“Zohar, Noah” © Michael Hafftka 2010
the way a searchlight listens over a lake
it was the prayer-word out of your mouth
your thousand-noun request
it goes up up to the florescent weather
was ivory-inlayed box
was hurdle & burn burning through
the infinite your overbright comet
“[You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior],”
Carolina Ebeid
My mother’s jaw has to be rebuilt every five or so years. They use bovine bone to do this. Yesterday she told me she has an infection in the bone now, and that also they think the graft did not take. She has been here before. She finds a way to speak anew each time this happens, new verbal mobility, to hide her discomfort. There are many times I’ve misunderstood her, and she, me.
But now when she does speak, I can hear the subtle realigning of her mandible, the small hand I do not see pressing down at a spot probably tender and painful, so that I might understand her. I feel very far away from her. I used to rarely speak to her of my own interiors, the neurological misfirings and resulting numbness that I explain away as poetic warfare. My mother and I do not like to call our afflictions by their given names; it would mean admitting defeat, conformity, falling into a fate written on national averages and soulless statistics. The last four years have brought about a series of new urgencies, new resistances from our bodies and ourselves. We don’t play to begin with, my mother and I, with work and time and love. Neither of us sleep—a recent discovery that’s always looked us in the face, our eternal dark circles and lean, hungry gaze. We have been given this time we didn’t think we had to spare. There developed between us something stronger than love. It took time to get here; we could not be more different, she and I, but we are not one for hurried replies on the subject of medical premonitions. The infection in her bone is a particular strong one, but she reminds me that she is stronger. I believe her.
It has long been and remains a messy understanding in the works. This understanding has been made public in front of other family, among strangers in strip malls, crossing the community beaches of Padre Island. Sometimes she and I don’t make it the short distance from sand to water before it shrinks—shrinks any declaration of theoretical, overarching love, shrinks into a stone we lob at each other. It frees us too, from expecting Carolina Ebeid’s “overbright comet” in reaching an understanding between us, an understanding that in reality is “made of berries & plastics & boxstops & eggshells”—those things natural and unnatural, those things we saved and those we threw away. A particular poem written in past tense, of the things she was and was like when “the words pollinated the dark there was darkness there/like the afterhours inside a library.”
Words as fertilizing both the idea of dark and real darkness. Words as un-barren-ing the light.
A house of books is a house of worship, and we never think of either as empty of us. Both need us, or else they are emptied of purpose, their spiritual purpose being their main purpose, that which nourishes and claims, which challenges and discontents, “the prayer-word” from our “mouths.”
It took years to bring my mother and I together. We are only two people; she is my birth mother—neither of these facts are lost on me. Perhaps it’s only now, when it’s so difficult for her to speak, that I most understand her. Because we are without “thousand-noun request” which go “up up to the florescent weather.” Because my mother and I are learning to bear long silences together on a phone line. We don’t see it as wasted time. We ask less and less of material shininess of each other. The understanding grows messier. It grows despite what our bodies would like to demand of us. It un-stills that silence we are learning to share. Together.
* * *
This is where I fall into your worlds, dear poeta. This, my complicated geographical grammar of your un-stilled life interiors, poeta.
I am walking down Queens Boulevard as elevated and exposed 7 Trains pass over in me in both directions. It is early in the morning, and the passing between trains is more deafening than the rumbling echoes of their passing. Here, under the mist of a brief-felt rain, the echo becomes the passing.
This past week, my father to me during our first Sefer Ha’Zohar lesson: Never forget you’re reading this between worlds, not between countries.
I pass these words through my lips now as another train passes over me. As if to summon a divining rod to dig itself up. But it wouldn’t be the one which struck open a gate of water from stone. It will always be something else in which our hand cannot grasp. It is not about the rod. It is not about the stone, which now turns into a watch I hang from the branches downward-growing from the rails.
Where time isn’t, even the in betweens can pray. In between worlds, for instance, might the stone become the vessel. Become woman. Become your “Juliet, White Swan,” in which the speaker calls upon its interiors to “Unowl the night air/ unsparrow.//Comes a little /night. Comes the leftward waltzes/what war/makes.” These, the unsuddened dances of wanting, how the last word lingers in the line after. How the last word lingers in the line after. Your “long/hollowing of every//rooted thing to wood-wind” is singing me into of it.
This, the reader comes to live/to life into of your un-stilled life interiors, poeta.
This, your interiors, still lives not captured but unleashed, not simulacrum but the song of things, the songs your interiors, and they pierce through me on a most cold, hazy day in December in which your Juliet reappears, in which in the photograph of your poem “Punctum / Metaphora”, the reader encounters “a man hurling the rock is my father insofar as Juliet is the sun.”
There is not one without the other: the rock and the beloved. There is no large fallen city without first the cameras, the new stories, the calls for action. Until the world forgets, until the world brief-felt listens not. The world shrinks to a stone held as a photograph, shrinks to love. Where “love remains a kind of present tense,” the reader finds the lives left behind in “the scenes in photographs” become catalyst for reflection, for reawakening the most difficult of loves in “a tangle of syntax.” The speaker’s father is throwing a rock which is also the same man who “keeps lions in his chest” which “rip apart a gazelle.” Poet-ethnographer, who is not the only changed by this transformation of past in which love is the constant, but the reader, the man, the memory, the speaker herself.
Say not, world, in your love of her, of the poet, that you might promise interiors of future countries alone. Say not either or. Say not another war.
Say she is creator who sees beyond “your overbright comet” of bombast and gossamer.
Say historical pain, say phantom, say real our jaws which might bring about new ways of speaking. Say those lost, sometimes out-of-order, enigmatic bodies caught between the two worlds in which the most radiant of science can admit all it does not know.
Say, world, what you cannot bear without singing: that, such poetry divines a new consciousness of what it means to be human, both by our singles selves and in disorderly togetherness.
Say, that in her poetry, we can be what would replace us.
This is the second installment in a two-part series on the work of Carolina Ebeid. Here’s the first part.