Every Word Heard Is a Corpuscle

Dear Friends and Family,

We come today to the third letter in a series on poetry. Here are the first two:

Ars Poetica and Human Becoming

When Soul Wakes, Poetry is Born

Since we are exploring verse, I added an audio recording—from my cell phone. The quality is not great, but perhaps it evokes sitting alongside one another.

My mother sets the stage today, portrayed in a moment that, if she were here, she would surely protest my voice for her. All the same, after nearly twenty years since she passed, I caught a glimpse of the two of us this week that I had never seen.

A little housekeeping before we move to the reflections. I have heard that Substack is doing some system updates, which may affect your email delivery. To be sure to continue receiving these Sunday letters without a hitch, please make sure to add reneeeliphd@substack.com to your contacts and email me if you have problems.

Thank you, as always, for sharing a few moments of your week beyond the comfort zone.

With love,

Renée

photo: Svetlana from Pixabay

When I was a child of eleven or so—not too seldom colored with red clay on my feet and twigs in my hair she begged me to brush—I had a knack for knowing when my mother was in the kitchen, or she had a knack for knowing when I was headed inside. Either way, I would fling open the door to find her there, already. Never did I not startle her, the open door closing the other place where she was. I would get a little catch in my breath, suddenly unsure of what I had done, softening my step inside a silent unseen, spilling out between us.

It was not an option not to wash up with the look that came next. I hoisted myself every time onto the kitchen counter, swinging legs from side to side and ignoring now a different look and a sigh which, if I am true, made sitting there all the more like eating cake when I should not. But mostly, I leapt up there for reasons I did not and could not say. I wanted to watch her hands.

. . .

ποίησις (poíēsis): the act of creation; a creative act.
                              the emergence of something that before was not there.
                              the process of coming into being.
                              the root of poetry.

. . .

How do you know how much flour to put in the bowl, Mom? “Get me those two sticks of butter from the freezer. Will you?” Returning, I see the bowl now mounded with flour, dusting, too, the board beneath, no measuring cup in sight.

Mom, why do you pinch the butter like that? “You can put the flour back in the cupboard.” Butter heaped in pieces now like fat pebbles on a knoll.

When do you know when to turn the dough and when to stop? “Set the buttermilk out for me, please.” Little clumps starting to form between two fingers and thumb, straight-as-arrow fingers burrowing a hole mid-bowl, patting just a touch the clumps on the sides.

A not-shy splash of sour milk in that burrow. The milk jar now turned up to her mouth as if she was pastoring communion and she the only communicant. Her hands resting in the bowl, her eyes on me to see if mine were on her, and no sooner, her hands spiraling around the clumps into one wet mass in one round sweep, then dumping the whole lump to the board, and without fail, before she would knead, she would say without pause, “You don’t want to overwork the dough. The biscuits will be tough.”

. . .

If a poem should not mean | but be, it cannot be tough; for to be tough is to hold fast together and so, be difficult to chew. A poem must be flaky in word that can never answer what words cannot say. Inside every word and the string that holds them close is an absence, this absence a presence pulling being into meaning, a chiasm—which is to say a gap that looks both ways—between the hunger that births a word and the words that come.

To attempt to close this gap is futility. Every word is a cliffside of hope insofar as it spans an abyss of meaningless. And still we try. Why? We are pulled into word.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf. 

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea – 

Every line on a page or verse turned is a cul de sac circling an endless empty inside the life between us. Only a gesture will do, and even that won’t. My mother’s hands were not my own. Nothing, ultimately, can close the breach in the membrane of desire to say what we mean.

And what we mean, if we wind our way down into the marrow of it, is what it is like to be.

If you wind your way into the marrow of you, the innermost inside the bones of you, the stones that shape you, you would come to a soupy something that has no form, a chrysalis you might say.

There, where there is no form, the promise of something that before was not there.

Everywhere we turn, a promise     a yearning       a gap we cannot close.

Every turn an act of poetry.

Every act of poetry trans/versing the isness of is.

Which can mean nothing unless you read these words from the place in you from which a poem comes to be. Leaving,

. . . as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind – 

We left something behind. We said before that we are pulled into word. We said we try. What we did not say is what pulls.

And for three days straight I have been looking at this page trying to say what is at once plain and altogether beyond reach. And every time I get close, I circle what I do not want to say barreling in with meaning I did not intend—or mean to intend, I do not know. The words come as if a dreamless dream until we can walk around them no more.

In the beginning was the word . . . and the word was made flesh.

Forgive me you who may believe I have sinned when I say that every poem is a body, outstretched. A poem, its fragrance the flesh trans/versing Being and being. Come a little closer and you will see not with your eyes alone but with the whole of you that every word heard is a corpuscle, bright red and breathing.

The beginning is ever-beginning. Out of a great Silence, a yearning, ever mute, signaling the endless unfolding of being.

A poem should not mean
But be. 

. . . 

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

. . . 

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit. 

NOTE:

The notion of language as an extended body is not my own. I have adapted and added here to this notion from Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: New Modern Library, 1911).

photo credit: Kimberly Warner (thank you!)

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