Many years ago, sometime between its glory years and its slow, sad death, I walked into The Hungry Mind bookstore on Grand Avenue and found a book I've come to treasure. A chapbook, rather, somewhere around 30 pages long: Eva Hooker's The Winter Keeper. I don't know why I picked it up--I am cheap and 12 bucks for a chapbook might have stopped me. But I am also drawn to beauty, and the book itself is beautifully designed. I do remember that once I picked it up and looked through it, I couldn't put it down. And in the intervening years, Hooker's poems have drawn me back and back again, in their spare strangeness, their reverence, their silences. I am unbelievably honored to put her poem "So Unlike Any Simple Thing I Know" in the box. I hope you will seek out her chapbooks, buy them, and love them. Because I ended up writing so much about this poem, I decided to put it at the beginning, rather than the end, of the post.
So Unlike Any Simple Thing I Know
Near the gray barn, the tumultuous sky
the color of white-bean ash:
it seems as if the lights of the truck
barreling through tunnels of white
do not blink, but strum the gravel
ragged along the road; it seems as if,
half sound, half silence, the sky
is composed to number and stay my wheels:
how long it takes to move round the curve
in the dark, careful like an empty freight
car: how the Schramel farm rises up,
unhurried, its exhausted fence too strong
to fall upon itself in the wind:
how sometimes at twilight you can see
the dead fall and sun floating down
like bloodroot: how I have lived like that.
I realized that I haven't been spending enough time on titles in these entries. Perhaps I think of this tonight as I write about Hooker's poem because, as I begin reading, I haven't any idea what in means in connection to the poem's contents. Or rather, I see how it connects, but the object of the (negative) comparison is not clear. From the start, I am drawn in, uncertain, and in search of understanding.
The poem's structure is very important.Starting with an image of a "tumultuous sky" which is "the color of white-bean ash" --a comparison that goes one step farther than we expect (white beans we know; white bean ash, maybe not) the poem then shifts. From here on, we find a series of lines beginning with "as if" and "how" and concluded with colons. "It seems as if" the second stanza begins. Here we have a simile, another comparison. But what is the "it" that seems "as if"? Do the comparisons connect to the sky in the first line? to the unnamed unsimple thing of the title? We don't know.
The stanza continues, "as if the lights of the truck/barreling through the tunnels of white//do not blink, but strum the gravel/ragged against the road." And at this point, the poem has moved us farther and farther away from certainty. The truck's headlights are eyes of sort, unblinking as they "strum" along the road. Eyes are supposed to see! They don't make music and they don't hear music. Interestingly, this line is end-stopped with a semi-colon, the only one in the whole poem. Here's what follows: "it seems as if,//half sound, half silence, the sky/is composed to number and stay my wheels." Notice how gorgeous those lines are. The line "half sounds, half silence, the sky" is perfectly balanced syllabically: 2 syllables, 3 syllables, 2 syllables. The pauses of the commas create the "half silence" and the long "i" repeats, as does a slant rhyme of "half" and "the." And we are back at the sky, another comparison.
Here we have come to the heart of the poem. The sky is "composed" by someone as music is composed, and for a purpose: "to number and stay my wheels." A benevolent sky, then, which cares for and protects the driver, steadies her in her hard travel. Now the poem makes another turn, following another colon (I love colons, and I think Hooker is using them as well as Bridget Pegeen Kelly does in her wonderful book Song): "how long it takes to move round the curve/in the dark." We are reminded that this travel is fraught and that the speaker feels vulnerable. Then another colon, and another image without giving us more information about the last one."How the Schramel farm rises up" surprises us because its such a concrete object, its appearance in the poem like the sudden seeing of an object in the ribbons of our headlights when we drive. The named farm suggests this is a familiar drive. The fence around the place is "exhausted" but "too strong//to fall upon itself."
The poem itself becomes a journey the reader must take with the speaker, trusting her to help make the situation clear. We are, the speaker suggests, like drivers on a dark road, empty freight cars, fences too strong to fall. No one simile fits exactly, though. And then we come toward the end with another line beginning with "how": "how sometimes at twilight you can see//the dead fall and the sun floating down" and what a shift the poem has made. The dead fall but the sun floats; the sun will go on but our corporeal selves will not. But Hooker isn't done yet. She has one more colon, and one more "how" for us. Let's look at the whole last stanza:
the dead fall and the sun floating down
like bloodroot: how I have lived like that.
I realize that "dead fall" can be a noun--a kind of trap for animals or the brush that gathers in the woods, but I read this line in its more obvious sense "the dead" followed by the verb "fall". Of course, I could be completely wrong.
Notice that we finally come to a period here at the end. Notice too that the speaker appears (before she was just there in her truck, suggested by "my wheels"). Notice that she seems to be answering the questions she set before us in the first line--I have lived like that. Beneath the tumultuous sky. Driving a familiar but frightening road in the dark. And yet that same dangerous sky is the one that "stays" her wheels--builds her up, keeps her safe as much as possible from the harms of her journey. Yes, she seems to say, I have been afraid and in danger, but knowing that someday I will fall beneath the sun, that is how I have managed to live. The force that sustains her is a form of faith.
I've gone on long tonight and still have more to say. In another poem, she writes, "I know now--my plain song is fragile, a privacy." When I read Eva Hooker's poems, I find songs generous, rich, and, yes, fragile. And in them I find grace.
If you want to learn more about Eva Hooker, here is a brief bio:
http://www3.saintmarys.edu/face-to-face/sister-teacher-poetAnd a wonderful interview:
http://www.hungermtn.org/visiting-with-eva-hooker/
And to purchase her chapbooks, go to:
http://www.chapiteau.org/html/
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