Ever-elusive Home of Bone

By Margaret Christakos

What matters is the way the poem puts it. The poem is the representation that matters. Poems are the rubbings (and/or transfers, let’s say, encodings), the poem-maker’s lift and trace of cosmos/world. Are cosmos/world translated to language.

Not: “Poems are like rubbings, like traces or transfers, of the poet’s experience of the world.” I’m prepared to authorize a naming, that: poems are the rubbings, and/or transfers and/or encodings of the poem-maker’s lift and trace of (sentient/felt/perceived) experience into language. Language as a representation system, the poem as a production of the imagination engaging deeply in this system’s operations.

But Question: Is imagination an act only of language? What is the relationship of visual image and linguistic image? Do we build thought always of language, or is there a wide-ranging prelinguistic and/or metalinguistic sensory and visual cosmos/conscious mind which is an equal record/transfer/representation of experience? A “picture-trail”? An engine of the imagination corollary to language? For the moment: I want these comments to turn us back toward the way the poems put it. The poems as the important representations. I want to revisit Dislocations in Crystal, its force field.

Michael Boughn’s lines are shoved, no, shove us into a poetics of “relentless push,” and here I’m quoting from his own “Fore-words”: “These poems open into…the rise of Imperial Europe and eventually the tumult of these other empires in which we (my itals) now find ourselves entangled, all of it founded on Henry the Navigator’s relentless push (my itals) to get around Africa on the way to the Spice Islands.” This explorer’s impulse of and toward Relentless Push leads to “Columbus’s cataclysmic voyage across the Atlantic.” Boughn gives us the most marvellous compass (not a tool or instrument, good for “nothing,” as is art—added after) as a reference, marked not with N, S, E and W but “here,” “here,” “now” and “now”—we start from the place, he writes, “where syntax flutters back and forth, in and out of the knowable.”

So what’s his navigator looking for? Boughn is generous, he writes: “These poems seek a glimpse of unanticipated forms and disparate knowledges in the detritus of experience piled up in the corners of the millennial turn, a land as promised, not of the given but the taken.” Knowledge of and from detritus, still a place to land, but a promised land, an America, that must always remember that it is taken.

Boughn offers three additional touchstones. (Here I use the word “touchstones” to riff off of the significance Boughn layers onto place as a situated “ruins,” the rock/land/ “dark ground” mass of Portugal’s Cape Espichel, the West’s imperialist perch-point—and it is clearly colonialism that is the driving push—from which Boughn charts and warrants a zeitgeist poetics of indeterminacy. A situatedness where movement in any direction is deeply problematic.)

The first touchstone is a Muriel Ruykeyser quote which describes the “basis of life” as an “hereditary information transfer” achieved in crystalline structural growth through a relentless and vigorous pushing flux of “pressure and temperature,” the same elemental forces we tend to think of when considering matter forming out of pure cosmos. As if all growth must be violent and disfiguring. Whirling swirls of gaseous matter coalescing into something resembling the precursor of crystal, to: rock, to land, to empire, to colony… it’s an evolutionary process toward nothing more real than the dislocation of the “millennial turn” we all inhabit and in some profound way as Americans must continually reenact. Michael’s thickly built poetic parataxis reminds us, as readers, over and over that we don’t know where we are, for certain, perhaps none of us knows where you he she we are, whether the compass in our palm says North or East—to be in the millennial turn always returns us to a set of postcolonial questions about the degree of dislocation our minds must embody, if we are to be present at all.

And then Michael gives us a second touchstone, a quote from the famous German artist Joseph Beuys who either declares or laments, “Art as such is what I wanted to achieve. We have not achieved it.” At the very simplest level, with this epigraph, Boughn flags art itself as a territory to be reached, to be taken, an elusive destination.

And his third quote, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who Michael told us last week he regards as the most significant of influences on his own thinking and writing, offers up not a ruin, or a dislocation, or a deferred destination, but a tip of the hat to the domestic home, its soft enclosure, with the music of kitchen clock and logs on the hearth, a location of potential solace and song. “The domestic man…had solaces which others never dream of.” The one who stays home, that is, who does not traipse and travail and travel with the colonizer’s telescope. Or else who is already fully settled down upon that postcolonial detritus with all its nows and heres.

For a book that sings of wreckage, of structural growth as a ricocheting, shearing and twisting disfiguration, Boughn must mean to trip us up a little on the vivid kicks of our own cynicism. Or perhaps he means to launch a navigator’s passionate agenda, from the crystal cliffs of Gone to the ever-elusive home of bone; for shot shards and done cloth give way in this text, or smither a path to something as “groaning” and “gleaming” as the almost-impossible human “relational moment,”— “intervals” intensities relational moment”—yes, an image of first contact between glimpser and glimpsed, whose fullness of self crackles like a goddamn log on the fires of word, touch, look, phrase: “so near and yet, here/out on that road through north to stone/and home, her voice, that song to which the feet”…

These are the closing lines of Michael’s “Dislocations of Crystal” (my itals), second last poem in the book, and the line simply stops, in transit, does not insist on getting to a defined syntactical destination—“that song to which the feet”—is a phrase left smoldering. And so I graze to another “here,” to a poem called “The Name of Bone,” (49) and is anybody by now not hearing Bone as a surrogacy, of Michael’s surname? Fittingly, the poem begins with the feet (and fittingly, metrical feet): “If I stepped into the pool your eyes of it left/adrift in its sky, blue and vast though/perhaps betrayed by a flutter at the edge/of that sudden stillness (turning to reach for the missing bag)/what could it say?”

That’s how the poem puts it, as image. That’s how Dislocations in Crystal, all its poems, are the rubbings and/or transfers, let’s say, relational contact encodings of the poet-navigator’s lift and trace of his cosmos/world. Where the poet’s imagination records images of the things to be recorded. And the strokes that compose these images are words. Are language.

Works Cited:

Boughn, Michael. Dislocations in Crystal. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2002. Print.