Sophie Cabot Black: “Begin the story as if you knew the horse”

Sophie Cabot Black caught my attention some time ago. There is an unknown world in her verses, an immense and itinerant doubt. As she talks about falls, precipitations, dreams, and disenchantment, careful of language, Cabot Black traces visibility and invisibility; she appreciates the safe place of poetry, where she can be herself with the burden of the world that touches everyone, a burden she turns into horses, hesitations, precious stones, and love. The critics of her country describe her as: "one of our most spiritually significant contemporary poets", "elegant, devotional, sober, intelligent, passionate, of a restless spirit.” "Sophie Cabot Black's verses are intellectually provocative and deeply moving."

To greet or say goodbye to this particular 2021, tied to the emblematic 2020 that was composed of so many virtual windows, zoomed recitals, and countless events that did not always help us appreciate good poetry, Mercurius Magazine is pleased to present the verses of a poet who is not in a hurry to publish, nor overly willing to appear in the media, nor in competitions. Secluded, secret, rather shy, and like true poets, always in flight, fleeing to peaceful places where she can flirt with the meanings that she will later turn into language and all the possibilities that are her verses. 

Sophie Cabot Black has three poetry collections from Graywolf Press, The Misunderstanding of Nature, which received the Poetry Society of America’s First Book Award, The Descent, which received the 2005 Connecticut Book Award, and most recently, The Exchange.  Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. She has also published several essays, and translated poems, She currently teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. 

NOT COMING BACK

(A previously unpublished poem)

What exactly did you want us to
Endure. And after: who will call out beauty
The way we do. Where will you go 

For awe, the fill of it coming
Sudden or slow, planned or not:
Birdsong as sung back, sunrise

As painted. Did you not want
Each re-telling? Was that not the way
You put the world to sleep each night, tenderly—

CHORUS AND ANTI-CHORUS

(January 21st, 2017, Washington D.C.)

All tragedies contain us
With no beginning
To speak of; each time we talk

Ourselves back into gathering
Another step toward
The finally said

Which does not work for all.
To say to each other
What we believe

Becomes the action, to explain
The story while also being
The story. We are enough

Not as one but as one of many.
We have imagined the places
We will not be moved; 

Have given many names
To what we can make—  
And the river sings as it flows  

Past both sides of the city  
As it splits the one
Into two. And he who was to be the hero

Is not the hero
And we who are given so much
To sing must move as if this is not

Interlude or merely disruption 
As we sing by the engine
That will not cease, and the bird above the siren

In its unexamined freedom
Lifts even higher
As there is no place left to land.

ALREADY BROKEN

You must write as if all along a flaw
Was on the bone, one place not quite right.
Begin the story as if you knew the horse

As weak, delicate, ruin about to happen.
Walk the road backward,
Thick with trees, out through to pasture

Where the bucket hangs ready to fill,
The truck cold, the doctor still asleep.
Your knees without mud,  the handbook high

Upon the shelf, the needle as it waits for the question
No yet asked. Morning untrampled
as a room we’ d never entered. Or entered 

And were not seen. Entered and then
Forgiven. Entered, never moved again.

LOVE POEM

Which cannot be written tries anyway--
From one room to another, each time startled
And does not want to hear of the already 

Passed through, the country of before.
Poem that at each door believes itself
In the room closest to the end

Where finally everything will be gone over,
Dismantled, held up, carefully laid back down
While talked into the beauty which can turn

In a minute. To hear of every other  
Poem written is to begin
Revision and what cannot be left enough 

Alone and so the lovers look at each other
Until none else can come near. Poem
Which never wanted anything but this

Tries anyway, so brave, unable to know where
She heads; unwrapping until only a gift
Which cannot be given as it cannot be let go.

OUR HOUSE

As the leaves turn their backs on us
And the lilac gives over to dusk, nothing
Is ever certain, not even the house, stubborn

In twilight as it outlasts the grove
It was wrestled from. Those left behind,
The oak and ancient elm, lean against each other

As if in consent. Out of dirt, out of
Some small mistake, comes the seedling;
It too has learned to watch, as we walk in and out

Of what wilderness was, and will again become,
As we enter our home, the way we enter love
Returning from elsewhere to call out
Each other’s names, pulling the door closed behind us.

FROM STONE

Perhaps she called out for him to undo
What was around her. Or he found himself
Cutting the relentless into smaller, into 

Meaning, into weight. What begins the fall;
Who first saw the path made clear, each tool  
Practiced in the dark or the last space left

Which could open enough. Did she climb
Out over his dusty and fearful hand,
Or did he pull her from the still place,

The ache until one caught against the other.
Piece by piece was recognized. Beauty
As the way through. But what is done to the stone

Is also the stone. How much does he take
Before we can no longer bear to look.

OUT DEEP

We are a boat without love. Love
Works a way through the current,
Headed for us, waving. It is
Unclear to whom she speaks;
It is even possible 

Something behind us
Moves her. We came
All this way for the unbroken
Water and such light I can no longer see
Where we are. You must 

Guide me: nothing more can be done
If we are to get to shore. In return
I will keep your story,
The one you will tell the others
When we get home.