Bluets

The Schuyler “footnote” – how wonderful is it to have a poem a footnote, maybe they should all be footnotes so that we could walk in them! This one is about a flower, and it grows wild. In France, where so much and so many wonderful things and poems and people grow wild. It is where I learned to grow wild, and am still learning to do so. It is about, of course – need I say of course? – Joan Mitchell’s Bluets and about so much else, a color and a life and a running wild and a holding vision. Nothing has to be rejected:

The bluet is a small flower, creamy-throated, that grows in patches in New England lawns. The bluet (French pronunciation) is the shaggy cornflower, growing wild in France. “The Bluet” is a poem I wrote. The Bluet is a painting of Joan Mitchell’s. The thick blue runs and holds. All of them, broken-up pieces of sky, hard sky, soft sky. Today I’ll take Joan’s giant vision, running and holding, staring you down with beauty. Though I need reject none. Bluet. “Bloo-ay.”

Les Bluets, 1973. Estate of Joan Mitchell, Centre Pompidou

All my favorite poets have written on this, it seems, including Lydia Davis and Maggie Nelson… how not?

1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke ...

2. And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.

6. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.

(from Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets”)

Apparently I had not known that an abstract painting could contain references to subject matter. Two things happened at once: the painting abruptly went on beyond itself, lost its solitariness, acquired a relationship to fields, flowers; and it changed from something I understood into something I did not understand, a mystery, a problem.

Later I could try to figure it out: there had to be visual clues in the picture. Were all, or only some, of the elements in it clues? If the lighter, scattered, or broken areas of blue referred to cornflowers, what did the blocks of darker blue refer to, and the opulent white? Or were all the elements clues but some of them to private, unknowable subjects? Was this a representation of an emotional response to cornflowers, or to a memory of cornflowers?

(Lydia Davis, “A Writer Grapples with a Painting”)

And I will end with two poems by Grace Schulman. Now, what makes me think they are prose poems? As I told Grace, when I just wrote her I was going to speak on these poems, I believe the prose poem is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. So first, one that purports to be about “Losses”:

Life's gains are losses: water leaches rock,
rivers erode and deltas restore the land;
the sun melts ice, turns rain to clouds of mist.
Wind that spins palms in circles like propellers
squanders its force; the fire that feeds destroys.

Each morning burns what night had bound together,
waking us, amazed, staring in wonder,
broken apart. So for all things refused,
I turn, as ships spill wind to change their course:
just as the sea recedes, I grow with loss.

Life’s gains are losses, she says, but then, for” all things refused”
she turns, and we turn with her. “I turn,” she says, and then she grows, and we grow, “with loss.” Not against loss, but with it. This gain and this growing makes this poem, for me, into a poem of gladness and of gathering, as we turn into this community of creativeness.

The final poem, “Blessed is the light,” sends me back to the essays and the poems of Robert Hass, and “what light can do” and what it  gives us, as it blesses us in this long and anaphoric litany of gathering.

How could it be other than gladness?

Blessed is the light that turns to fire, and blessed the flames
that fire makes of what is burns.
Blessed the inexhaustible sun, for it feeds the moon that
shines but does not burn.
Praised be hot vapors in earth's crust, for they force up
mountains that explode as molten rock and cool like
love remembered.
Holy is the sun that strikes sea, for surely as water burns
life and death are one. Holy the sun, maker of change,
for it melts ice into water that bruises mountains, honing
peaks and carving gullies.
Sacred is the mountain that promises permanence but
changes, planed by rockslides, cut by avalanche,
crushed, eroded, leeched for minerals.
Sacred the rock that spins for centuries before it shines,
governed by gravity, burning into sight near earth's
orbit, for it rises falling, surviving night.
Behold the arcs your eyes make when you speak. Behold
the hands, white fire. Branches of pine, holding votive
candles, they command, disturbed by wind, the fire that
sings in me.
Blessed is whatever alters, turns, revolves, just as the gods
move when the mind moves them.
Praised be the body, our bodies, that lie down and open
and rise, falling in flame.

Mary Ann Caws
Février 2016