i.
The only bears I know float
in the sky. They appear
in the dark only after I look
north, find
the Big Dipper, and sing
a spell to pause
their restless pacing.
See
me call
the stars down? The bears refuse
to come.
ii.
I choose
to forget
polar bears in dens sleeping
in the heat
or the blue bear pacing
the edge of the moat I walked
past during my breaks at the zoo.
iii.
Do teddy bears count?
The ones that picnic
in the woods.
A sky-blue bear my sister was forced
to leave
behind when we moved.
The fuzzy brown soul gifted
to me, when I was
in my thirties,
the one I clinged
to after a lover left.
iv.
I forgot.
We keep
bears scattered
around the house:
One painted Navajo style;
a thumb-sized jade carving mouthing a pink stone salmon;
a wooden carving made in China that my husband mistook for a dog.
v.
My bears get
smaller, my lines grow.
When asked what the form of poems with numbered sections was called, I had no answer. Like any good reference librarian, I went looking for the term. Landing on Edward Hirsch’s The Essential Poet’s Glossary, I spent hours reading through Hirsch's entries, looking to see if there is a name for such a poem. And tagging pages. Ou, ou, I want to try that, and that, and. . . . .
I decided to call it a PRISM. Take one object or idea, in this case “bearness.” Look at it through a prism. Turn the prism and look again. Let light pass from the object or concept through the prism and into you. This can involve tricks of light or perspective or time. It can be used as a way to move on when the first few lines of a poem lead to a dead end.
In the case of Shrinking Bears, the first facet of the prism I looked through was that of the Celtic myth of Artaois, who was the god of warriors, craftsmen, and magicians, associated with bears and the winter solstice. During the solstice, Ursa major and minor are visible to the naked eye all night long. The Ursid meteor shower occurs around that time. In the second section, I looked at the only living bears I’ve come close to. In the third I moved through time to a childhood memory and another that happened after my zoo experiences, “bearness” as a stuffed toy. In the fourth, I looked around my current home and found bears scattered everywhere. In the fifth I realized that my bears, and possibly my universes, are shrinking.
Where did this practice of numbering sections of a poem come from? When did I first encounter it? Like any good reference librarian, I went looking for an answer. Many new ways of organizing poems came from my reading just before and during the time I spent working on my MFA. So I concentrated on writers discovered during that time. One of the professors who exploded my limited universe of poets was Susan Gevirtz. Her American Poetry and Poetics syllabus included Susan Howe, Barbara Guest, Erica Hunt, John Cage, Maya Deren, Kathleen Fraser, and Cecilia Vicuña.
On my bookshelves, I found Doug McPherson’s and Edward Smallfield’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo; the numbers are a straight forward counting device. In Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony and God, at first I thought she used dividers in “The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s Guide,” much like a fiction writer would chapter titles, to mark the progression of events along a timeline. It is a journal of a journey. Reading it I find they are closer to what I call prisms, sections sometimes similar to a snapshot, sometimes an aphorism, or notes scrawled on any piece of paper that came to hand.
The AHA! moment arrived when Judith brought Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” to the poetry class at Senior Studies Institute this week. This is the PRISM. Why on earth hadn’t this old acquaintance, at the heart of my fascination with crows, come immediately to mind?
Comments