Red Letter Poem #228

 Red Letter Poem #228

 

 

 

Door

The house wants to go home.

Boards sail to the forest, singly

and then in small flocks of rafters

and beams. Abandoned, the windows



tremble mid-air. You mingle

with them, murmuring, calming.

It was an old house.



Here's a door. You open it to trees

you've always seen from one angle.

Another step makes them new.



A line of footprints leads deeper,

under the tracks the boards left in air.

Time for you to follow.


––Pamela Alexander


I suspect you’ll agree: this has been one of the most unsettling autumns in memory. Not because of the petit terrors gusting in with All Hallows––those housebroken frights we indulge in so that we might consider the darker territories beyond our daily purview. No, I’m thinking of the genuinely horrifying headlines rising like flames from our political turmoil, making us all fearful about the future of our Republic. So it feels almost like a relief to set aside the latter for a moment and immerse ourselves in the disquieting vision offered in this new poem by Pamela Alexander. In this murky season, with winter fast approaching, our attention naturally turns to thoughts of de- and evolution, the dark processes by which the earth moves toward renewal. Of course, within the limitations of our thinking, we can’t fully grasp how, as another year draws to a close, all this effects our precious self-contained existences. And thus the experience of trepidation and gloom that November often comes clothed in. Still, doesn’t it seem that, at the same time, our minds cannot help but embrace the immensity of the transformation? It is aweful, in the original sense of the word. Likely, it’s the reason some seek out––in movies, stories and poems––these small-scale and manageable trepidations; they prepare us to confront the more encompassing dread beyond our control. Right from line one, and without even a second to prepare ourselves, Pamela’s house begins deconstructing itself––relocating, perhaps, from our material existence and reestablishing its presence in a new and undefined landscape which may or may not be welcoming to its former inhabitants.



Pamela is the author of four previous collections of poetry: the first, Navigable Waterways, was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Younger Poets Prize; and the most recent, Slow Fire (from Ausable/Copper Canyon Press) contains visions both bracing and beautiful. A forthcoming chapbook, Left, will be published by the Beloit Poetry Journal. Pamela has somehow managed to travel both the customary path of a poet and the road less traveled by. After teaching creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for many years, she joined the faculty of Oberlin College, where she was an associate editor of FIELD magazine. After retiring, her permanent address for four years was her 26-foot RV, crisscrossing America and Canada, accompanied by her obstreperous cat named Metta. She’s now settled in Maine where she continues to write poetry and nonfiction as well as mystery novels under the pen name Pam Fox.



Today’s poem is a bare-bones affair that quietly captivates us because we believe (or want to believe) we understand what we’ll find when that door opens before us. We enter because there is no other option–– Time for you to follow––and must decide whether to hold tight to the vision to which we’ve grown accustomed, or to open ourselves to a mystery beyond our comprehension. It reminded me of how, many decades back, I’d read poems like “Autumn Day” by Rainer Maria Rilke, and relish the heightened sense of desolation carried by this season: “Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.” Perhaps. But these days, when I am much closer to winter’s enveloping dark (and not just the conceptual version which that young poet was investigating), I am surprised by the paths into hopefulness which seem to be opening. When so much in our current circumstance feels as if hurricane-force gales, without a moment’s notice, can tear our lives from their foundations, perhaps the deepening imagination constructs its own sort of shelter. Pamela’s vision, though quietly ominous, ends up erecting the sort of abode designed by our in-residence dream-architect, and which the author then constructs with inky two-by-fours, and a roof shingled with the music poems are made of.

 

 

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