LYNN LYMAN TROMBETTA'S FALLING WORLD* - MOMENTS OF STILLNESS

I don't know when I've

read a book with more breasts in it than in Lynn Lyman Trombetta's Falling World.* That's just an observation, and I'm not sure what it means.

Closer to the center of the book than the breasts, perhaps, is the epigraph for the fourth section, a quote from a Paris Review interview with Saul Bellow:

"... art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm."

These poems are such moments of stillness, whether it is the moment Trombetta's daughter is no longer a child (in "Abandoned Doll"):

her body has lifted into loveliness - breasts
with a weight, a round tenderness,
she can cup in her palms.

And she thinks it alarming,
and wondrous, too,
how each nipple, dazzling, stares back
at her from the glass.

Or a moment of "Romance:"

You kneel behind me on the bed
   and cup my breasts in your hand, you roll
      my nipples against your palms, and then
         in my mind, I don't know why,
                                               I see star-nosed moles.

There are moments of tenderness in these poems, of joy and sorrow, of turning away and looking back. There is the moment of reflection in the window glass just before her husband turns the light off; she sees herself as a surprise of someone else:

Naked, and leaning over you,
breasts like apples,
like everything ready to fall.
And she looked straight at me
with softness, surprised to see me there.

Trombetta is attentive. She has learned to be attentive. She is still learning. The poet's life, if she is any good, is always an astonishment of days and hours, minutes and these instants of stillness. These moments out of ordinary life blaze with clues, just as when the poet was five years old and saw her father in his bath; the naked clue of his penis makes the young girl "begin to think perhaps he is a god who can create whole worlds." Certainly Trombetta has become a poet who can create whole worlds.

She writes of "The Ruddy Duck's Sky-Blue Bill," saying:

It must start very deep in the inner body
among the paraphernalia of his desire....

She writes of "Earthworms," of

... their tender lengths
stark and gleaming as sex. The sleek tubes

of their bodies all undulation and probe,
all liquid under pressure....

She writes of "The Wild Turkey," a hen:

she was an awful bag of tricks, poor bellows, poor shag.
There was not one lovely thing about her, unless it was
her determination to stick in that tree and stare east.

She writes of "Indian Summer:"

I want to die and rise again.

I want to dream
the tumbling acorn's dream.

Trombetta gives us here both a natural history of natural things and something of a natural history of family life. And all the poems are suffused with a kind of eros, as if at any moment we are going to be happily seduced:

saying, Yes! saying, More! saying,
   Anything you lay down here
      I will take.

She is not without a sense of humor, as the poem "Arse Poetica" illustrates:

Not head and heart's collusion, not their
menage a trois a la muse. Not breathy inspiration
or lines that thrum in the dark. Rather,
I summon rump, summon bum, summon bottom.
I invoke gluteus maximus....

Sweet, hefty peach of the body
that holds me firm so the pen can do its work.
Praise it, praise it roundly.

And she can speak of serious sadness, too, as in "After the Miscarriage:"

Her hands and arms with nothing
to hold, she enters the studio, morning
after summer morning, throws
wet clay down, the gritty solidity
beneath her palms....
...
She is the dizzy hum and revolution,
the muddy eye of the storm; she does not
think of God's own loneliness, pulling
Adam from the damp of the earth
setting him up against the void.

Trombetta writes of the piece of human bone found on a rooftop two blocks from the World Trade Center a year after 9-11, the bone appearing to be a piece of a woman's pelvis:

Name her unfastened one.
Name her open to the sky.
Name her relic, burnt offering,
shard of lamentation.
Name her lamb of the altar.
Unimaginable lamb.
Name her grit off the barges,
ash in the wind. Name her wind.
Name her laved by rats, flies,
by sun after rain.
Name her fallen world still falling.
Name her lost garden;
yoni, womb, place of passage,
Eden's cradle rocking, rocking.

My wife's mother died in September, 2005, and I was sitting with her in those last moments. Mary had gone home to get a shower and a change of clothes, and I sat with her mother and I was reading Trombetta's book to myself. When my mother-in-law's breathing changed for the last time, when breath became rattle moving towards silence, I was reading "Border Lament:"

You can tell by the set of this woman's jaw
her child is dying.
...
Her eyes search the distance as the dark rain falls,
bargaining the long valley, glazed sky, for miracles.
...
She cannot give up the stunning beauty of his feet,
only a little longer than her thumb.
She cannot think that they will never take one step
toward her, or how he is moving back now, alone,
across that final outland.

And then Mary's mother was moving across that final outland and Trombetta's poems became special to me. My mother-in-law's final stillness somehow woofed into the warp of these poems. One recognizes Trombetta's falling world, and he does not forget it.

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* Lynn Lyman Trombetta, Falling World. Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco, 2004. Order from: Sixteen Rivers Press, P.O. Box 640663, San Francisco, CA 94164-0633 or www.sixteenrivers.com .

Comments

[Beth]

This meant a lot to me; I heard my mother's last breath exactly two months ago, and there was never such a silence.