LEE ANN RORIPAUGH'S BEYOND HEART MOUNTAIN* & YEAR OF THE SNAKE** EXPLORE "THE PEARLS"

"I have never used the image

of a rice paper lantern in my poetry; Lee Ann Roripaugh has several in hers. Only some few poets have the right to use such a metaphor as this, and Roripaugh is one of them:

... like

the pattern of
a kimono found burned into
a woman after

Hiroshima, and it is almost
too beautiful,
too horrible for me to bear.

There is horror in such an image, horror and loveliness both. In Roripaugh's two collections, Beyond Heart Mountain* and Year of the Snake,** the great sweep is from the horror in the lives of Japanese-Americans at the Heart Mountain internment camp, to the comfort of father and mother and home, back into a terrible unsettledness at the end of Year of the Snake. I speak of Roripuagh's pearl metaphor later; perhaps, in a sense, each of these poems is a pearl, built up to encase some particular pain. Yet, beyond that, perhaps the poet's life itself is the great pearl, and at the end of Year of the Snake the pain is great, and pearl-making is most necessary.

There is certainty and fixedness in Roripaugh's poems out of memory, out of her childhood and her years with her parents; we are left at the end of Year of the Snake with uncertainty and a loosedness arising out of what? - the persona's current experience perhaps. Is that the arc of Roripaugh's work in these two books, from tetheredness to an untethering? I think so.

*

Beyond Heart Mountain, a winner of the 1998 National Poetry Series publication award, was Roripaugh's first book of poetry; it blends the lyrical and the narrative with elements of traditional Japanese poetry and with the experience of beng Japanese-American. Indeed, the title poem is about Japanese-Americans living in the Heart Mountain internment camp in 1943. These are powerful poems, at once lyrical and grounded, filled with the ordinary details of that prison camp existence, yet somehow lifted and wondrous too. Internee Nine Inoue speaks:

Since the shoe ration, I can't play
with Kathy Kawamure. She's in Block 25
and mama says I'll wear out my soles.

Chikakoo Okano speaks:

An Issei woman died tonight
from a bleeding stomach ulcer
even after four orderlies and I
gave blood for a transfusion.
I think of how she'll be buried
in Heart Mountain Cemetery
with my cells inside....

Lily Iwasaki speaks:

... No one will help me.
But even caged, a tiger's
full of rage and cunning.

The first poem in Beyond Heart Mountain makes clear we're not in Kansas anymore. Roripaugh's mother is Japanese; her father, American. The poet was born and raised in Laramie, Wyoming:

Mother eats seaweed and plum pickles,
and when the Mormons come knocking
she does bird-talk....
...
One day when I was walking home
some boys on bikes flew down
around me like noisy crows.
They kept yelling Kill the Jap!

It is then her mother tells her about pearls:

... She says
oysters make them, when there's
sand or gravel under their shells.
It hurts. And the more it hurts,
the bigger the pearl.

Poets make poems. The more it hurts, the bigger the poem. There are some big poems here.

Her father took Roripaugh hunting when she was just a youngster:

We got to Shirley Basin
before dawn, gutting
my antelope by noon.
Some drunk men
drove by in a pickup
and yelled, Goddamn,
it's a girl. Circling
the prairie he told me,
There are things
you don't undrstand.

In another poem, Roripaugh writes of eating the antelope's heart:

Next morning
my father showed me
how to roll it
in peppered flour,
cook it in a frying pan.
We ate for something
more than hunger -
tough to chew, I let
the spice sage taste
run through me.

Obviously this girl did not have the usual childhood:

... They
never heard of shitakiri suzume
in this cold Wyoming town.

I'm half-and-half, and I hide
in ther house, listen to my parents'
music.

Later, in "Songs for an Approaching Rainy Season," Roripaugh writes:

This mute cocooning is something
less than grief but
more than blue - leaves me wondering

where sweetness goes
once tomatoes fall from their vines
and start to rot....
...
... maybe silence is song, so
I keep it furled
tight around me like the ornate

origami
of a peony bud, and wait
for spring to come -

for the delicate fingers of ants
to burrow in
and pry each of my petals loose.

One must grow where planted; one must blossom, whatever the seed one is sprung from. Roripaugh grows and blossoms in the fullness of her Japanese-American experience, and the poems in Beyond Heart Mountain open like peonies. The poet raises her eyes; she lifts up her life. She must make art of it, and she does, for the alternative would be a sad one:

Once, when I was a girl,
I kept a cricket in a bamboo
cage, to sing for me

at night. I was careless,
I didn't feed her, and so she ate
her own limbs, one by one.

*

Year of the Snake is Roripaugh's second book. She is now an associate professor of English at the University of South Dakota. Her experience as a Japanese-American continues to be central to her poetry, as does her experience as the daughter of a man who hunted. The collection starts centered in memory, yet through these poems we find images of splitting, separation, isolation, of coming apart:

... I felt as if I were coming
undone, the way a thumbnail splits
open a pea pod, tough green fiber
along the side unzipping the two
halves, the peas inside neatly
spilling out....

And the following, from a poem about transience, about the short life of the mayfly, about the inconsequential urgency of adolescent love. There's an obvious correspondence, once you think about it. It's just that most of us would never think about it:

... I imagined how
it must have felt to push up
against the margins of the body, that
unforgiving delineation of self,
and feel skin stretching, cracking....
...
... And what about the boy?
It was so many selves ago, and all
I remember of him now is the lilac
color of the jacket he used to wear.

And this, from a poem about that which endures:

... I thought my mother seemed
happier with the
company of cherry blossoms. She used

to say that once you leave a place, it's best
not to be always
looking over your own shoulder, but I

don't see how this could be true....

Her mother had an apple from her grandfather's orchard confiscated by Customs, and never got to taste it. Of course, there were Macintosh, Winesap, and Granny Smith apples here,

but they never tasted as sweet
or as bright as the apple taken from her,
the one she had to leave behind.

Could we set the apple her mother had to leave behind side by side with the poet's own unhappiness?

... because
this happened in
Wyoming, and because this was

my parents' house,
and because I'm never happy
with anything

at any time, I always wished
that I was some-
where, anywhere else, but here.

Her mother sneezes in Japanese, and the poet does not. So that sets Roripaugh to thinking about herself and her mother:

... How do you chart the diaspora
of a sneeze? I don't know how
you turned out this way, she always
tells me....

The poet's parents make antelope jerky, and the poet helps. It starts with cutting up the animal:

That smell, something like a wet dog, stayed
on our hands days
after skinning the gutted meat

shell of hollowed-
out antelope on the back lawn -
alternately

shearing through the opaque membrane
of fat that held
skin to flesh with a hunting knife,

or pulling off
larger sections of hide by punching
down with a clenched

fist to reveal the cool smooth lengths
of sinewy
purple meat. Finally, the hooves

and head were sawed
off....

Obviously Roripaugh is not afraid of the bloodied image, nor of real torn flesh. She was raised the daughter of a hunter; she hunts, and she dresses out antelope.

... My mother neatly
wrapped everything
in freezer paper and labeled

the packages
in Japanese with black magic
marker, English

translations underneath to be
polite....
...
one year my mother sliced open

her thumb, was rushed
to the hospital for stitches,
a tetanus shot.

That doctor, he was so surprised
I was cutting
up an antelope, my mother

said later with
a strange kind of pride as she held
up her thumb....

And Roripaugh sees with a startling flash that her mother's thumb

... is the same
thumb that I now wear on my own
hand, my very own.

No, Roripaugh is not afraid of the bloodied image, not afraid to describe the full process of cutting up an antelope, not afraid to speak of insects, of fish, of the octopus in the freezer:

... sliced thin in cross-sectioned slivers
for sushi on birthdays and holidays....

She tells us of that octopus and thinks:

How odd that it has all come to this.
And then I wish for someone, anyone at all,
to dream of me, if only for a moment,
to unfurl my rigid aching limbs and melt down
all my hearts, taste my salt on their tongue,
let ice transubstantiate to breathing flesh,
and resurrect me back into the living again.

In a later poem, we're told:

... I am lost
between one thing and another,
and can't remember which....

Then, as the book comes to a close, as all things seem to come undone, we're presented with a flurry of images of whiteness: a white snake, an albino squirrel, a white butterfly. Why?

Unhinged from father and mother, from the apple her mother left behind, from the antelope being cut up, from family and Wyoming, the poet's world seems to come apart. The center does not hold. Is the life away from worse than the loneliness of Wyoming?

This is the dagger
I unwind from silk
to hand to you.
And here the sword
I'll use to cleave
delusion's head
clean off.

To whom does the poet speak? Herself, perhaps?

... Remember
the memory of this light and follow it
wherever it leads

you, because you are all spirit, breath, and
seed now. I will come
with you and show you. I will take you home.

These lines, which conclude "White Butterfly," end the book; you've read them and you feel unsettled, as if the dog has been shot - as if it's not dead yet, and you know you have to go ahead and finish the job. Duty, and the revulsion that duty brings. You want to be some place else, any place else, yet here you are, and you do what you have to. That's how unsettling the last of these poems seem to me. You wonder how it will turn out.

*

A word about technique. Roripaugh can write long-lined poems and short-lined poems, as she chooses; she can write poems in parts and poems in couplets. These are all techniques we also see in other poems from other poets. A technique that Roripaugh employs, which I don't think I've seen elsewhere, is something almost like linked haiku. In a poem like "DDT," each stanza is three lines; the first and third lines each have six syllables, the second line has twelve. In other poems, the first and third lines might have four syllables, the middle line eight. Then in still a third kind of poem, the stanzas will alternate, one stanza with 5-10-5, the next 10-5-10, for instance.

These shapes are amazingly flexible - Roripaugh can pour a lot of experience into such pliable containers and the forms hold and fix moments out of life, almost as if they were jewlels. I look forward to Roripaugh's next book, to see what else she can amaze us with using her sure mastery of a form that seems her own.

*

I also look forward to the next book in order to see how the unsettled conclusion of Year of the Snake plays out. I've been with her through Beyond Heart Mountain, I've been with her through Year of the Snake - I want to know where she goes next, how she resolves everything loosed at the end of Year of the Snake. You will want to know too.

---------------------------------------
* Lee Ann Roripaugh, Beyond Heart Mountain. Penguin Books, 1999.
** Lee Ann Roripaugh, Year of the Snake. Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinios, 2004.

Comments

[Dave]

Tom, I've really been enjoying the poetry book reviews you've been posting here. Roripaugh's books sound especially worth hunting down. Thanks.

[Rachel]

Poets make poems. The more it hurts, the bigger the poem. There are some big poems here.

Wow. What a line.

Thank you for this thoughtful review.

[Artichoke Heart]

Tom, thank you so much for the very kind and generous words, and the careful and engaging readings! I'm flattered and honored.