Forrest Gander: At Which Point Without any Lurching Commencement
I met Forrest Gander at the Miami Book Fair, where he introduced himself as a translator of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. This awakened a particular sympathy in me.
Born in the Mojave desert, California, Forrest Gander has a degree in geology, as well as Literature. A telluric aesthetics and ethics may be found in his verses. He is highly esteemed and respected by his peers. Kind and as he once told me "married to poetry", I asked him to translate a poem by the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas, for the book: The Land of Mild Light. His answer was the poem translated on the same day. In 2016 he lost his wife, the poet Carolyn D. Wright.
Be With, 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry, is a deep, blinding and stark book in which the poet recites his pain in the mirror of his wife's death. See below some poems from that authentic and voracious collection, along with a recording I made for The Nude Maja in 2016. Forrest Gander currently lives in California.
SON
It’s not the mirror that is draped, but
what remains unspoken between us. Why
say anything about death, inevitability, how
the body comes to deploy the myriad worm
as if it were a manageable concept not
searing exquisite singularity. To serve it up like
a eulogy or a tale of my or your own
suffering. Some kind of self-abasement.
And so we continue waking to a decapitated sun and trees
continue to irk me. The heart of charity
bears its own set of genomes. You lug a bacterial swarm
in the crook of your knee, and through my guts
writhe helminth parasites. Who was ever only themselves?
At Leptis Magna, when your mother & I were young, we came across
statues of gods with their faces and feet cracked off by vandals. But
for the row of guardian Medusa heads. No one so brave to deface those.
When she spoke, when your mother spoke, even the leashed
greyhound stood transfixed. I stood transfixed.
I gave my life to strangers; I kept it from the ones I love.
Her one arterial child. It is just in you her blood runs.
BECKONED
At which point my grief-sounds ricocheted outside of language.
Something like a drifting swarm of bees.
At which point in the tetric silence that followed
I was swarmed by those bees and lost consciousness.
At which point there was no way out for me either.
At which point I carried on in a semi-coma, dreaming I was awake,
avoiding friends and puking, plucking stingers from my face and arms.
At which point her voice was pinned to a backdrop of vaporous color.
At which point the crane's bustles flared.
At which point, coming to, I knew I'd pay the whole flag-pull fare.
At which point the driver turned and said it doesn't need to be
your fault for it to break you.
At which point without any lurching commencement,
he began to play a vulture-bone flute.
At which point I grew old and it was like ripping open the beehive with my hands again.
At which point I conceived a realm more real than life.
At which point there was at least some possibility.
Some possibility, in which I didn't believe, of being with her once more.
CARBONIZED FOREST
The eye that was open on Friday.
The portent and the portent’s flensed hide. Ribbons of flesh
swarming downward. Like a school of leeches
deserting some unlit cataclysm.
And a briary phantom there, Stygian, erect.
Saying, here is the untranslation of the world.
Mounted on a spire of form.
The disembarkation of abyss. Fragmentary sputtering.
And what you thought were dark whiptails of illumination
were bristles from a shaved bear
being milked for bile in a rusting cage. Nested
among the mesh of soft translucent sounds
fallen from your lips, the
vestiges of someone’s breathing.
WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE
As grains sort inside a schist
An ancient woodland indicator called dark dog’s mercury
River like liquid shale
And white-tipped black lizard-turds on the blue wall
For a loss that every other loss fits inside
Picking a mole until it bleeds
As the day heaves forward on faked determinations
If it’s not all juxtaposition, she asked, what is the binding agent?
Creepy always to want to pin words on “the emotional experience”
Azure hoplia cockchafer, the caddisworm, the bee-louse, blister beetle, assassin bug
The recriminations swarm around sunset
When it was otherwise quiet all the way around
You who were given a life, what did you make of it?
So take her hand, walking in
the garden: an animal moment of warmth
she won’t recall after our sit. Voracious
starlings ride a swinging cage of suet.
That signal enthusiasm in her eyes
muddles with torment. Choose whatever
you will and the disease
still wins. Like a heavy shawl,
the shadow of cloud drags across
mountains on the horizon. Maybe I’ve
misread her expression.