Fleda Brown - Mortality, with Friends: Essays

Praise for Mortality, with Friends

I have long felt that Fleda Brown the poet had an utterly unparalleled capacity to meld keen intellect, extending even to hard science, with exquisite lyrical sensibility. To read these essays, at once heart-rending and reassuring, is to affirm that that capacity applies to her prose as well. It is not mere hyperbole to say that the woman is matchless, whatever her genre.

Sydney Lea, Vermont poet laureate (20112015)

Mortality, with Friends endeavors to gather, to slightly misquote Leonard Cohens trope, gather up the brokenness and bring it to [us] now. In an age of isolation, Fleda Brown beckons us to draw near and pay heed to the hearts joyous and sorrowful mysteries, the hearts bewilderments, into the maw of which she tenders a countervalent language. This is balm, a splendid feat in essaying; an orderliness, which feels, if not like healing, a sort of palliative against the ineluctable feature of humanity, to wit: we die.

Thomas Lynch, author of The Depositions and Bone Rosary

In Fleda Browns Mortality, with Friends, every life form deserves its own kind of honor: the ordinary and extraordinary, the tiny and massive, the political and personal, even an impossibly difficult father residing in that deep interior wound we call parent. Like the sailboat of her childhood whose sail breathes the breath of forms, Browns arresting essays set off to catch the pattern of disruption of memorys ever-changing currents.

Rebecca McClanahan, author of In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays

Fleda Brown is a writer who cannot look away. In Mortality, with Friends, she probes the deep extent of love by way of loss, and in this way honors the hard truths of living. There is sorrow in these pages, but reading I also kept thinking of Dylan Thomas, his line Light breaks where no sun shines.

Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

How is it possible to so fiercely and so lovingly hold and shape the truth of a life? I read these essays hungrily, with the attention one pays a trusted guide, and with the deep pleasure one receives from a poet continually stunned into language.

Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers

Made in Michigan Writers Series

GENERAL EDITORS

Michael Delp, Interlochen Center for the Arts

M. L. Liebler, Wayne State University

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

Essays by Fleda Brown

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

2021 by Fleda Brown. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

ISBN 978-0-8143-4874-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8143-4875-8 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932168

Publication of this book was made possible by a generous gift from The Meijer Foundation.

Cover design by Lindsey Cleworth

Wayne State University Press rests on Waawiyaataanong, also referred to as Detroit, the ancestral and contemporary homeland of the Three Fires Confederacy. These sovereign lands were granted by the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot nations, in 1807, through the Treaty of Detroit. Wayne State University Press affirms Indigenous sovereignty and honors all tribes with a connection to Detroit. With our Native neighbors, the press works to advance educational equity and promote a better future for the earth and all people.

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References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Wayne State University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For my friends, with love and thanks.

One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply thats a chair, thats a table, and yet at the same time, Its a miracle, its an ecstasy.

Lily Briscoe, in Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse

I n my grandmothers fishpond were little black jelly dots with tails. I would sift them through my fingers, pass them from hand to hand like egg whites. I would turn some out onto the cement, feeling the power I had even then, inherently, to wield life or death. I was cruel, but only barely, only enough to test myself. My handprint was in the cement of the ponds edge. How valuable I was to my grandparents, how much of the world I owned already! A spring darkness was in the pool, and in the trees over it. I see it luminous, oily, and still, except for the hovering tadpoles and the goldfish. The bottom was unknown to me. I lived with so many mysteries it was as if I were swimming, keeping just above water.

What was it like, before the words took over? There was a cold pipe stuck in the tree that slowly dripped sap all summer. It was sour, dark, and thick. A drop hung on the pipes edge for minutes before it fell. But there was no clock, only touch. During this time my parents and my grandparents lived next door to each other. To travel from one yard to the next was to engage what would become the tension that strained the elements Im made of.

What is felt collects in the body with no comment. Where is the sun? In little islands, on the tree trunk, in the grass. There is a mimosa tree. I touch it gently and it magically folds. How full was I of all this sensation? It seems that I must have had no room for anything else. There were the red berries on the bushes under the window, the ones we told each other were poison. Who is we? My little sister, the neighbor children, the grandchildren of the neighbors. They passed through my life. I was not stupid but absorbed, forgetful. I knew the old ladies next door to my grandparents, Gertrude and Lurlene Waylan, because they had an old Victrola with a horn.

I didnt know what day it was, or what month, which goes to show that impressions make a life. I was close up. Now all I can do is approach as an interloper into what is outside of time, trying to force it into sequence. Now, and then. Light and color wash against the sky and thats all. Nothing to keep, except the word I. I saw it. I was there.

Its adults who make up stories of their lives. What I really knew was the milkman in the driveway. He let me ride to the top of the hill sometimes on his truck. I remember mornings because I was the lone explorer. Dew was on the grass, on the hollyhocks, on the side of the milk truck. The wetness was both annoying and gratifying, evidence that I was first. Maybe my father was in the garden, as anchor, but the air had a tremulous quality, nothing certain yet.

My mind wants to rest here, for a few minutes, in relative safety, with Nanas roses budding and the gladiolas. And particularly the tightly packed petals of the peonies, with ants crawling in and out like drunkards. There is so much trouble to come, as is true, mostly, of the course of living, but here are butterflies and ants, and nicely weeded islands along the side of the house, and a garden in the back, with strawberries and marigolds and green beans. This is an argument for order. A child whose life will become often unbearable can have this forever: the garden, carefully weeded. Not standing for anything, or standing for order in the universe, or, as Elizabeth Bishop said of the carefully stacked Esso cans, evidence that somebody loves us all. Not evidence at all. Just remaining there in the mind, still wet with dew.