Hearthwork II
April's Poems
Waymarker I
Sisna
Horses move swiftly as the cavalry devastates the enemy territory it sweeps through. This medieval military strategy was meant to exhaust the land of the enemy, so there was no circumstance where they could continue. Of course, the earth receives damage, but eventually like all things it will recover. “Sisna: Chevauchée” applies this to the interior life. “Sisna” opens in observation, and the speaker witnesses their endurance from outside it with the same remove that “recognition” named as the pity thing.
at least I can watch a fallen leaf fleeting finale
Arles is the horse beneath the speaker and it is the city at the edge of the Camargue where Van Gogh rented the Yellow House, a geography already freighted with creative labor and the cost of feeling too much. The grief’s beast is received by a listening ear (its gear heard from within the ride itself). The speaker along with Arles enjoys the freedom of a liberty that belongs to moving through loss than against it. Each return carries the weight of lessons learned: tethering, faltering, and the forced-open eye. The speaker keeps returning to the refrain as a rider returns to a familiar trail, asking each time: is this still true?
free as could be
we gallop and streamThe indented lines—“in line with its starry wheat,” “in line with its wicked sting,” “in line with its spirit wisp,” “in line with its welcome spring”—descend the page like way-markers on a road, as the terrain changes, the speaker aligns each slightly more hopeful than the last. The rider does not stop for them; they are disregarded to the peripheral. Yet they form an arc from the indifferent loveliness of nature, then pain and longing, into renewal. Grief sweats, skips, churns, wines and dines. The wrist seam trembles; the iris is called to irony. The emotion moves through tissue, sinew, the horse-body and the human body made briefly in motion. The rider is themselves, the horse, the hooves, and the skipped beat. Riding becomes a metaphor for any pursuit in which one cannot separate themselves from grief’s carriage.
each thought an image of wonder crimes each time a tied tithe where ponder cries at that stop, did we hear movement fear? the wind muscled the earth to drop
Crimes leave evidence, implicate a perpetrator, and belong to a record that persists after the act. Every act of wonder—thoughts that become images or feeling deeply—becomes self-incrimination. The speaker builds a case against themselves as looking becomes a kind of trespass. Each is a moment where the speaker's attention is commandeered by something external: the chevauchée that strips the land, the forced focus that holds the eye forward, and the irony moon that rises without permission. The speaker has accumulated evidence of their grief throughout the piece and “wonder crimes” names the cost. Tithe is the prior claim the earth or the divine has on what the speaker produces and tied is a bound and equal cost matched to the wonder. Each time the tithe comes due the speaker goes under to meet it. In “Flame Will Rise” the speaker stands at the threshold where water meets rock:
between the lefts—
roll onto hard jagged knew
between the rights—
dive under wet tithes' knewIn “Sisna,” the speaker chooses submersion over the alternative, which is to keep rolling over the jagged edge indefinitely. Ponder cries is a chosen submersion; the sound of someone facing what the gallop could have endlessly deferred. The question arrives in retrospect; fear traveled the road as sound, passing through unnamed while the gallop still held. The wind muscling the earth to drop is the external world confirming what the interior already knows. After all that churning (the bruise, the forced gaze, the wines and dines of grief), survival turns into the beautiful. One may say “good morning” and life flowers:
Good morning becomes the garden’s bloom. 
Waymarker II
Umbel
um·bel /ˈʌmbəl/ noun.
From Latin umbella, diminutive of umbra. A flower cluster in which all the stems radiate from a single point, producing a flat or curved surface. Each bloom originates from the same source and spreads outward at the same level.
se·rein /səˈrɛ̃/ noun.
From French serein (”serene, clear”). Fine rain falling from a cloudless sky after sunset.
“Umbel: Serein” opens after the chevauchée has passed and finds two figures at dusk—the earth warm from the day’s light and the tears working the soil. Together, umbel and serein create something that blooms and weeps.
a gravy hear and wear
splash sweetly our heel and mare
another was brought to trust
with a kind bright for soundThe body registers the world before the mind can name what it is receiving. “a gravy hear and wear” thickens the atmosphere until it has substance. The “heel and the mare” share the splash of wet ground, human and animal moving through the earth together, which continues the companion presence from “Sisna.” What was gallop is now wading, standing, and taking in the moment.
The poem introduces two presences:
one is a sun hue of petals
peeking through a muddy slew;
two’s a handsome fellow
whose form adjust per moat The petal pushes upward through mud toward light. The fellow’s form adjusts to the moat, reshaping itself around the barrier. These are two distinct modes of persistence that the poem allows to be true at once, which is the same generosity the poem extends to grief—it does not ask the speaker to choose between sorrow and its continuation. There is also the beloved whose form elevates what surrounds them, and whose presence defines the boundary of something worth defending. On the other hand, or the other eye, each iris prepares to bloom in its own way. One is devastatingly optimistic despite the earth that's been drenched by the sky's drool. Its faith is rewarded by the support of the eye that handsomely adjusts. Together, there is more than sight or sound—the bloom welcomes peace.
sky welcome eyes
who protect your drool
...
earth goodbye tears
who soften grounds consumeThe two refrains are the poem’s structural and spiritual center. One is addressed upward, one downward, and each contains something the speaker offers to a force larger than the self. The body speaks in involuntary liquid. Drool and tears is the body’s overflow as grief that simply runs, welcomed by the sky without requiring it to be made beautiful first. The sky and earth become the only vessels wide enough to hold the unselfconscious flow. The earth’s tears are the speaker’s tears directed downward, and as they soften the ground they fall into, mourning becomes the act that makes the soil workable for what will grow next. The earth, in receiving the tears, says goodbye to them and releases the speaker. The serein falls from a sky that has already cleared, and the speaker’s tears fall from a grief that has already done its riding.
The umbel blooms from a single point, and everything that fell during the chevauchée fed that root. Every stalk of an umbel emerges from the same center and reaches its distinct head, and the cluster reads as one flat surface from above even as it is many individual stems from the side. The poem’s two presences, its two refrains, its sky and earth all stem from the same shared root—the speaker standing in the garden of grief—and spread outward to their separate understanding of the same experience. The salt-white ring in the poem’s final movement, “from sting for love’s endless blue,” is the tide mark left by the ocean’s reach; the ring that remains after the water withdraws is proof of how far love extended and proof that it will return.
Waymarker III
Mara
Mara is Hebrew for bitter. In the Book of Ruth, Naomi asks to be called Mara after the passing of her husband and sons (“I went out full and the Lord has brought me home again empty”). The subtitle, “Interlude,” places bitterness as its interval, a moment where the forward motion of “Sisna” and the earthward offering of “Umbel” pause so that something more interior and resistant to the season’s consolations can be heard. “Mara” is written in a single unbroken column of short lines, two and three words wide, with the form presenting what bitterness does to interiority. The poem’s central metaphor is the tamarind ball, a Caribbean treat made by kneading tamarind pulp with sugar and rolling the mixture by hand until it holds its shape, then dusting the exterior in white granulated sugar until it is coated. It is a treat that requires knowing what it is before you eat it, because the first encounter with the interior—after the dusted sweetness of the shell—is almost always a surprise.
The poem expands the metaphor across three movements that mirror the physical experience of eating the treat. The first is the looking, in which the outer surface is examined (its dark hue, defended shimmer, and the wild white dust) and the first contact made:
From the slightest Brush, the flesh Sinks in to meet An abnormal bit Of space—
That abnormal space is both the hollow of the tamarind ball and the interior of a grief that has been moving and releasing for two poems. The second movement is the tasting, where bitterness lands before sweetness does, and the crucial turn is that the bitterness intrigues. Complexity of flavor is what makes sweetness worth seeking; the sugar field is called because the tang has already landed. The ambrosia that follows slivers, which is the tamarind’s specific texture made into a spiritual proposition where the divine arrives in the precise quantity and manner the vessel allows. To taste something fully, bitterness included, is to participate in both origin and transcendence. The two “Living” constructions present tasting as creation (genesis) and a divine encounter (ambrosia).
Tamar once again Smile for liminal sake Arles heeds the seeds righteous ache
In “Sisna” Arles bears the speaker’s weight as the chevauchée moves through grief. In “Umbel” Arles is unnamed but present as the mare in the splash, the companion in the wet ground. By “Mara,” “Arles heeds the seeds.” The speaker has finally stopped moving long enough for Arles to turn toward what the ride left behind. The tamarind ball at the poem’s center holds its seed at the core—after the white sugar dust, after the pulp, after the tang that lands before the sweetness, there is a hard seed that cannot be eaten. Tamar is Hebrew for palm tree. When Tamar smiles for liminal sake, it is the tree itself smiling. It holds its ground while everything passes through it. The liminal smile in “Flame Will Rise” precedes the decision to “dive under wet tithes knew”; the spiritually grounded choice of someone who went under willingly rather than being worn down by the jagged edge indefinitely. A rooted thing recognises humility and Tamar smiling again is the tree bearing witness to that recognition. Righteous ache is what that surrender leaves in the body as consequence to the particular weight that belongs to someone who chose correctly, but felt the full cost of the choice anyway.
Retrospective
Transcribed from a recorded conversation with myself:
“Sisna” was written in February, right after “The New Year: Camargue.” I had the name before I had the poem, which is unusual for me—ordinarily it goes the other way around. Sisna means, roughly, she who blooms in chaos. I wanted movement. Writing it, I remembered feeling scared. I did not have a clear image going in and I did not know what it would become. But I knew that I wanted to light a fire under my speakers ass. February was beautiful, but sorrowful. I thought let’s ride and cry. I usually trust the first draft completely—whatever comes out is what it is. “Sisna” was different. The last two lines were originally reversed: “good morning becomes the garden’s bloom” came before “illuminated iris called irony moon.” “Sisna” was the most complex to write.
“Umbel” was written in the last week of March, which makes it the most recently written of the three, and also the only one I wrote in the evening. Usually everything comes between one and four in the morning, when I am restless or in a heightened emotional state. But I was sitting at my desk and the first line came to me—“a gravy hear and wear”—and I thought, what is that, and then I wrote the poem. I never know what my poems are going to be about. “Umbel” was a smooth write, very easy, and I think I am going to grow into loving it the most.1
“Mara” is two poems put together, which makes it my most unorthodox creation. The first part was originally a standalone piece called “Testa,” written in February for a journal.2 I was working on it line by line—thinking as I wrote, which I almost never do—because I wanted to describe a tamarind ball. I am Guyanese. Guyana is a Caribbean country in South America, and we are culturally Caribbean even though we are not in the islands. Our history is very rich and it is a very diverse country—there are Afro-Caribbeans, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, indigenous peoples—and I say all of this to say that the food is extraordinary. The tamarind ball was just part of the landscape of options around me.
Then on the night of April first, I felt an ache at the base of my spine and some lines came. I wrote them in my notes app because my notebook was too far away. Two days later my computer was glitching and I found the old “Tamar” file open on the screen. As I was looking at it I kept thinking, why is the tamarind ball coming up again? I didn’t realize the poem I wrote on my phone was about the tiny treat. I have not had one in probably ten years, but I don’t believe in coincidences. I thought, let me adjust this, and I put the two pieces together.3 I considered adding a moment where Arles tries to take some of the sugar from the tamarind ball—horses love sugar—but “Sisna” is long and I did not want to push it.
Please enjoy these until May.
I ― II
I’m editing this 15 minutes before posting, and incidentally, “Umbel” has the highest engagement. I’m pleased that the crowd agrees.
It was rejected. I wasn’t too disappointed because my work is unusual, but I did put a bit of effort into constructing “Mara.”
I’ve decided to be generous, so here is the original second piece since I posted the original “Testa” on notes.
