Scorch Marks

I was at the library last week and found on the shelves an anthology of poems I had heard about but not seen, American Journal: Fifty Poems for our Time, put together by Tracy K. Smith, the current American Poet-Laureate. I thought it was a terrific collection. One poem, I was particularly taken by was a sonnet called "Scorch Marks, " written by Dara Wier, a writer I had not heard of before, even though she is roughly my contemporary and has been a writer and a teacher for as long as I have. I typed it out and pasted it into my commonplace book:

Here's a more readable representation:

Scorch Marks

Whenever we find wide black swaths burned across our paths

We think of you. Our friend the black swan turns to look

At us frequently when we pass by its pond. We see your back

Far away inside the pupils of those we love. We stare

And we stare where we are. That is what we do. It makes us

Look as if we've misplaced our minds or perhaps replaced

Ideas of mind with some new stronger fog. I feel you

Fading and find you falling for that feeling, you staring farther

Into one of the farthest vanishing points in the universe.

We find this alarming. We are losing track of something.

Our friend the black dog watches us carefully as we walk by

The door she guards. The crows look at us in their crooked

Ways. They converse and inverse and walk like the mechanics

Of mystery they are. Who are we to believe what they say?

-->

Then I went online to find out more about Dara Wier. It turns out this poem came from You Good Thing, a book of sonnets that came out in 2013. That interested me, since if you have been following my blog this year you know that I've been putting a lot of time into sonneteering myself of late. So I looked it up and lo and behold our always-surprising local library system had the book. It came in yesterday, and I spent a number of happy hours over the last two days reading and re-reading these poems. A lot of what I most enjoy about them is evident in "Scorch Marks."

First of all, there is Wier's musicality, the way that sequences of words wend and warp and echo one another. ("I feel you fading and find you falling for that feeling...")

Simultaneously she spins out sequences of words that have a forward flow, a fluency, that picks you up and takes you for a ride. ("It makes us look as if we've misplaced our minds or perhaps replaced ideas of mind with some new stronger fog...")

There's the originality of the combinations of words that she comes up with, that at first startle and make you stop and think and then quickly resolve themselves into something that feels not so startling after all, but rather just right. ("We see your back far away inside the pupils of those we love...")

There's tremendous range as well in these poems, in terms of tonality, in terms of theme, in terms of the many highly original strategies of syntax and juxtaposition and repetition of ideas. But there is also a strong sense of unity among them. All of the poems are addressed to a vaguely defined and somewhat amorphous "you," who might, in any particular instance, be a friend, a lover, a mentor, a presence, an absence, a spirit, or some combination of all of the above. ("Whenever we find wide black swaths burned across our paths we think of you...")

And finally, in this particular poem, the crows sealed the deal for me. As you may have noted before, I'm partial to crows myself ("They converse and inverse and walk like the mechanics of mystery they are...")

I'll close by offering the last poem in the book, another example of pretty much all of the qualities I mentioned above:

Epitaphic

How a haze of you weighs us down is not strange.

Those of us who don't know where you are go around

Addressing you as though your face were hovering

Before us half out of reach almost as if you were

Teasing or testing our reflexes so this is what you

Are now to inclining ever more fugitive reasonings

Now slipping so deeply into deepest of shadows

Now folding yourself into folds of your choosing

Once a black cloth folded forever once a cloud black

And beautifully asserting once a bucket of ashes now

You are racing or flying so your velocities sway us

Into all keening wavering telegraphic of broken into

Thundering so go you go on as you were into the hills

Into this river leaving us with little to do with our hands.

 

Quarter to Twelve

Quarter to Twelve

A strident sun overseeing what might
be desert, what might be sea. Rocks
just here; on the horizon, perhaps, hills.
Something breaking up in the middle
(where it all began, where it always
begins): buckthorn bursting into bloom,
grackles harassing wrens, or maybe
some kind of business with an axe.
Over on the right, a building? A book-
case? A mirror? All of the above?
The whole surrounded by a wall:
contents under pressure. The light
doing its definitive work. The day
nearly over, or just about to begin. 

Process Reflection:

It's been a while since I did a pen-and-ink abstract. Wound up doing this one yesterday. It's small, maybe 4" x 6". As usual I had no idea what it was going to turn out to be as I was doing it. I started in the middle drawing more or less random shapes, and worked my way around, ending with the circular figure in the upper left. I was aware, as I worked, of wanting to break up whatever patterns were emerging as I worked, which is why I went to some horizontals in the lower right and then to some verticals and right angles in the upper right. By the time I got to the upper left all I had left to do was circles, so since it was looking landscapey by that time I decided to do a sun thing.

But I kind of liked the way it came out. And today when I was trying without success to get some traction on a poem, I put that work aside and thought I'd just try to work out from the drawing and see what words showed up. I was conscious of wanting to have the poem have some of the same shiftiness that was present in the picture, as well as some of the same continuity. The title just popped into my mind somewhere in the middle of the third or fourth draft.

Looking at the picture as it will appear here, I notice that it appears a little lumpier than it would if I had taken it with my regular camera than with my iPhone. But you can kind of get the idea of what it looks like.