chris at 4:49 PM |

Sunday, September 07, 2003

 

When the "Milk Fog Sank" into Myth on the Loch:
Notes on Carolyn Forche's Early Mythicsizing Poetic

Here's one I had occasion to rediscover--to read again after a long time, thus to evaluate on different terms--while researching for some writing I'm doing on Carolyn Forche's work. It's an early poem out of Gathering the Tribes, wonderfully physical though not solipsistic or fixated about body (in the way a focus only on human body-sexuality might be).

Literally a language workout in many ways--it hews close to the grain rather than to any larger ideological (or other) sense of plan, as it were. It's as if the only thing that could matter here (and elsewhere?) is how tangible living really is, though there are so many reasons to ignore that tangibility. Living occurs in wakenings and in every breathing result of multiple, simultaneous interactions. The poem reminds that there are sensualities we cannot ever account for, and perhaps shouldn't try, though this poem tries its best to do so for one collection of moments passing. The poem also reminds me that personal things are said and intimate actions are committed because meaning has the impetus to cohere. Such matters to the personal in this poem because as mythic brinks and/or bridges between people, how these things cohere is also how speaking subjects--these people-- care. That this poem is near-relentlessly narrated in past tense until a crucial moment at its end, is a trademark of Forche's in terms of what became a continuous focus on historical materialism, history and History as the cultural exchanges between these two notions bear on lives in the present as well as lives of presence horrifically absented (Forche's more recent poetic focus).
But without more gabbing on my part, here is

Carolyn Forche's
Kalaloch **


The bleached wood massed in bone piles,
we pulled it from dark beach and built
fire in a fenced clearing.
The posts' blunt stubs sank down,
they circled and were roofed by milled
lumber dragged at one time to the coast.
We slept there.

Each morning the minus tide--
weeds flowed it like hair swimming.
The starfish gripped rock, pastel,
rough. Fish bones lay in sun.

Each noon the milk fog sank
from cloud cover, came in
our clothes and held them
tighter on us. Sea stacks
stood and disappeared.
They came back when the sun
scrubbed out the inlet.

We went down to piles to get
mussels, I made my shirt
a bowl of mussle stones, carted
them to our grate where they smoked apart.
I pulled the mussel lip bodies out,
chewed their squeak.
We went up the path for fresh water, berries.
Hardly speaking, thinking.

During low tide we crossed
to the island, climbed
its wet summit. The redfoots
and pelicans dropped for fish.
Ocelots so silent fell
toward water with linked feet.

Jacynthe said little.
Long since we had spoken Nova Scotia,
Michigan, and knew beauty in saying nothing.
She told me about her mother
who would come at them with bread knives then
stop herself, her face emptied.

I told her about me,
never lied. At night
at times the moon floated.
We sat with arms tight
watching flames spit, snap.
On stone and sand picking up
wood shaped like a body, like a gull.

I ran barefoot not only
on beach but harsh gravels
up through the woods.
I shit easy, covered my dropping.
Some nights, no fires, we watched
sea pucker and get stabbed
by the beacon
circling on Tatoosh.

2.
I stripped and spread
on the sea lip, stretched
to the slap of the foam
and the vast red dulce.
Jacynthe gripped the earth
in her fists, opened--
the boil of the tide
shuffled into her.

The beach revolved,
headlands behind us
put their pines in the sun.
Gulls turned a strong sky.
Their pained wings held,
they bit water quick, lifted.
Their looping eyes continually
measure the distance from us,
bare women who do not touch.

Rocks drowsed, holes
filled with suds from a distance.
A deep laugh bounced in my flesh
and sprayed her

3.
Flies crawled us,
Jacynthe crawled.
With her palms she
spread my calves, she
moved my heels from each other.
A woman's mouth is
not different, sand moved
wild beneath me, her long
hair wiped my legs, with women
there is sucking, the water
slops our bodies. We come
clean, our clits beat like
twins to the loons rising up.

We are awake.
Snails sprinkle our gulps.
Fish die in our grips, there is
sand in the anus of dancing.
Tatoosh Island
hardens in the distance.
We see its empty stones
sticking out of the sea again.
Jacynthe holds tinder
under fire to cook the night's wood.

If we had men I would make
milk in me simply. She is
quiet. I like that you
cover your teeth.
(54-57)


There are interesting plays here in and on the notion of a seamless first person narration when it is understood as involved in mythicizing a self among other selves. This is not a seamless "I." It is one that moves literally and figuratively within a gestalten paradigm. This is innovative, if subtle. The early seventies is not a poetry-moment known for much rattling of the "I" cage, at least not in the Yale Younger Poets Series.

Also, one main contradiction stands out for me: the language is so active--it's almost as if the poem were an exercise in the inventional strategy of finding *active* verbs to muscle around tendencies to over use forms of the favorite, "to be"--coming across the way instructions to composition students do from Strunk and White. Sad to say. But okay, an almost hyperactive use of verbs to relentlessly draw attention in past tense to a personally mythic moment of the speaker's. One might expect, then, an equally rigorous activity in the regions of logic, say, in use of some non-sequitors, or outright lunges into the surreal that seems ever, in this poem, to be humming at the margins waiting to be taken hold of or at least recognized. But no: active-hyper-elastic language use, though not so elastic stretches for the internal structure that drives the language use. I cannot account for this except to say 2 possibilities come to mind: 1. the poet wanted only to put this story down as a kind of self-actualizing poetic moment, traditional lyric mixed into an almost epic straightness, therefore did not want to butter it up with fancier or more challenging logics. And-or, 2. there simply was not such a measure of intention and control at work here. This is hard: I want to assume a large amount of control on the poet's part, especially this poet. I may have to learn something new, then, in that it may not reliably be a part of what is going on in the negotiations between writer and work this time. I should add here that I have assumed an autobiographical speaker to a large degree. There seems here as much reason for as not, so, my reading goes that direction for now.

But finally, because of the strong way this poem ends: asserting a certain sexualized bond between women--not necessarily in opposition to "men"--the apparently self-sufficient, nearly mythical Jacynthe (though the speaker of this part could also be understood as nicely ambiguous) on this count says, finally, "If we had men I would make milk in me simply." In other words, it is complicated enough to have been the "bare women who do not touch" but now have committed the care of doing so. To be so committed requires self awareness way beyond that which the simple physiology the body has accustomed itself to in the ancient processes of categorizing which is now the very term "woman." In other words, between men and women the answers are simpler and the body more accustomed to what amounts to a pat, reliable or predictable simplicity: milk gets made because of certain actions and processes between them--or so the poem concludes, yet not without a thought to what "teeth" can indicate in such matters, as well.

A final note: There has been a lot of talk about islands in poetry blogland lately. This poem does some interesting troping on that contested figure.



**Carolyn Forche, Gathering the Tribes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976)