Hillman - Death tractates

Death Tractates

Brenda HillmanPublished by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
1992 by Brenda Hillman
All rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5
CIP data appear at the end of the bookOriginally produced in 1992 by Wesleyan/University
Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755ISBNs for the paperback edition:
ISBN13: 9780819512024
ISBN10: 0819512028Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines for printing some of these poems: American Poetry Review (Much Hurrying, Near Jenner, Reverse Seeing, A Dwelling, and An Entity); Berkeley Poetry Review (First Tractate); Pequod (Possible Companion, Split Tractate, and Black Rose); Ploughshares (Sideways Tractate, Keeping Watch, Divine Laughter, Subtle Body, and Finding Her); Zyzzyva (Yellow Tractate). Many thanks to Joe Ahearn, Fran Lerner, and Carol Snow for their advice, to John Prendergast for his guidance, and to Bob Hass and Louisa Michaels for being close by. At the beginning of 1989, my closest female mentor died suddenly at a young age. I had been working on a manuscript to be called Bright Existence. The poems in this little book presented themselves as an interruption to the other work (though the themes and sourcesmany of them gnosticare similar); I tried to will them to be a part of Bright Existence, at first allowing them only a certain number of lines, twisting them to fit assignments. But they would be written only when/as the present form showed itself to me (like a butterfly opening out on a leaf).

In this process, the relationship between the two books changed as well. Though this book was a sister to the other, it still needed to break away, to stand by itself. February 1989January 1990 B.H. FOR LMP 19471989 On the day that I am nigh unto you, you are far away from me.
On the day that I am far away from you, I am nigh unto you. from a gnostic identity riddle

That the soul got to choose. Nothing else got to but the soul got to choose.

That it was very clever, stepping from Lightworld to lightworld as an egret fishes through its smeared reflections through its deaths for it believed in the one life, that it would last forever. When she had just started being dead I called to her. Plum trees were waiting to be entered, the swirling way they have, each a shower of What. Each one full of hope, and of the repetitions When she had been dead a while I called again. I thought she was superior somehow because she had become invisible, because she had become subtle among the shapes and at first she didnt answer; everything answered. Tell now red-tailed hawk (for we have heard the smallest thing cry out beneath you): have you seen her? (Red hawk) Thrush walking up the ragged middle: have you seen her? Mockingbird with your trills and scallops, with your second mouth in your throat of all things tell us: where is she whom we love? I closed my eyes and saw the early spring, pretty spring, kind of a reward; I opened them and saw the swirling world, thousands of qualified pinks, deer feeding on the torn changes and I wanted to go back from whence I came.

Up the coast, along sandbanks and spillways, the argued-about bays, spring came forth with its this n that, its I cant decide, as my life had before she died: preblossoming: cranesbill, poppy and I wanted to go back from whence I came. Heart that can still see our heart Heart that will not let us rest February evening young mothers in the drugstore with valentines all of which needed to be used. Packages of plain or lace ones stuck together. And the mothers proud of themselves for remembering, the valentines slumped down so the red merely looked promising but pressing up bravely anyhow the awkwardness of whats here, ceaselessly trying to arrange itself; I went out in the night, I called out, I felt along the edges of the panel: without her, everything seemed strange to me in this world; just the taste of oranges: imagine! And all of this compared to her seemed bulky. For weeks this was true. As if only being dead were the right amount.

Only being dead were fragile enough for what the earth had to say. Clumsy. For a while. Clumsy. For a while it was too much to go on living. Roadside acacias I could not bear them.

All unzipped, like meaning. The ostinatos of the birds. Magnoliasdogs-tonguescurved to spoon up rain. Too much shape. Even that which was only suspected of having it: the iris that lay in the ground with their eyes of fate. And then the other voice said You who long for things who cant understand borders who like to spread your magic and your blame forgive yourself.

Shed given you an impossible task: she said to follow and you intended to. But youd come to a place in the forest where there werent any tracks

So much hurrying right after a death: as if a bride were waiting! Crocuses sliced themselves out with their penknives. Everything well made seemed dead to them: Camelias. Their butcher paper pink. The well-made poems seemed dead to you, only what was vastly overheard would do, you had to say something so general over the edge that everyone could hearthe guests, the bridethough the edge was specific to you, the edge was inside At first I was able to speak to her quickly just by closing my eyes. She had died in the first week of quinces, when things put forth their secret knowledge: fiery, random blossoms are allowed to live, and robins dont seem all that common as they swing at the tops of cypresses through new song; and I wanted to hear just one voice but I heard two, wanted to be just one thing, but I was several; I called her more quickly, told her how much I missed her, pausing at the edge of the screen that kept me from her in all the awkwardness of living, and she said it was not up to me to live without her or make the voice be single, she said every voice is needed.

Every voice cries out in its own way

Then the owl came back the druid the helper and you asked, Where is she whom we love. Who-who, it said, who-who, matching sets for you and her you who had sought distinction in the pronouns found they were all the same but wasnt that death a gift to you as well, just as the life had been? Now you got to hold her by yourself, for the first time I asked the mind for a shape and shape meant nothing; I asked the soul for help, and some help came: some wedding-band gold came around the edges of a sunset, and I knew that my bride could see forward, behind it; and all the women I had known came back from their positions where they had been hanging the silk laundry of heaven upside down by the elastic; theyd help me find her though they looked slightly faded from being dead, as the first wildflowers here radish, and the ones they call milkmaids look faded when they appear on the shoulders of the Pacific You think about a poem too much. Like Spanish moss, it starts killing the tree! Look: Berkeley spring. A mockingbird has chosen you. Try to follow his new short songs: buree, buree, cheat-sheet, and the one that sounds like maybe I will and maybe I wont do any such thing. Each time the gray feathers on the throat part it looks like another mouth as though the song came from that.Next page