The Red Letters
In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.
To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.
––Steven Ratiner
Red Letter Poem #260
Metaphysics of the Seahorse
In a seagrass meadow, a male seahorse
gives birth, lunging like the yellow horse
on springs at the Vineyard’s penny arcade
my daughter loved, the barrel-bellied horse
grinning, Emma thought, as if it remembered
her each year. A camera films the seahorse
expelling hundreds of fry in a murky froth
from his brood pouch. Most seahorses
don’t survive—they’re weak swimmers—
but Poseidon’s chariot was pulled by seahorses.
Imagine the shock of Dr. Julius Caesar Aranzi
in 1587, cutting into a brain and finding seahorse-
shaped tissue in the temporal lobe, branding it
the hippocampus, sea monster horse,
not knowing it held the key to memory
and memory’s loss. The mindful seahorse
can look forward and back at the same time
while staying put. Me? I’m a crab, not a seahorse.
––Teresa Cader
Dizzying terminology. Metaphysics (so says my dictionary) “is the branch of philosophy that focuses on first principles, including ontology and cosmology, and is intimately connected with epistemology.” If ontology feels shrouded in the foggy recollection of your college philosophy class, a thumbnail might point to “the study of existence itself.” Cosmology and epistemology round out this heady quartet with an investigation of the physical universe, as well as the place of human knowledge within its grand design. A little overwhelming. . .and that’s just in the title of the poem! But then everything else that follows in Teresa Cader’s lovely meditation on our tenuous place within the natural world feels intimate and much more present. What a revelation, when I first learned about the seahorse, seadragon, and pipefish––members of the Syngnathidae family––whose males are impregnated by the females of their species, injecting their eggs into the partner’s ‘brood pouch.’ Then it’s the fathers who will fertilize, incubate, and give birth to some 2000 offspring when they come to term. But the poet quickly returns our attention to the human realm, writing: the seahorse “lunging like the yellow horse// on springs at the Vineyard’s penny arcade/ my daughter loved, the barrel-bellied horse// grinning, Emma thought, as if it remembered/ her each year.” The form of the poem––a contemporary ghazal–– acclimates us to the eddies and repetitions of our thought processes. And so, we slip easily from the nature documentary to the deep heart of the familial––and suddenly we have a good deal more skin in the game, so to speak.
But this deft poet is intent on drawing us into the whirlpool of comprehension by shifting back and forth between (what my mother termed) ‘textbook knowledge’ and the sort of wisdom (or astonishment) that is particular to the lived experience of our species. Mythology and history enter the mix (the names Poseidon and Julius Caesar can’t help but conjure schoolroom memories). And then, in 1587, when Dr. Aranzi performed his early investigations of the human body, we share his astonishment to discover that “seahorse-// shaped tissue in the temporal lobe, branding it/ the hippocampus, sea monster horse”––and we are quickly reminded that, while each day we navigate both the quotidian and the utterly mysterious, saddled to these fragile human bodies, we barely understand how any of this universe works. Human consciousness sometimes seems yet another far galaxy, and just as confounding. We can’t help imagining what depth of meaning resides in that seahorse-like brain structure. And how utterly at sea our lives would be if it were somehow damaged. As these couplets progressed, I felt myself releasing a heartfelt sigh: for the seahorse and its all-too-fragile young; for Teresa and Emma and the yellow rocking horse of youth; for all those scientists and poets who are so hungry to know, they will travel through emotional storms and over whatever rough seas necessary in order to reach that far shore.
I find the poetry Teresa produces to be a perfect combination of craft and invention; she is a student of history, but also an adventurous mind willing to startle us with improvisation. This is the third poem I’ve featured in the Letters from a manuscript that has finally achieved book publication. At Risk––awarded the 2023 Richard Snyder Memorial Award, and published by Ashland Poetry Press––explores, in a variety of dimensions, how our existence on this planet is buffeted by the storm tides of history, memory, grief––but spurred as well by the tailwinds of love and the full-sails of imagination. Teresa has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe; she also spent years working with young writers in programs at MIT, UMass-Boston, the Emerson College Graduate Writing Program and, for a decade, the low-residency MFA Program at Lesley University. And while this poet admires the seahorse’s ability to direct its attention both forward and back, I think Teresa’s crab-mind sideways crawl reminds us that, between where we hope to go and where we’ve been, lies the experience (and the deep rewards) of simply living on this planet.
The Red Letters
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https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices
and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
http://dougholder.blogspot.com
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