By the time I have finished reading the poems of Marjorie Saiser in Bones of a Very Fine Hand and Lost in Seward County, I am overwhelmed with melancholy, the kind of sadness I feel as I pass an abandoned farmstead, the barn sway-backed and losing its shingles, the house leaning towards the earth and wishing to be soil again. That sadness - what has been lost and won't come 'round again except in our memory of it. The world turns, Saiser seems to say, and it is not always towards joy.
Saiser is a Nebraska poet who explores the intensity of certain moments of our lives, those instances when you know "this is important" and you have to tell yourself to "pay attention!" I am always afraid that the stories of who we are and the rubrics of how we live will be lost in the fog of an uncertain future. Saiser is bent on making sure that doesn't happen. She writes of those moments, out of her grief and her joy, out of the darkness, the moments of light.
She writes of these keen moments; she writes of loss; of her family, her parents, husband, children; of friends and their plights, her community and its larger truths. She writes of her mother, and her mother's struggles. She writes again and again and again of father. Sometimes she writes of stories she has only heard, of events which occurred sixty or seventy years ago, so those incidents and the people in them will not be forgotten:
Margaret was, my mother says, all over
Robert in the back seat....
That was back during World War II, mind you.
Her poems, rather than being conversations with God, seem to be conversations with her relatives and friends, seem to be an on-going conversation with the world around her. Saiser is bringing us "the news that stays new" out of her life, its joys and sorrow. What she tells us is not gossip because it is too important to be ignored: it is the stuff we use to make our sense of the world. Her lines are meant not for some vague, generalized reader, but for particular people in her life, for those she has loved and those who have loved her, for the hardy people she grew up among who enjoy the beauty and who endure the harshness to be found along the Niobrara River of north-central Nebraska, for that young clerk in Lincoln, Nebraksa, "big-boned, round-cheeked, big overalls, dark hair, plenty of it, plenty of everything." In "Re-entry" she talks about these people:
I know their temper, their temperature,
the way they get through whatever happens:
Blizzard: scoop it. Drought: quit your whining.
Bad luck: So?
She means this description as praise; this is a toughness Saiser admires.
Like me, Saiser needs to eavesdrop, to read things upside down from the other side of the desk, to find the stories of our lives wherever they lay, in the moments of drama inherent in our living. In her poem "Night Flight," for instance, she is "watching us, the community of [Flight] 1090 to Denver."
... We are facing forward or we are the cast of Our Town;
as though in a tunnel or tube,
dots of light in a row above our heads.
We are ranks of readers, sleepers,
we are cast as the dear departed,
sitting onstage on our chairs–supposed to be graves–
looking straight ahead, talking among ourselves....
In "There Are No Atheists in Airplanes," she absorbs her surroundings, wanting to hold onto this moment and not let it disappear: "It's what we have, 12,000 feet, cloud nosing/up to the windows, and potholes in the road./We're in this together, the guy behind me says."
Saiser looks at the world around her and she wants it to matter, all this that she sees and knows and loves. That "chain of hands, coming on down, funeral by funeral" in the poem "The Living, the Warm." That sense, in "Losing," that we are "eroding surely the shape of what we will lose." Or the poem "As Long As Someone Remembers," where the world is a sad place, where we live with our losses. In the poem "I Want to Create," she concludes:
... I want
someone – I want to be the one – to stand up,
to hold the lost –
rediscovered and powerful
in the palm of the hand, to say with
amazement: Look, I found it.
In some ways we could describe hers as "the poetics of loss."
Saiser's poem "Looking for Ted" seems representative of her way of handling more than one stream of narrative while rooting around for resolution and meaning. One story is of the poet's getting lost in Seward County while looking for Ted Kooser's house. The other story is of Kooser himself, waiting patiently, making soup, setting dishes on the table. We move from an image of Saiser's car stuck in the mud to that of Kooser grating cheese, back and forth, imagined on the one hand, sweating real on the other, until we reach the end:
... Here's his flannel shirt, his beard,
his hug, his plains eye, laconic, blue,
as if home must be close at hand,
dug-in, planted, lasting,
perpetually found.
"Not So Much Bottom Line as Bluesteam" is another such poem, one which makes leaps between three narrative strands before bringing them together: "as if I can stand close enough to matter/in that radius where we are separate together." Saiser has a habit of examining two or three images or stories together, looking for common meaning and larger insight, trying to find resolution of their disparateness. It is like weaving: the beauty is not in the separate strands, but in the bringing together, which is what this poet does again and again.
Saiser also has a way of describing what something is by telling us what it is not, as in "Not So Much Bottom Line as Bluesteam," where she describes a memory of the distance between herself and her father, "a warm and loyal space," as she ran towards him:
not so much profit as mystery
not so much increase as Elkhorn
not so much envy as bud
not so much advance as seed.
Or again, when she holds out her arms, raises her face to watch a cloud of geese:
not so much the power as the trail
not so much to garner as to free
Or thinking of those who hold her:
not so much the market as the daybreak
not the rush but the lake
not so much resume
but to live
And this is how it ends:
as if I can stand close enough to matter
in that radius where we are separate together
not so much impress as honest
not so much merge as search
not so much first as true
not so much to grasp as to fly.
In her poem "What My Life Is," we hear that "My life is not..." and then "none of that [is] my life either..." and then "My life is almost...."
Similarly, I would characterize the poem "The Light that Makes the Web Show Up" almost as "The Poem She Does Not Write." I recently heard poet Beth Ann Fennelly say "you are closest to something when naming what it's not." Saiser's practice seems to agree with Fennelly's statement.
Yet, too, for Saiser sometimes it is the act of naming which holds the world together; it is the simple enumeration of particulars which saves us, as in the poem "Naming" where Saiser's two-year-old son has climbed the ladder to the roof so as to watch his grandfather working; the grandfather has the hammer hanging in his hand, he's
seeing the baby at the edge of the eave,
talking to him, calm on the outside,talking him steady,
keeping him from falling like a hammer.
The heft and plumb of my father's voice
keeping things where they should be.
Her father's dry cracked hand closes on the boy's arm "as on a handle./My father's voice calling my name,//as if naming." The boy is safe, yet the naming goes on and on, as if naming itself holds the ladder against the house, keeps all things where they should be:
A child at a height in the quiet morning,
looking at what can be seen,
at things to come,
as if receiving names:
Common, jack, rafter, valley, hip.
Heel, bird's mouth, pitch, rise.
Facia board, rake, soffit.
Tab nail, sixteen,
eight-penny, ring-shank,
galvanized.
Ceiling joist,
ridgepole,
dormer,
peak.
Bearing wall,
truss,
claw,
shakes.
Two-by-sixes.
Two-by-eights.
Two-by-tens.
Bearing wall, indeed. Everything holds, belongs. The boy is safe.
Often what Saiser's poem would appear to be about is not what it's about. "The African American Quilt Exhibit," for example, would seem to be about the quilts, yet at the end it grows suddenly expansive: "I want to see more, more, all there is, every cockeyed thing,/no dainty little invisible stitches. Let the seams show let them show." The poem "In No Hurry" would seem to be about her husband holding up the going-down garage door as long as it takes to get the motor to reverse, but it's really a poem about life and death, about wondering "if my/life is like that, a three-dimensional picture, if I could/let my eyes go slack and see it, if I could look at it/as long as it takes." In "Shopping," something so simple as buying earrings or a barrette for her daughter takes on significance because she is able to suggest how everything is connected to everything. This movement from such particulars to the universal truths of our lives is a common shift in her poems; we snap to another realm of understanding, and it is like Basho's frog, jumping. Like seeing the world "in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour," allowing this particular to suggest something so much greater is a way of apprehending the world; and Saiser uses it, too, as a way to shape some of her poems.
In other poems, such as "Otto," however, we get the sense that "this just is," that there's nothing more or deeper, that there's no "resolution" because in this life sometimes there's nothing to resolve. The poem ends with the acknowledgement that Otto "would stand/mornings/at the screen door/his hands in his back pockets." We are left only with this image set on the altar of memory. The poetry is in the poignancy of the image and what clings to it, not in a resonance with any larger meaning.
Sometimes Saiser makes a simple leap from another's life to her own, as in "Often He Came to Pick Up His Wife." For two stanzas she tells us about a man who has died, then she looks at herself in the final lines:
I want it, this sitting up in bed to write,
this stuffing myself with apples, with bread.
I want it to matter.
This is, yes, one of those poems which shifts from particulars to universal; and it is also, not incidentally, a poem about the material of Saiser's art, I think.
In "Anna in the Swing," the poet speaks of putting on a mask, in this case the mask of Anna. She was in class and she was writing a story. She put 12-year-old Anna into a story; "I called Uncle Michael/Rheinhold, and I called myself/Anna," Saiser says
... I
was answering some of the professor's
questions, an old part of me replying,
measuring, generalizing, anda new part of me in the swing....
She needs such a mask, I think, to tell it all: "the truth, the lie," the "real, unreal," to tell of...
Anna on the hillside
watching a red horse across a barbwire
fence, a stud cropping grass,
sound of his teeth tearing stems, his tail
switching at flies on his haunches, his
black sex hanging down,
telling the truth, lying.
Saiser needs the mask because the world of the senses is but raw, unfocused data unless we shape it; and doubly so, if we are to make art of the material, the shaping requires that we take a point of view, a stance, that we establish a place in the world from which to speak: "Anna on the hillside." Sometimes there is no other way than this to tell what we see, have seen.
Saiser has a habit of using repetition to create a little chant or litany that propels us through the poem; these poems sound like psalms sometimes in that regard, like the call and response of a church service. In "St. Cecilia, Seward County," she uses "Sure enough..." as the repetition. In "Nine-Mile Prairie, April," it's "What I like is," a phrase which recurs twelve times, along with three incidences of "What I don't like is." In "Not So Much Bottom Line as Bluestem," it's "not so much," used eighteen times. Such recurring phrases become the frame upon which the poem is hung, become the bones of the telling; in Saiser's poems we hear the voice of one who has made the form of ritual language a part of the way she structures her art.
Yet for all the seriousness of life, sometimes the poet is just having fun, as in "This Ain't No Bass Boat Day" where she rides a metaphor about as far as it will take her. Her husband is home from fishing and
... ready now for a romp,
he says, in this haystack I've been keeping warm.
Haystack, nothing, I say. More like, I declare,
a whole darn marina. This ain't no 16-foot Lund day.
It could be a twenty-footer inboard/outboard day, an off-shore racer day, an unlimited hydroplane V-8 with supercharger day, a twin-hulled Hobie Catamaran day, a 40-foot three-deck Grady White day, "if luck holds, if the wind is right." She makes us laugh, and she laughs herself. She does it again in a poem like "The Cleaning Wind." These moments of humor sometimes overtake her in a world full of loss. How could it be otherwise?
And then before she is done, Saiser surprises us with poems that come not according to any pattern we think we've seen from her, not from any habit we recognize. I'm thinking of a poem such as "You Know My Father Prayed for You," which seems unlike most of her other poems. It startles us, the difference. And yet in terms of the material the poet takes up and the leap the frog makes, there is much here that is classic Saiser. This, perhaps, is a poem which shows us that the middle of something is the edge of it; that what it is not is what it is; that telling the truth and lying in the interest of telling the truth are all the same difference. That what we are is what we are, however you try to make art of it. It is a good stopping place, here, this poem, and I think it's here I'll stop.
You know my father prayed for you –
must have – and for me too.
A quiet man who didn't talk about religion.The prayers of a man like that.
Perhaps while he poured his raisin bran into a bowl,
while he poured the milk, while he took
a second to look out at the weather.Perhaps we were there, you and I, in his routine.
What difference does it make, now or ever?
A hawk, winter fog, silent wings.Most of the time, we take no notice of birds in the air.
It's a red-tail, it's a winter morning on the edge of a city,
a parking lot, a light pole. There is the sound of the carson the freeway. Effortless landing, soundless folding
of wings. The prayers of a man like that. A hawk
over snow at the edge of a city.
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*Marjorie Saiser, Bones of a Very Fine Hand (Backwaters Press, 1999; $12.00) and Lost in Seward County (Backwaters Press, 2001; $12.00) – available from The Backwaters Press, 3502 North 52nd Street, Omaha, NE 68104-3506. Add a couple dollars to help defray shipping costs.
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