I’ve been reading Zen Mercies, Small Satoris by Marianne Bluger. It is her ninth collection of poems, this one put out by Penumbra Press. The next couple would be published after her death.
At first the opening tanka struck me as simple, then deceptively simple in the way an elegant vase is. Then as days passed the vase filled. She wrote these small moments and each standing alone is easy to digest, but collectively they make something more complex.
p. 21
They leave
& I open
the window
wide as I can
to the wind
It’s a sentence but each line taken clustered forward or back creates different weights.
They leave sets up the whole scene. They leave & I open suggests the relief of stopping the tense withdrawal, perhaps even release from a tense conversation. The opening is floral. wide as I can is the enthusiasm of cranking and perhaps not just fresh air but loss of perfume or smoke or any last mote of those people. to the wind is letting it go and the opening reinforced, not just of the tension but the self opened to change. As well, there is the consonance of leave, window, wide, wind that bundles them tighter.
Many of the poems are as complex as this with a depth of particular person and place, and sharpness and the sense of choice of reponse. All of this is also in the tanka on p. 18
Spot my old flame
buying Gitanes
& the New York Times
not to trouble his heart
I slip from the shop
There’s the immediate cleverness of flame and cigarettes embedded in the action and the kindness of avoiding causing pain for someone even though there is a history and presumably reason that some people would choose rancor. The poems are external actions (or inaction of exiting as action) but they are a psychological landscape that doesn’t hide in easy answers but rests in open-eyes to discomfort without a self-pitying anger and wallow. In her Writing Life chapter, from p. 29 and p. 31, there’s almost a self-deprecating humor that has humbleness and frustration paired. The tributes to the great impressions and impressiveness of others, but do what you can with where you are and what you’ve got nonetheless.
After the rockets
& the roman candles
came home
& lit a packet
of matchsticks in the dark.
Deaf
to glib articulates
why
heart do you strain to hear
a troubled stammerer
There’s a gentleness stepping forward and a detachment at the same time, of second watching mind amused at the world and at self. On p. 38
Lined up
at a Nashville deli
a stranger’s voice
“I live for Christ”
— that edge in her voice…
I know the edge. That defensiveness, fear and pride leaking around the aim of high road, love and earnest cheer and all things good. That scene suggests a clatter and chatter of background and the strident note, lifted chin and do things quiet just a tad to see how the person the fundamentalist spoke this to reacted. There’s the step-back of the POV. How does she feel? Familiar from her life, those she knew. What all loads of resonances and memories, good and bad tumble forward from this?
p. 43
In sticky heat
with the sweetness of petunias
going
ragged in the borders
a sip of iced gin
A beautiful brevity of what line breaks can do, the person is going, fading, both speaker and flower getting ragged in the fatiguing humidity. Almost a humor in the relief that at least for her part, she can sip and cool and refresh. Interesting word choice of sweetness, petunias being generic and not sweet of scent yet countryside-sweet, grandmotherly innocuous.
The discipline of form, the discipline to the form, the discipline for her to form what to see when there is so little time left all force precision. There is no sloppy laying down of word. Each must carry all it can.
She covers a lot of ground of moods, content, commentary. It’s raw and polished both, which I suppose means it is down to essential tenderness. The press of time is strong in chemo. Even if there were to be a remission, the sense of mortality is sharpened. One can’t shape loose of it. It is skin more than something insubstantial adhered to the person, worn as a weave thru the poems. There’s a need to attend to bits of life. From her chapter A Plunge in the Sky, p. 45
with melting flakes
still spangling his parka
he lies down
by my side on the hospital bed
& I’m home.
And I realize a few things — that somewhere in the weeks, piling in the mind, they came collectively to make me care. In among the specifics of poems, universal experiences, an individual to lose started to be in the words. Yet she was lost before the book began in a way, certainly before I began to read it. It gives the odd sensation of paradoxically falling through time and connection across two nodes of time, such as in her tanka on her father, p. 32
Above my desk
the photo of a haggard
young Berlin Jew
is watching me
writing you this now