A Handpicked Poem by Michael Todd Steffen

 A Handpicked Poem

by Michael Todd Steffen

Winter 2024

A l e x a n d e r H o l l e n b e r g

origin story, crow

First in the 2-Day Poem Contest 2023, Contemporary Verse 2, published online in December 2023

– on the occasion of Earth Day 2023

The crow’s wing is a blade

slicing the ocean open:

inside, the usual offal—birds’ nests

of old transatlantic cable, fists of seagrass

that clasp and conceal the bleached bones

of tankers and trawl nets, dusky shards of fallen stars

set down on the seabed in a sunken syzygy

of celestial trash—a drowned, stationary orbit.

Even deeper in abyssalpelagic space, a forest

of grey spruce slow-dances

in the dark undercurrent, like phosphenes

forged by the pressure of water and salt.

The crow plucks one, squirrels it in her plumage

and soars—for a moment spruce and crow and sea and sky

concatenate, which is to say create,

a new cosmos in the ink of her wing,

connecting the drowned

to what cannot be drowned.

She returns the spruce to drier ground, from its boughs

watches fishermen gadding about the bright, boatless harbor,

gathering bait and gossip, mending generations

of decay in their nets,

listens to them quiz one another about traps and tides,

the topography of a good trawl line, the boundaries

of inherited territories and the brisk profits

to which they’ll one day return—

as if returning

is something that will always happen,

as if there were a net wide enough

to reel back in the world.

As I comb back through a file named poems_by_others, I find the great blessing of Alexander Hollenberg’s poem, “origin story, crow,” found a year ago in the cited online poetry journal I go back to. To me it’s a “winter” poem because I found it online last winter, and because the fishermen in the poem are doing the winter work of mending nets and readying gear. The texture of the language is rich as the paperweight weather and its palpable ghost-pluming air we’re in today.



It’s January 11th, 2025. In the Boston area it’s snowing, a brief assurance we’ll get at least a taste of the winter season this year. 10 years ago, in 2015, we had a doozy of a winter that had me looking for a plane ticket back to Oklahoma to spend a month just to get out of the blasts and shoveling. As I remember it, one full-blown 13-inch blizzard a week. We accumulated a record 110.6 inches that year.



And, on most of the media I try like a dog chasing a Ferrari to keep up with, we’re in the aftermath of the LA wildfires which began on Tuesday evening, three nights ago. The scope of the devastation is piercing. Right here in my own country a glimpse of the sort of bleakest devastation I’ve been watching unfold in Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti, Sudan over recent years. There is no war in America… Except perhaps the back lines of the war or struggle humanity is engaged in now globally: climate change. Which in a sense is an ongoing war we have been in against global reality or truth. A week or so ago Meta (formerly Facebook) dismissed its fact-checkers. Somebody leaped at the LA tragedy in a lampooning gesture to that dismissal, posting Greenland had carpet bombed LA in response to assumptive President Trump’s bid to annex their land, and for our involvement in the destruction in Gaza. Try fact-checking ironies. The post was seen before it disappeared. Perhaps in an age of widespread farce, effect-checking would be the name of the game.



This morning’s snow isn’t all a job. As I woke to see it blanketing the housetops outside my window, something child-like sprang and effervesced in me. April, month of awaking desire and its dormant virulence surrounded by a new generation of competition, might be the cruelest month. But December, January and February can contain superlative senses of claustrophobia, darkness, and doom (end of year, end of the world…). A snowfall, brief as most are anymore, is a divine distraction from all that closed-in northern angst.



Climate change and warmer weather has opened the northern winter to more clement temperatures, yet deepened the sense of our doom in the long view. The less snow we see up here, the more convinced we become of the phenomenon that the world is warming. This is different from being convinced by reports and photographs. It is, I imagine, the difference between a doctor’s words and the pain and weakness the gravely ill are overcome by. Warm or even not so cold winter days in Boston refute any hope that documents have just been photo-shopped and edited along with all the scientific research. January sunshine sinks a much starker dread in me, because my mind is convinced of its global and potentially millennial implications.



Hollenburg’s poem is an “origin story”—the title not capitalized, as in the beginning of the beginning, in the throes/remnant of timeless chaos, still lacking conventions, like rules for capitalized letters in titles. The first act of the poem, the crow’s flight or rowing, is “slicing” as though the ocean here were a pie? This opening, true to the title, remembers the divisions of the acts of creation in Genesis, land from water, day from night.



Winter’s the season of ends and so origins and origin stories. Its beginning is marked by the shortest day in the calendar year, scientifically the darkest time of the year, night with its analogues of chaos, blindness and lostness. Along these lines the birth of Christ signifies the beginning of a new order. We make resolutions for New Year’s Day to become new, better people.



But Hollenburg’s poem is going to get a little more forensic—“inside, the usual offal”—with that homophone of “awful,” the dread feeling darkness, death, which the absence of order deepens inside us.



For the new order to step in, the old must be largely digested and dissolved. Hollenburg’s primordial waters, bearing witness to the historical day, have a bad case of indigestion from “old transatlantic cable…the bleached bones/of tankers and trawl nets”—modulating the musical registers of the poem’s language between myth and documentary, juxtaposing the two essential times, eternity and now, aligning with the poet’s “sunken syzygy/of celestial trash.”



Science is now admitting to materials we call forever plastics.



In another staggering signature the poet more deeply names his “deeper” ocean, for our utter disorientation of up and down, “abyssalpelagic space” where a “forest/of grey spruce slow-dances” from its valley or hillside time out of mind before an a-historical flood swept over it. Forests of spruce don’t grow under salt water. But oceans have been known to move, over whole areas, forests.



Crows are bantering spirits. Known to collect odd things, bottlecaps, earrings… They are notorious takers. They sing in omens of noise. Their high status in indigenous mythology stands well documented and we have phones, we have, more importantly, libraries. Nearly everybody at one time or other, most of us more than once, is gathered into an audible address by these odd angels of roadsides, neighborhoods, fields and, yes, the seaside. In Jung’s sense, the crow’s an archetype of the supernatural, a luminous token of creation in the world out there before but also always just as we see it, as though we have always known it, a touchstone for the nature of reality beyond, though also part of, our will and might to bend. Like the doubtful hope expressed in the brilliant final lines of the poem:



as if returning

is something that will always happen,



as if there were a net wide enough

to reel back in the world.



Again the homophonic play between “reel” and “real”; that “net” both referring to the tradecraft net of the fishermen and also to the (Inter)net we most all are most always caught up in.



“origin story, crow” is what Allen Grossman might call a cosmogenic poem. In it Hollenburg magisterially lights up the dual nature of our tenuous residency on earth, in its subjective/objective framework of interdependency, dear and endearment. It’s hard to imagine another language with its demands to adhere, advocate for and sell, holding and giving so much so succinctly, to nearly anybody, other than the language of poetry.