☀ What Sparks Poetry: Paul Yoon on "Evidence of the Journey"

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March 22, 2021

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite writers to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems and other writing. In Delineated: Prose Writers on Poetry, prominent writers of fiction and non-fiction reflect on how poetry illuminates their creative lives, whether as inspiration, a daily practice, or a thread of hope through difficult times.

Evidence of the Journey

Ralph Sneeden

After the search for the depression gene ended
in disappointment, after the failures of lens
and bench I went to the world, watching first
above tall grasses the white rumps of deer
floundering like the sails of small boats in trouble
just before they vanished into spruces
which ate them like a storm; listening first
to the timbre of crows' argument in drizzle,
then measuring the angle at which their legs hung
limply as they flew to the cities, where I traveled
from ward to ward cataloguing the scars of unknown
origin, recording the contortions of my own face
in the steel curvature of bed rails. What had I hoped
to gain? To shake the chaff from this drab bouquet
of data, crush the seeds with mortar and pestle,
toss them to the breath at the ocean's lip?
I was no different from the prisoner
passing time, carving the bar of soap
in the likeness of his guard.
I stood outside
the husk of Coventry Cathedral the way I've wished
I could outside myself. Within the cavity
of lacework and melted lead, a tatter of red glass
throbbed like a living organ in charred ribs.
The old man was beside me crying. He
was eighty-seven, had pumped water from
the shelters underground as bombs pounded
the city through the night. "In the morning
I could have cried," he said. And I considered
the difference between the consequences of violence
and the violence itself. His name was Morris Mander.
It was raining. I had my picture taken
with him. There was no roof, and rain
was falling gently inside the empty church.
Pham Thai Phuc, our neighbor's foster
daughter: thirty years ago, I marveled
at the X's down her leg, the healed incision
of fifty-caliber bullets. I'd heard her sobbing
when I spent the night, in her sobs the sound
of geese flying through clouds of driving snow.
Arriving or fleeing? What would exile be
without memory, if one could forget the place
refused, the place departed, and return a stranger?
Poker on the floor, whiffleball in the yard,
we watched her grow from walker to crutches.
She was sent back to her village before the war
was over,
before the black levy was built
against the tide of names hers would not
be among, even though she vanished
more completely. Why have I searched its chiseled
list as I would a giant aquarium, its swarms
of orbiting fish, or a window at night, snowflakes
like sparks in the floodlight's beam? To say
mirror is only half the story. Standing there,
it was easy enough to ignore myself, to see
instead a ladder from a great height, the descent
precarious, impossible to read one panel's
human rungs, to say each life without
looking down, a foray into the territories
of drama.
A friend adapting The Women of Troy
cast refugees from the wars in the former
Yugoslavia, governed twice the people
needed for her play—a spare for every
actor; if one broke down, another could take
the script, continue—human bookmarks in
the spine of what has been, what must be
told again. Better that evidence than these
ticket stubs shoved between the pages
of my burning calendar, the perpetually obsolete.
Enough of the ancestors' clothes, which grow
more two dimensional on their bending hangers.
Let the dust settle on their brogues and boots,
the snow on brilliant maples.
Ahead, voluptuous
rubble, collapsing banks of wave and cloud:
welter of beautiful failures where the sun
has parked a rusting chariot to work inside
his torch's aura, lone welder perched
in the girders of another cold morning,
while I retreat into the convenient
shortcomings of my omniscience, like the un-
heroic narrator of The Firebird describing
the hero's progress, I've no idea how long
he rode. You can tell a story in no time,
but it is another matter
to live one.

from the book EVIDENCE OF THE JOURNEY / Harmon Blunt Publishers

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What Sparks Poetry:
Paul Yoon on "Evidence of the Journey"
"Here are two things I have a difficult time writing about: myself and the sacredness of a great poem. Maybe a great poem can give us shape when our own—that is, whatever holds us together—has slipped away."

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

Poet Adam Zagajewski Dies at 75
"Adam Zagajewski, born in 1945 in Lviv, was one of the most famous contemporary Polish artists. He was a poet, prose writer, essayist and translator, winner of many prestigious literary awards. For years, he has been listed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his work has been translated into many languages."
via POLISH NEWS

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