Hillman - Bright existence

Bright ExistenceBrenda Hillman

Wesleyan University Press
Published by
University Press of New England
Hanover and LondonWesleyan University PressPublished by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755
1993 by Brenda Hillman
All rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America 5 4CIP data appear at the end of the book For ROBERT HASS Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following periodicals in which these poems first appeared or will appear, sometimes in different forms: Agni Review: Steinberg Case (originally His Shadow) American Poetry Review: Old Ice, Dark Existence, Black Series, The Servant, December Shadow, January Dawn, March Dawn, Blossoms Appearing, Every Life, A Vigil, First Thought, Adult Joy, Gnostic Heaven, Magdalene, Little Furnace Antaeus: Dark Matter The Berkeley Voice: The Rat The Denver Quarterly: Sorrow of Matter Epoch: Branch, Scraping, Luminous Textures, and an untitled fragment, (Why did you tremble...) Equinox: Three untitled fragments, (Who wounded you...), (While I slept you stood...), and (In the cave of the self...) Estero: Vast Fluttering, The Snakeskin The Nation: Trapped Light The New Yorker: A Foghorn The Paris Review: Meridian Plinth, Autumn Moon Partisan Review: Torn Shadow Ploughshares: The Spell, Small Spaces River Styx: Several Errands The Taos Review: Marshy Area, Useful Shadow, Empty Shadow Tikkun: Holding On The Threepenny Review: Food, Toll Collector ZYZZYVA: Mighty Forms, Recycling Center, Spare World Pushcart Prize XVI reprinted Mighty Forms. Many thanks to Alex, Fran, James, Joe, John, and Roland. These poems were influenced by my readings in gnosticism, particularly Hans Jonas, to whom I owe a debt, and the old texts in The Nag Hammadi Library, which emphasize an inward search for reality, a disjunction between spirit and matter and the souls individual journey. In the present volume, the first section finds the soul at dawn, the middle sections move through matter, dailiness and the wounded self, and the final section is a dialogue between love and its shadows. I also owe a debt to the landscapes of West Marin and to Jules Evens for his Natural History of the Point Reyes Peninsula. While I was working on this book, a close friend died, and I wrote Death Tractates.

It could not be inserted into this book, which caused me some difficulty. I now see the two volumes as intimate companions. Bright Existence

Once more the poem woke me up, the dark poem. I was ready for it; he was sleeping, and across the cabin, the small furnace lit and re-lit itselfthe flame a yellow tongue again, the metal benignly hard again; and a thousand insects outside called and made me nothing; moonlight streamed inside as if it had been... I looked around, I thought of the lower wisdom, spirit held by matter: Mary, white as a sand dollar, and Christ, his sticky halo tilted oh, to get behind it! The world had been created to comprehend itself as matter: table, the torn veils of spiders... Even consciousness missing my love was matter, the metal box of a furnace.

As the obligated flame, so burned my life... What is the meaning of this suffering I asked and the voicenot Christ but between ussaid you are the meaning. No no, I replied, That is the shape, what is the meaning. You are the meaning, it said

A veil exists between the world above and the realms
that are below, and the shadow came into being
beneath the veil, and that shadow became matter. (from a Gnostic codex) The thought that you could even save the light, that you could stop it from having to be everywhere at once. You stood in the ice cream shop and from the street, in a group of silly glass trumpets light came, and broke into millions of itself, shattered from the pressure of being mute who knows how long.

There also, leaning against the counter the child who saw nothing but the bins of sweet color separately rimmed with silver. Behind you, thoughtfully placed by the owners, a photo of an avalanche, its violence locked in blue spears... The ice moved cruelly, one way only, and behind the avalanche, and behind the posts that held it, the cars went back and forth like mediators. You who do not exist: you stared along the edges of the freezer: frost glistened and clustered. Suddenly it looked as if one act could be completed, mounting over and over, even under terrible pressure. Perhaps the tiny crystals would last forever.

Once it seemed the function of poetry was to redeem our lives. But it was not. It was to become indistinguishable from them.

You lay down in your bed for ten years, and after ten years you got up. The room was full of weak color but there was an interesting little hill of rich life from which all things streamed; and you saw between existence and the fringe of your quotes non being on the wall an active shadow that could not reconcile itself to earth and was not ironical, that is, not split; but nothing could be done without some cooperation between this shadow and whatever refused it in this world so you invited it in dark existence that comforts and terrifies bright existence that could not stay Then in the scalloped leaves of the plane tree a series of short, sharp whos: a little owl had learned to count. You lay in your bed as usual not existing because of the bright edges pressing in.

All at once the black thick os of the owl made the very diagram you needed. Where there had been two kinds of infinity, now there was one! The smudged circle around the soul was the one the gnostics saw around the cosmos, the mathematical toy train, the snake eating its tail. Relieved by the thought that the owls os had changed but not you, that something could change and not be lost in you, you asked the voice for more existence and the voice said yes but you must understand I loved you not despite your great emptiness but because of your great emptiness

So you whispered to the soul Rise up! but the soul was not ready. Get up! Its our turn! But that part of the soul stayed still. So you checked the list of those who existed but the soul was not on the list, the soul responded to none of those things. Very well, you said.

He sank back in his furs. And you started across the plain to one he loved

Then how to address the place where the soul was not. Should you have said, standing next to the trench, this should have been you? This darkness was not the terror of what we do to each other, or the delicious sexual darkness hed brought you or the black corridors of the female body remember the early diagrams, what the inside of a woman looks like? A cows skull. This darkness was the protection of the child, it included the vast fluttering as the oak included the moths with its shadow remember in the brilliant day long ago, the ball coming toward you? You played with the other children like this not as anything blocked the sun with your non being as it were, but by that pewter shadow you could be affirmed... One by one they kissed you. One by one the guests advanced themselves into the night where you would have been had they looked for you though it was not in the dim night that youd planned to receive them but at midday, when the druid oak blossomed with moths, with being gone Next page