"The Bird that Begins It," by Jorie Graham
from A Public Space 15
Please, Lord, please do not let Jorie Graham reconcile the mystery that binds the self to its body, or that keeps the abstract so inextricably assigned to the concrete worlds it informs. Early-ish in Graham's carrer, in her book The End of Beauty, she refers to a veil that separates the world of volition, emotion and consequence from the physical world. As it turns out, this is a subject of inexhaustible depth for Graham. There is no end to the poems she can and does write on this subject.
And thank the Lord for that. Because when Graham writes that poem about the irreconcilable relationship between spirit and flesh, I go weak in the knees. For Graham cannot be dettered, and her method of inquiry is indefatigable. "The Bird That Begins It" starts quietly. It is just before the morning. It is when the self is rousing itself to wake. But why? Why would the body react to light? What part of the body is "listening" for the command to waken? And, most particularly, why would this poem endeavor to inhabit the time that marks this very sensitive transition from sleep to waking?
Am I doing this poem justice? For me, what Graham brings to this occasion is a scrupulous and sensitive scalpel, which she uses to tease open this mystery of self versus body--a mystery attending even the most common experiences. In the poem "The Veil" from The End of Beauty she describes the anxiety of a mother waiting for her son to come home. In "The Bird That Begins It" she talks of waking. In both, it is her ever-widening intellectual treatment of the subject that raises its significance. Sentences in her poems are like tree trunks animated using CGI so that you witness their immediate growth and maturation. And yet, even in this overflow, her attention to each instant of an event feels precise. The first light of the morning arrives "as leaf-shaped coins." Later, "the clay / in the soil gleams where dew withraws." And later still, "preparation / of day / everywhere / underfoot." Graham notes the texture, thickens that texture, and, in the process, makes day a dense lushness of time. What irony that the self gets drawn out of sleep by such a crowd of facts. Where does the self fit in this frame? Well, I'm always in a frame, says the self. Think again, Graham says. Think again.
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