Editor’s Note
Unlike many philosophical poems that veer off into the abstract due to the nature of such questioning itself, Deckard roots us in concrete details. In ‘Storm Dance’ she situates us in a parking deck overlooking the ocean to watch the “knotted clouds roll in.” One might think that the premise is dangerous enough but Deckard sharpens it further by layering it with people even closer to the sea, swaying by the coastline. The tension built with such specific images is held throughout the poem with an effective use of caesura and line breaks.
We see a similar pattern in ‘Even the Dead Are Alive.’ But here, the repetition of the word “reservation” and its varied meanings help create the poem’s own environment. Then we’re shown a polluted river, how it becomes an unexpected altar for raising the dead. Grievance meets defiance over and over again throughout these poems.
Most interesting for me however, is Deckard’s expansion of the age-old chicken-egg conundrum. The way she extends it to meditate over the relationship between a creator and their creation. Does the poet, as is commonly believed, seep into their poem, or do poems also leak into the poet’s being? Who, in effect, is creating whom?
—Lavanya Arora
The Bombay Literary Magazine
We wait for the hurricane in a parking deck
several stories tall that overlooks
the ocean. We want to watch the knotted clouds roll in.
It’s dangerous
so close to the storm tide.
We should have left long ago.
Hippies sway
down by the coastline—
a storm dance. Parade past us with skirt hems
whipping their legs. Their bodies
bend like lithe foals.
Black fog rises, wisps of it, as if the storm holds
the intent of dark. Rain blows in
and coats our tongues with salt.
I tap my foot, a cold
shivering.
My whole leg
soon follows suit.
We all begin to dance
a desperate
gyration where we cling
to each other
as if we were each
the only roots we can grasp
as we fall
down
a steep
mountain,
our movements so unlike
the swell of the sea
as if we can’t trust
our own bodies to know
the rhythm
of the ocean inside
of the storm.
We dance even as the water rises
and licks
our feet, devours
our legs.
We drag our bodies
through water as if
we’re corpses.
We can’t stop even as the ocean’s
storm surge swallows our mouths.
Revere appropriation;
holy contortion
a thirst for soured blood
Reservation (“a thing held for future use”):
monsters
rear up wasteland fire
Reservation (“condition stipulation”):
stain the promised-
broken
Reservation (“habitat for large use”):
buffalo eye-blood
empty
Re-serve entrails
snaked
into forest
on blooded stone plates
Holy contortion consumes their death
Holy contortion consumes the poison of their death
Harrowed she washes
hair once stained with blood
in polluted rivers
for nothing is
the earth’s here
Protect with weapons of warfare
(this is forest-fear)
The dark: untameable
cannot be turned off
but shut out like regret
Revenants haunt drained fens
(they cause forest-fear)
while undead agitate blithely like flies
stuffing plastic money into plastic stock markets
doing doing
Plastic
doesn’t change
What is unchanging is not alive
and even the dead
are alive
Bury the dead (hide them!)
in their useless rot:
they can’t grow money
(this is forest-fear)
Watch the dead rise
out of marshes
out of mires
antlers hooves teeth
they wake they haunt
Drink their bitter medicines
A rule in Old English called “Substitute Possessive (For Body Parts)” requires some nouns have a dative ending. An example: “him on banum,” which means “[to] him in bones.”
Galway Kinnell wrote in “There Are Things I Tell to No One”, “…of spine marrowed with god’s flesh / thighs bruised by the blue flower, / pelvis that makes angels shiver to know down here we mortals make love with our bones.”
And I think, yes, who else would distinguish a human
in bones from one not in bones?
For that is our mortal marker:
our bones; and so, the angels
would cry out, maybe with shock, maybe with love,
about our fleeting lives. And it would be an angel
who would address us thus: to them in bones.
Could we distinguish if this angel
were addressing us humans in bones
or other animals? The deer
who slips into the yard in cover of dark, nibbles
the elderberry, leaves behind cloven
tracks pressed into mud because of the weight
of her bones? Or the bird who lights
outside the library window upon a flame
bush with its winter-dull branches
as thin as the cardinal’s twigged feet
but not nearly as thin as their hollow bones?
Who of us does the angel address: to whom in bones?
And of what is an angel made,
if not feathers and foehn?
Is the extratextual reality of my poems terrestrial?
The extraterrestrial leaks into my life—
or is it that my life leaks textually
into my poems?
I write:
“Um zu sprechen”
to think with written words
“Um mich zu orientieren”
to find the North star, or whatever damn star I can always find;
no, instead I find the moon. I am
always in transition.
“Um zu erkunden”
a poem is a chart of myself
where I’ve been, where I’m going
in these wide skies
of extratextual existence.
The extratextual howls
paginatedly.
I am the being of my place.
I am the water I translate.
I am the books I swallow.
I am the extratextual of the umbilical cord
I buried at Spring Creek.
I am both ontologically I and
the extratextual of my being.
Here, my meaning is found in the extratextual
pages of trying to understand Celan
in the spaces he left blank,
I am the tension between breath
and break. Reality
and no reality.
Un—, ir—
ur—
reality.
Language springs from a seed.
It sprouts from my lips,
my lungs, throat, tongue.
Language
the word
begot.
Notes:
Um zu sprechen: to speak. Um mich zu orientieren: to find my bearings. Um zu erkunden: to explore.
Acknowledgements
Image credits: Gustave Doré. The Vision of The Valley of The Dry Bones (1866). Material: wood engraving. Dimensions: 24 x 19 cm (9.4 x 7.5 inches). Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons.
Doré’s engraving is a rendition of the scene in the Book of Ezekiel, Chapter 37, verses 1-14. Even for a book filled with dramatic scenes, this scene is pretty coccyx tingling. YHWH sets the prophet Ezekiel down in a valley filled with bones and instructs him to speak to the dead. Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.
Narya Rose Deckard sets the reader down in another valley of the imagination and asks: Who of us does the angel address: to whom in bones?
Author | Narya Rose Deckard
Narya Rose Deckard is the author of Wolfcraft, which won Broken Tribe Press’s MFA Graduate Award, and the winner of the Susan Meyers Poetry Fellowship Award. She has poems curated in journals such as Dead Mule School, heartwood literary magazine, Kakalak Anthology, and the Weatherford Award winning anthology Had I a Dove. She received her MFA in poetry from Lenoir-Rhyne University, where she now teaches English and Creative Writing. She lives in Western NC with her husband, cats, dog, and chickens. For more: naryawithwings.com [Source: Author’s text]
