A Handpicked Poem
article by Michael
Todd Steffen
by Mary Buchinger, from There is only the Sacred and the
Lily Poetry Review Books, 2026
Bare ruin’d choirs –
Last night
I walked
past my dead
friend’s house
my feet plowed
the fallen
leaves beneath
the borer-ridden
street ash
words so
many words
he and I had
dared to try
out against
indifferent air –
Once in a country
I’d never known
he took my hand
we crossed
the broken threshold
of an old chapel
laced with thistles
crows perched
on crumbling pews
the open loft
above us then
there –
an absolute
unburdened
blue
Mary Buchinger’s poems
speak with the intimacy and hush of sacred places, churches, libraries of old,
and I’m often inclined when reading her poems to start making topic lists, like
a reference librarian.
One of the unusual topic
search words for this poem on my list would be “nudity,” synonymous with the
first word in the title, “Bare,” like the unornamented language of the poem and
justified by the poem’s close with the blue of sky showing through “the open
loft” of the broken chapel ceiling. The poem is visionary, dreamlike.
“Grief” would be a more
prominent topic word on the list, announced in the enjambment from the first to
second strophes of truncated lines—“past my dead / friend’s house”—a breach
that misleads us, at first, from one bat of the eye, homing in like popular
belief about poetry the speaker is being lofty by addressing “my dead”
(ancestors, the culture at large)—to the rather cadaverously thudding actuality
of “friend’s house”—a deceased friend. Oh my. Acceptance can be one of the
trickiest psychological labors for the mourning heart and mind and it is laden
yet bold of the poem’s speaker here to take this walk—in halting breaths of two
or three words at a time—and endure the bitter dark windows of the
announcement. My friend is no more. Terrible and necessary, courageous the
demand on those in the wake.
Shakespeare’s name would
appear on my list for this poem’s reference index also, the author of the
three-word title of Buchinger’s poem, referring to Sonnet 73, “That time of
year thou mayst in me behold…” The selection of the title powerfully evokes the
I-thou intimacy of the Sonnets, a palpable nearness in Mary’s poem—which is
searching to raise the friend as it simultaneously reflects on her own approach
to mortality, embracing a different coming-of-age realization.
The reference to
Shakespeare in the title also prepares us for the transport of the poem, which
occurs at the dash midway, after the fifth tercet, where we glide as it were
from an American neighborhood in autumn, ankle-deep in fallen leaves, into a
vision of “a country / I’d never known”—perhaps France or England, in a land
where there are ruins of old churches to explore as well as the
tourist-friendly restored ones.
Ultimately, though, it
doesn’t matter where the second half of the poem takes place. It takes place,
in a sense, in no time, or in suspended time, in the timelessness of art, time
of dreams, visions, perhaps the time of (the dead) immortality, and so it
happens no where, the unlocated Byzantium of Yeats’s vision. Buchinger’s dream
is not nearly so fancy, yet it is very precise and responding to the degree the
broken chapel stands as a figure of the mortal friend, haunted by spectral
crows perching on crumbling pews (a sound for our reaction to the odor of putrefaction).
We in this sense, as
Buchinger’s new collection title suggests, are caught in a paradigm of the
sacred and (subject to time with its imminent ruin) the desecrated. Yet the
desecrated, those ruins, accumulate an air of the sacred about them which
ultimately must yield to the sanctity of nothing, heaven, the blue of the sky
above—configuring a dynamic of reversal of terms distinguishing us as people
and the places we live and visit. The reversal of those definitions question
the severity of the difference upon which so much discord in our society today relies,
and probably has relied on for a lot longer. Yet it is good to remember these
moments and visions that become pristine and nearly tangible in the hush and
suspended disbelief of poetry easily escape us (or we it) in the harder walls
and streets and harsher light of our daily lives, where an opposite
pronouncement of nothing sacred or desecrated tends to resound.
There
is
Only the Sacred and the Desecrated is
Mary Buchinger’s eighth collection of poetry. Other recent titles include The Book of Shores, Navigating the Reach and Virology.
Her poems have appeared in many top journals, including AGNI, Pedestal Magazine, Plume, Salt Hill, Salamander and Seneca Review. Mary is the winner of the
2024 Elyse Wolf/Slate Roof Chapbook Prize. She teaches at the Massachusetts
College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.
Her upcoming readings:
Saturday, November 7, 12:45-2:30 pm, with
Patrick Sylvain and Steven Ratiner
Red Letter Live! Hosted by
Arlington Poet Laureate Emeriti Steven Ratiner and Jean Flanagan
Robbins Library, Community Room, Arlington, 700 Mass Ave. Reception at 990 Mass Ave following the reading
Sunday, November 15th, 4 pm, with Kevin
Gallagher, hosted by Michael Franco
The Press Room, 90 Oxford Street, Somerville ($5 donation
requested)
