usages of our collected stories and images. When Lisa Wells’ writes above, “Into the witless dim / I go, into my own / development,” she suggests that her manner of utterance no longer is based on the accretion of self-mass but on sheer speculation and flux. Her generosity is the invitation to peer with her into the yet-to-be with this unforgiving comprehension.
* * * * * * *
[Published by the University of Iowa Press, April 1, 2018. 70 pages, $19.95 paperback]