Brenda Hillman - Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days

Also by Brenda Hillman POETRY White DressFortressDeath TractatesBright ExistenceLoose SugarCascadiaPieces of Air in the EpicPractical WaterSeasonal Works with Letters on Fire CHAPBOOKS Coffee, 3 A.M. Autumn SojournThe FirecageFour Poets (with Brett Fletcher Lauer, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and Andrew Zawacki) Her Presence Will Live Beyond Progress AS EDITOR The Poems of Emily DickinsonThe Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (with Patricia Dienstfrey) Writing the Silences: Selected Poems of Richard O. Moore (with Paul Ebenkamp) Particulars of Place by Richard O. Moore (with Garrett Caples and Paul Ebenkamp) AS TRANSLATOR Instances by Jeonrye Choi (with the author and Wayne de Fremery) Poems from Above the Hill: Selected Poems of Ashur Etwebi (with the author and Diallah Haidar) At Your Feet by Ana Cristina Cesar (with Helen Hillman and Sebastio Macedo) Extra Hidden Life, among the DaysBrenda Hillman Extra Hidden Life, among the Days Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut Wesleyan PoetryWesleyan University PressMiddletown CT 06459www.wesleyan.edu/wespress2018 Brenda HillmanAll rights reservedManufactured in the United States of AmericaLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Hillman, Brenda, author.Title: Extra hidden life, among the days / Brenda Hillman.Description: Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, [2018]Series: Wesleyan poetry | Includes bibliographical references.Identifiers: LCCN 2017036431 | ISBN 9780819578051 (cloth : alk. paper)Classification: LCC PS3558.I4526 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.54dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036431Designed by Quemadura5 4 3 2 1 Front cover photos by Brenda Hillman. ContentsI.

The Forests of Grief & Color Perhaps grief is imagined to end in violence, as if grief itself could be killed. Can we perhaps find one of the sources of nonviolence in the capacity to grieve, to stay with the unbearable loss without converting it into destruction? If we could bear our grief, would we be less inclined to strike back or strike out? And if the grief is unbearable, is there another way to live with it that is not the same as bearing it? Judith Butler, On Grief and Rage This mycorrhizal network architecture suggests an efficient and robust network, where large trees play a foundational role in facilitating conspecific regeneration and stabilizing the ecosystem. Architecture of the wood-wide web: Rhizopogon spp. genets link multiple Douglas-fir cohorts http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2009.03069.x/full I will open my dark saying upon the harp. Psalm 49On a Day, In the World We had a grief we didnt understand while standing at the edge of some low scrub hills as if humans were extra or already gone; what had been in us before? a life that asks for mostly wanting freedom to get things done in order to feel less helpless about the end of things alone; when i think of time on earth, i feel the angle of gray minutes entering the medium days yet not built-up:: our work together: groups, the willing burden of an old belief, & beyond them love, as of a great life going like fast creatures peeling back marked seeds, gold-brown integuments the color time will be when we are gone Whose Woods These Are We Think(ekphrastic haibun) When they ask What are you working on now that the elements are finished i say the elements are never finished; in China they have metal, in India they have ether, in the West we are short on time. Wood has also been named as an element.

In white Euro fairy tales, children are sent into the woods, probably the Black Forest, carrying baskets covered with cloth made by child laborers just as factories are beginning. When i first read the Frost snowy woods piece as a desert child in the 60s, i experienced a calm as he enters the whose woods these are he thinks he knows, though i didnt know that many woods in Tucson or a little horse thinking it queer or a village. What would it have been like to be sent out with a small covered basket if you were a peasant child into what we now call the ecotone, the region between two environmentsa marsh with striped frogs for examplethen on into the woods where a peasant uprising is being planned. We have sent them all into the woods We have sent them all into the woods We have sent them all into the woods & we know exactly whose thin logged-out woods these are. What do people need from poetry during the changes? The changes are immeasurable. Perception, form, & material locked into the invisible.

Many need calm poetry, especially at weddings where they feel uneasy, & i would certainly write that way if i believed calm were key to any of it, but if what woods are left are lovely, dark, deep, they are also oblique, obscure, magical, owned for profit, full of fragile unnamed species, scarce on time, time that barely exists though people base their lives on imagining it does. i hoped to find some wisdom to send back to you & that is what i am working on now, my present hopeful wild & unknown friends All-night Crooked Moonrise over Mountain Pines Scraping, on the horizon& the disk rose, throbbing, to the triple cloud the enigma responded:in the forest, a wood mind swayed on the crest while the angle brought ground water, always a thin other, down to the river Through lace life, late life light rises bent /// you stand a while; & if, at midnight, that raw moon slashes your bed through the cage of the blinds, oh now the sweet owl calls to its cripple & hurries across the meadow where t i m e is carried, tranquil & stretched how can knowledge spread itself thus, unable to sort itself out?& you might weather this: you feared no one would love you & when they did, you feared you would not be forgiven such a small word, time yet it is friends with both nothings The Bride Tree Cant Be Read The bride tree puts down its roots
below the phyla. It is there
when we die & when we are born,
middle & upper branches reaching
the planet heart by the billions
during a revolution we dont see. Quarks & leptons are cooling on their infant stems, spinning the spinning brain of matter, fled to electrical dark water, species with names the tree can hold in the shale shade brought by the ambulance of art; no one but you knows what occurred in the dress you wore in the dream of atonement, the displaced tree in the dream you wore, a suffering endurable only once, edges that sought release from envy to a more endurable loss, a form to be walked past, that has
outworn the shame of time,
its colors sprung through description above a blaze of rhizomes spreading in an arable mat that mostly isnt simple but is calm & free Brief Walk at Salt Point Park seal pupsar-ar-ar & the skin of the soul felt a chill, especially the left sideof the S, facing the Pacific(specificPacific specific Pacificar ar ar); sandstockburdockhumanspines (does thesmove toward pinesorspines?) buckwheathardpanup a hill findingthe rim of the miracle fearblueshadesense blindmadewhattense pigmy cypress trill or hill (knowledge did not wreck experience) weather warped& nations fell over the edge of the miracle What thus doth keep love safe, brittle rhymer