There are phrases which pivot the way you perceive from defaults, however those defaults got there. For example, whenever there was an ambulance siren my mom’s face took an anxious gaze, fretting aloud, “someone’s hurt“. It took 20 years until the incidental of being present when someone else responded to the siren and said, just as automatically, “help is on the way” and went on with that she was doing. This is a better way.
In a small way, I think Roo Borson has done it again for me, changed some arrangement of how the world looks, how I perceive. She did it with the phrase “caesuras in the grass”, p.9 of Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida.
The last time she did, it was those headlights as arms reaching out into the night. I haven’t tracked what book it was in now but I know where I was when the phrase grabbed my chest and held my breath, raised my hair.
When I read her lines I was in a dark aisle of Kanata’s library, a sprawling crab on the floor. The overhead fluorescent bank didn’t line up with the aisles, this light was over the shelf-top. I was conscious of limbs going to sleep from the shoulder, leaning back, my palms pebbled red, indented with the berber, a sort of burlaps impression pressed in. I was pulling books from the bottom shelf but when I came to hers I read it all, there on the floor.
Reading her Short Journey Upriver was like that again.
p. 58
Soon I’ll be fifty.
Around the block, another cherry tree.
Another’s cherry tree. Like it I want to begin
blossoming first from the very tips.
Beyond the gorgeous senses of image and surreal and identifying as one being to one being, human to tree, there’s that matter of age.
Quick calculation and I am now the age she was when I last read a book of hers with that phrase. In the same amount of time I’ll be fifty as well. The lag doesn’t close but age to age pass quickly.
This time I’m in a chair, back to a window, cloudy light. I’m surprised to find she’s in Toronto as of 2004. For some reason I felt she was more coastal. Or had been for a while. I know I can’t finish it in one hungry sitting. I have less need to as well. It will still be there. So will I.
Her poems seem more reconciled with loss than I remember. Less pathos of fire, more mature. A quiet observation, not as under the darkness inside a pressure cooker. They seem to suggest that she’s taken a path of contemplation, mediation in the interim. I wonder what all has gone on with her.
She isn’t gesturing emphatically of how things are, but wondering, noting, wondering. In a way that is wrought powerfully but delicately. I don’t feel Hollywooded into reacting. It’s open-palm offering.
One section is diary format. Here she talks of her mother’s death 7 years before and the red mittens that were hers and I feel almost as if it is my future there.