“Hope is an ‘intuition of emptiness’ with
which we make agreement…”
-Fanny Howe
She went out to see
white trees
that night as black
branches turned
and filled with snow
shrouds where
lamplight
didn’t reach
where figures
she went out to stay
away from
how the night went on
without her
burrow into drifts
to stalk
the blizzard to its face
and deep crevasse
to fall
and falling
to touch
silence
with her hands
to channel
vision against the coming
storm the sheen
of sodden places
as if to pick up
afterbirth
and steady lambs
to grass to
track
and shepherd
grief she walked
that night
to vacancies
white trees were filling with
Wow, this is a stunning poem. In its very short lines and abrupt fragments, it represents
the inner state of a woman walking bravely, if haltingly, into a “coming/storm.”
The first eight lines immediately introduce the poem’s
beautiful, startling images and the fragmented nature of the woman’s
experience:
She went out to see
white trees
that night as black
branches turned
and filled with snow
shrouds where
lamplight
didn’t reach…
In the line breaks we get discombobulated: is the night
black, or the branches? is it snow or a snow shroud? Without punctuation to
guide us and with those line breaks that work both forward and backward, we are
uncertain.
It continues:
she went out to stay
away from
how the night went on
without her
And again we have the surprise in realizing she did not “go
out to stay” but rather to “stay away.”
To stay away from what? “How the night went on/without her.” We begin to get, with the shrouds in
the first few lines and the fear of being left behind (“without her”), a sense
that this is a poem about fear of death or the unknown, of the ‘desert places’ Frost describes in
his brutal poem about walking at night in the snow.
What happens next, though, surprises. The verbs change and
in changing suggest that though this woman is upset and alone, she is also
active, not passive, in face of whatever she fears. Look at these verbs. She
goes out to “stalk,” “fall,” “touch,” “channel,” “track,” and, finally “shepherd.” If something awaits her,
she will find and come to understand it. Moreover, in the end what she
shepherds is “grief,” suggesting that even if what lies before her is indeed
hard, she can take a gentle sort of care for it.
The poem ends,
“she walked/that night/to vacancies/white
trees were filling with”
no closing mark of punctuation, ending with a
preposition: all indications are that the walk is not over, that the “empty
spaces between the stars” that Frost writes of must be lived. The paradox of
vacancy filling a space extends this notion. Life requires us to face absences
and our fear of loss, and if we accept loss, we can actively examine it. If we
examine loss, we have something—a space is filled by seeing and accepting. If we try to stay inside, where it’s
warm and safe, the loss is still out there and we have nothing but our fear.
I’ll end where I began. Wow.
Kirkpatrick won the first Linquist-Vennum Prize for Poetry and her book, Odessa, will be published this December by Milkweed. For more information, see the link below.
