A man hired by the man who dredged the pond
documented twenty-six kinds of birds
at the southern bend of the Pojoaque River
early one April morning. Like the autistic girl
who glided up to you in a tot pool
when your daughter was small, and peered at you
unseeing, reminding you, against your will,
or perhaps it was against your better judgment,
of a blind fish—as you mull over ways
to incorporate the subcontractor’s list
into a poem, you stare blankly,
first at the page, then out the window.
All month you’ve been watching flurries of leaves
catch in the sunlight as they flutter down.
Weighing “the gravity of a leaf” against
“a leaf’s gravity,” you don’t notice the drift
of your mind until, as in a newscast re-cap,
the rabbit is already writhing, tossed
from the wheels of the car ahead.
As before, you’re glad you aren’t the driver,
but angry too, because you’d seen the rabbit—
if you’d been in front you could have swerved
and saved it. Whether impotent anger
or relief came first, you’re not sure, and which
emotion is truer—stronger—you also can’t say.
Even now, you wish you’d stopped to bury it,
the way you buried your daughter’s Siamese kitten,
mauled by the dogs next door. Small calamities,
you know, compared to the world’s, some
of which you register before you glide away.
© Carol Moldaw. Printed by permission of the author.
Carol Moldaw is the author of five books of poetry, including, most recently, So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems (Etruscan Press, 2010), and The Lightning Field, winner of the 2002 FIELD Prize (Oberlin Press, 2003). Her first novel, The Widening, came out in 2008. In the spring of 2011 she served as the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. writer in Residence at Hollins University.
Chronicle Poetry Columnist Lisa Russ Spaar notes: A year ago our newly adopted shelter dog spent her first autumn outside of institutional captivity barking wildly each time a leaf or beechnut or acorn hit the ground within ten yards or so, whether she was inside bounding ecstatically on the couch or out on a walk beneath the falling sky. Her relative indifference to the same deluge this autumnal go-around does not diminish my memory of the sense I had, last fall, that we were in for a very long season.
Poets pay attention. And poems often involve a documentation or registering of what has been observed. This close absorption in and attentiveness to the world around us—as with my dog and her hypersensitivity to all that minute dross brought down by gravity—has its consequences. Who among us, in the driver’s seat of an automobile, has not traveled many miles in a state of trance or reverie without once noticing an exit sign or passing vehicle? I think, too, of a friend, a poet, who was actually stopped by a police officer for writing while driving. She denied it even as the notebook and pencil in question lay guiltily in her lap. Poets look around; they want to record what they see, mentally, literally. Once asked to describe my research process for an academic assessment, I half-jokingly responded, “Looking into other people’s lit windows at dusk?”
Carol Moldaw’s “A Leaf’s Gravity” concerns itself with these processes of poem-making—the almost obsessive need to watch, to heed details (the poet who is like the “man hired by the man who dredged the pond / [documenting] twenty-six kinds of birds / at the southern bend of the Pojoaque River / early one April morning”) and the equally compelling desire to discern from among those observations what is worthy of regard, or useful, and what is not, not only in relation to a poem one might compose, but also out of a kind of responsibility, a mindfulness not to miss, in our focused absorption, the forest for the trees. The speaker acknowledges the very real possibility, as “you mull over ways / to incorporate the subcontractor’s list / into a poem, [staring] blankly, / first at the page, then out the window,” that the subject risks becoming inured to everything else, not unlike “the autistic girl / who glided up to you in a tot pool / when your daughter was small, and peered at you / unseeing, reminding you, against your will, / or perhaps it was against your better judgment, / of a blind fish.”
In this way, close, intent seeing can lead to blindness, external perception to interior reverie. The words mystery and mysticism, for instance, derive from the Greek myein, “to close” (the eyes or mouth). As the poem’s subject spends a month “watching the flurry of leaves / catch in the sunlight as they flutter down” (the sense of musing is reinforced throughout by Moldaw’s loose blank verse), she is utterly preoccupied with the subtle distinctions between two possible phrases for her poem. Is “the gravity of a leaf,” she ponders, preferable to “a leaf’s gravity”? Engrossed as she is with these seemingly small distinctions (which in themselves raise all sorts of questions—can a leaf possess gravity? Or anything? Or does gravity possess the leaf? And “grave” how? Further, what does it mean to possess something? And what is the relationship between possession and falling, or falling off? How is possession related to culpability?), she fails to notice the “drift of her mind”—so much so that, while driving, she finds that she is witness to an accident she somehow feels she might have prevented had she not been so mentally elsewhere.
Her poetic self-involvement engenders in the poem’s “you” a mix of responses to the run-over rabbit, ranging from “impotent anger” to “relief.” Even worse, the subject of the poem cannot help but further blame herself for not stopping “to bury it, / the way you buried your daughter’s Siamese kitten, / mauled by the dogs next door.” Finally, the poem ends where it began, with a registering and a gliding away. What, Moldaw seems to be asking, by paying attention, do we miss? How is our desire to possess the world through language related to (and how does it affect) our responsibility to that world? I like how Moldaw, in a meta gesture, does choose between the two phrases she’s been pondering—or at least she chooses one for the title. By eschewing the genitive-link metaphor (“the gravity of a leaf”), she grants the leaf a more active, even human agency.
Poets, too, have agency. We look. We are possessed by looking. And in doing and being so, we possess—possess the capacity, even, to suggest that something like a leaf might also be capable of owning something. It might possess gravity, or be grave—if not for itself, then for us. With this power, Moldaw strongly signals, comes accountability, even culpability. Even the “small calamities,” she suggests, “compared to the world’s,” are worthy of our notice. Whether at the level of language or of action, minute choices and decisions, as they relate to our ability to see inwardly and to see outwardly, are a grave and important business.
(Photo by Flickr-Creative Commons user John Morgan)
