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 #298
Runoff
it’s all too porous
our tears disappear
and go below
she and I
together forever
shouldered up
steely friends
through dirty flats
and predators
the other night
she asked me
to speak for her
as she lay dying
and I wanted
to say no
tears bubbling up
from rocky walls
her perpetual sadness
yes I said yes I will
she wanted me
to let her die
and afterward I heard
the runoff
leaking into the rocks
––Cammy Thomas
At a recent poetry reading––primarily filled with gray-haired attendees like myself––a young man was asked what drew him to poetry events like this one. “There’s no algorithm in play when it comes to poetry––you never know what’s coming next.” I assume he was referring to the way all social media thoroughly assesses our online personalities and, with AI’s shrewd calculation, pre-selects what we will find in our feed (and doesn’t that word make you wince?) The goal is as calculating as it is simple: cultivate, capture, maximize, and monetize our attention. Poetry, by contrast, remains such an idiosyncratic enterprise. Each poet’s imaginative drive and intuitive reach carry us along wholly unexpected paths toward some culmination no one could have predicted at the poem’s outset. This young man craved authentic discovery––and, say what you will about the cacophonous mélange of contemporary poetry, that motivation remains a constant in those putting pen to paper. (I’m betraying my age here––perhaps I should say putting fingers to keyboard). Cammy Thomas’ new poem strikes me as an excellent example of that unpredictable journey. We readers don’t even learn for certain until the midpoint of this 24-line poem that the subject being examined is the dying of a dear friend. But looking back now at our navigation of that slow unfolding, we learn a good deal about how one poet’s mind operates (and perhaps, in the process, our own).
The poem’s title, “Runoff” brings to mind the spring thaw, where winter’s ice pack begins melting, coursing downhill to replenish the streams, saturate the land. But in these quiet tercets––unadorned with either capitalized sentences or guiding punctuation––the waters being tugged by gravity are our tears. A single stanza to declare the friendship––“she and I/ together forever/ shouldered up”––and another to convey the history of that bond––“steely friends/ through dirty flats/ and predators.” Did we immediately sense how provocative those words were––“forever,” steely”, and “predators”? Certainly, after a second and third reading, we imagine the almost geologic heat of experience that makes an amalgam of two souls. But when the next stanza arrives––“the other night/ she asked me/ to speak for her”––I began to imagine a funeral being planned. What does it mean to speak for another individual? At this point, I’m thinking that the subject was eulogy, the effort to evoke and celebrate somebody’s life with that most insubstantial of materials: words. What a daunting prospect, magnified by the impending loss. It did not surprise me that the poet continues to phrase her thought process in physical, even geological terms. The prospect of such grief is beyond understanding––but it is somehow tempered when we imagine the universal cycles in which each life takes part.
Cammy is the author of three much-honored full-length poetry collections, each published by Four Way Books. Cathedral of Wish received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2022, Tremors was awarded Poetry Honors from the Massachusetts Book Awards. Cammy’s most recent publication is Odysseus’ Daughter (Parkman Press), a chapbook that responds, from an invigoratingly feminine perspective, to the pivotal Homeric tale. In “Runoff,” it becomes painfully clear that the power of speaking is manifold––here, it extends from eulogy to advocacy and finally to elegy. With something approaching the force of medical proxy, this suffering woman is asking her friend to allow death to wash her away in its flood, to help her surrender to its overwhelming current. Did you admire, as I did, that the speaker wants to refuse, to insist that life must endure? And did it feel even more astonishing when the magnitude of her love demanded more––required from her a more selfless response: “yes I will” declares the narrator, submitting her own heart to the devastating gravitational power of this runoff? We are left imagining those great forces that carry us onward, hoping that our lives, too, might somehow become part of this timeless landscape. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons we return to poetry, in all its varieties: we ask it to speak for us––as Cammy does here––to bring language to bear on the very substance of our mindful lives until it somehow produces a momentary clarity. We call such luminescence beauty. What an unfathomable burden for the poet and (though perhaps only in hindsight) an unimaginable gift.
The Red Letters
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* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:
https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices
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the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
http://dougholder.blogspot.com
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