Poem 30 Patricia Kirkpatrick

WHITE TREES    by Patricia Kirkpatrick

“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.

http://milkweed.org/blog/awards/patricia-kirkpatrick-wins-lindquist-vennum-prize-for-poetry/