The weight of my boots creates that familiar yet strange wedging sound as each foot presses snow against itself. The sound brings comfort to me in the lost airspace of snow. Ice clings to my eyebrows and stings my cheeks. Snow collects on the cowl of my coat. 

I am lost. My mother died and I am lost. Circling the Empire State Building, trudging along New York’s Fifth Avenue to 34th Street. Going around again. And again. I know how to get to the subway. I understand the grid of the city. Tonight, I can’t exit the loop.

The city’s night tableau of architecture — concrete, ice, and steam; of generational conflict and perseverance; of storytelling and trash decomposing in the gluey sludge under the snow. Always so rich, so full of historical resonance and personal meaning, the city is suddenly meaningless. Blank. 

∞

When lost, whether physically or emotionally, one’s sense of time implodes. Time, under normal conditions, frames the experience of daily life through predictable rhythms of the insistence of deadlines, the immediacy and care of others, the spaces we inhabit, and the diminishment of light at the end of the day. Even under the gray, vaporous weight of depression, time sculpts identity whether as a marker of incremental accomplishment or as an inner drumbeat of failure — an inability to engage known markers or  guideposts of a life. One’s awareness of time’s duration in moments of joy, ecstasy, dread, excitement, or perception of loss comes, in part, from within the body, arising from the hormonal bath of the brain and nervous system. This amalgam of awareness stabilizes identity and provides a framework for understanding the conditions of existence. But in moments of terror or shock, whether emerging in the moment or from the webbed entanglements of unmetabolized trauma, awareness dilates, and one’s sense of the usual logic of the movement of time halts.

I first began to think of the relationship between time and loss in reading Katie Farris’ chapbook, A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving. In her small collection of poems, Farris meets the gaze of existential uncertainty, a condition we each face at every moment but imagine we don’t. We really don’t know the body’s internal ecosystem; we cannot listen with acuity enough to know the path or level of severity of developing cancers. A routine test or heading to the doctor’s office with otherwise unexplained symptoms make these known.

For Farris, the moment arrived with the diagnosis of a potentially deadly form of breast cancer. When I read Farris’ chapbook, I’d also begun reading Max Ritvo’s Four Reincarnations and his posthumous The Final Voicemails, a collection edited by Louise Glück. In these three works, the poets write from the knowledge of facing death and separation from loved ones, not in an imaginary far-off future but as an attack on their experience of the present. While I have not faced such a diagnosis thus far, I’ve experienced the deaths of close family members for whom depression eventually became a factor in their cause of death.

The first stanza of the second poem in Farris’ collection, “Tell it Slant,” stages a protective disassociation from this threat, the strands of growing cancer—the spiculated masses—take on the name “cactus.” Farris chooses, in honor of Dickinson, a disassociation from the MRI image of her cancer to “tell it slant” by using the spiculation—the spike-shaped appearance of the growths—to suggest an image of her body as a host to a cactus, as the feeding ground of something foreign to the internal body and with complete transformational control. 

You float in the MRI gloam,

Several spiculated masses,

I name you “cactus,”

Carcinoma be damned—you make

A desert of all

Of me.

Here’s a shot between

the eyes: Six days before

my thirty-seventh birthday,

a stranger called and said,

You have cancer. Unfortunately.

It’s the “shot between the eyes” that describes the kind of cognitive evisceration that renders the mind unable to think, remember, and forecast. As Cathy Caruth, professor of literature at Cornell, observes, trauma expresses itself in literature and society as the very thing we must witness to understand, but neither witness nor understanding can take place. Caruth is careful to point out that there is a social tendency to equate trauma and violence. Caruth situates violence as an event that takes place in time, one available for observation. Trauma, on the other hand, is an experience of unseen unfolding; each experience of the original violence returns unresolved and comingling other lived experiences. 

The “shot between the eyes” signifies the violence of Farris’ world being overturned, of the loss of continuity of Farris-as-being. In “Tell it Slant” and many other poems in the chapbook, Farris draws upon the exquisite joy and sorrow we find in Dickinson’s poems.

For “Tell it Slant,” Farris uses the fragment of Dickinson’s poem, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,”  most aligned with the Dickinsonian ars poetica: to hold the raw truth in abeyance, to have it unfold in the careful reader’s consciousness, to “dazzle gradually.” Difficult truths, those that cause shock and ensuing cognitive blindness, disintegrate the familiar.

Farris looks straight on at the masses of cancer cells floating in the dark of the 2-D MRI image, these telling the unrefutable truth, but she gives them the dimensionality they don’t have in the image. She associates the visual form with something wholly other, a cactus, thereby coping with this reality by using its likeness to sidewind away from it, stating the truth while not stating it.

A little further into the collection, “Emiloma: A Riddle & an Answer” offers an instance of the fear emanating from trauma as it opens into an interrogation—of cancer, of the ravages of its treatment, and of a poetics—each asked to say which will call Farris into death. “Emiloma,” a neologism of “Emily” and “carcinoma,” draws a Dickinsonian metaphysics into an examination of mortality. As Dickinson guides Farris toward a melding of grace and mourning, there is a movement of the outside, the sky, into the inside of her body. Farris’ own poetics render the puzzle of a sky and a self against the mystery of their inversion. 

Will you be

my death, Emily?

And keep the sky 

from reaching inside—

you, the voice; me, the faithful echo?

Will you be my death, echo? 

Do you know—no

in which meadow—mow

the ginkgo grows—goes

which is fallow, which is furrowed—foes

what is winnowed, what is—woe. 

The poem ends with the sound, rhythm, and meaning of the word “echo” as its centerpiece. The homophones “know” and “no” offer a koan-like puzzle with the rhymes of “know,” “meadow,” “ginkgo,” “fallow,” “furrowed,” winnowed,” and “woe.” In these, I hear Farris creating a dilation of time almost to the point of meaninglessness, an evocation, perhaps of the sensation of time stopping as when someone experiences a violation of body or spirit. The spectral presence of Dickinson, long associated with poems about death and an ecstatic afterlife, appears as the originating voice with Farris’ as the copy, the resonance, the echo. The second stanza asks Dickinson to unpack the puzzle of longevity as symbolized by the ginkgo tree, but in the series of negations and reversals that follow, Farris leaves all questions unanswered. 

I see this, too—the weaving of the body’s experience with the idea of a dissociative start/stop of being or being in time—in Matt Ritvo’s “Anatomic and Hydraulic Chastity,” a poem in The Final Voicemails:

Sometimes I can almost feel

what the world would be like without me:

like an olive-green paperback

shutting a perfect story flat—

no longer crimped by

a spasmodic paper clip miming

the shape of his genitals

with his nauseated, skinny body.

In Farris’ and Ritvo’s poems, a poesis marked by disjunctions in real or clock/sensory time, each with its own push/pull dynamic on our consciousness, comes alive. Human awareness, as it develops from infancy, becomes deeply conditioned with an experience of a linear movement of time. In the research areas of science, psychology, and philosophy, the embodied experience of time forms human cognition. In his book The Order of Time, writer and theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli describes time’s influence on all of what we think and do, how it is the lens through which we experience everything on this side of death:

“We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is being in time. Its solemn music nurtures us, opens the world to us, troubles us, frightens and lulls us. The universe unfolds into the future, dragged by time, and exists according to the order of time.”

Rovelli postulates that this unfolding, though, is an illusion—that “time at some fundamental level doesn’t exist; it exists for us.” Farris and Ritvo riff this edge in their poems as they confront intense fear and loss of control. They open the seams of what it means to “be in time.” They play along a double edge of precarity: a recognition of vulnerability and a playful, sensual resistance to it. 

A poem titled “The Big Loser” in Ritvo’s collection, Four Reincarnations: Poems wields transformational energy at a slower burn rate than Farris or Dickinson’s but plays along the same thematic contours. This gorgeous poem winds itself around dreamlike observations and interventions brought by the angel and troubles distinctions between reality and whatever it is that we want to call “not-dreams” or “not reality.” Two images, a box and a road, are threaded throughout the poem. A road, a boat, a car: all a means to a destination. So, too, is a box. “The Big Loser” brings me to an overlook in this story where one’s death is observed as one might watch rain-laden clouds circle evergreens at the top of a mountain:

The guardian angel sits in the tree

above the black lip of street

the man walks down.

He calls the man Cargo.

The angel sees a pinewood box in place of the man,

and the street he walks is a boat,

the hull like a coal crater.

Somewhere in the real world there is such a boat and box.

The angels call these overlays dreams

and believe they crop up because angels

can’t sleep but want to—

space falls apart when you have unlimited time.

*

The cargo is rattling in the boat.

Maybe it’s just the waves, maybe it’s rats.

What’s the difference? Either way: it’s the box.

The angel sends the man

a happy vision from his past—the time

he fed birthday cake to his goldfish

after an unsuccessful party.

The angel thinks he’s applying lemon oil

to the creaky, wounded wood of the box.

He knows it’s palliative, but it’s beautiful.

*

The man reaches the end of the street. He’s a sick man

and he starts to ponder death

as he often does these days:

All of death is right here

—the gods, the dark, a moon.

Where was I expecting death

to take me if everywhere it is

is on earth?

At life’s close, you’re like the child whose parents

step out for a drive—

everyone else on a trip,

but the child remains in the familiar bed,

feeling old lumps like new

in the mattress—the lights off—

*

That night the child dreams

he’s inside the box.

It’s burning hot, the heat coming 

from bugs and worms

raping and devouring one another.

He starts the hard work

of the imagination,

learning to minister to the new dream.

Perhaps all that’s needed is a little rain—

for everyone to drink and have a bath.

Outside: a car humming,

somewhere, his mother’s singing.

“The Big Loser” sets compass points in a collapsing landscape, each footstep sending the ground further away. The idea, “space falls apart when you have unlimited time,” frames again the dilation and implosion of time when either violence or trauma arrive. Ritvo beautifully described poetry’s unique and “inbuilt” quality among the arts of using endings—lines, stanzas, page, poem. When space falls apart within an expanse of time, familiar markers dissolve. 

Undergoing cancer treatment, Farris faced yet another round of unknowns, another round of body and mind scarring. In “On the Morning of the Port Surgery,” she pleads with her heart before it enters the deep space of cratered time:

O feather-headed mongrel

my pickled fleabit heart

thrice-sword-stabbed

please keep beating.

Ungraceful, the heart boinks:

suspended, spiderwebbed, and drugged— 

In these two stanzas, a siege upon the heart echoes the warning found in a typical hospital-patient contract: that the scheduled medical procedure may result in serious disability or death. The threatened and bedraggled heart, the “feather-headed mongrel,” embodies an alienation that clangs against reality. The plea, “please keep beating,” calls to the heart to find its way home. In referring to her heart as “suspended,” Farris invites into her poetics the idea that time itself is suspended. The poem ends with a mark typically used to bridge thoughts in a sentence. The long dash, another homage to Dickinson, reinforces the idea of the heart’s suspension, its suspension in the blank space of unknowing. 

I find in Emily Dickinson’s “If I should die” a framing of the problem of loss of the body within the context of time — the “after.” Where Ritvo’s “Anatomic and Hydraulic Chastity” finds a freeing of creativity at death and rebirth of vibrant sexuality in his body, Dickinson displaces the notion of rebirth from her body into the continued hum of natural and commercial activity. 

If I should die,
And you should live,
And time should gurgle on,
And morn should beam,
And noon should burn,
As it has usual done;
If birds should build as early,
And bees as bustling go,—
One might depart at option
From enterprise below!
‘Tis sweet to know that stocks will stand
When we with daisies lie,
That commerce will continue,
And trades as briskly fly.
It makes the parting tranquil
And keeps the soul serene,
That gentlemen so sprightly
Conduct the pleasing scene!

Dickinson’s “If I should die” mulls over a metaphysics of what one might be aware of after death, either through one’s own eyes or the eyes of a living surrogate. But this is all conditional. Any awareness that remains after death depends on the continued existence of everything else, as Dickinson offers in the first few lines: — “If I should die [. . .] / And time should gurgle on.

It's not surprising that Farris finds in Dickinson an archeology for her own existential explorations, a way of searching for lost inscriptions on the walls of mortality. There’s a haunting going on here. As Farris speaks through Dickinson’s poetic form, her exuberance, and her syncopation, Dickinson inhabits the present moment each time Farris’ poems are read. 

These explorations — as philosophical engagements with the boundary between subject and object, self and the beloved, self and the world — offer ways to begin thinking about some of the constructs that keep me rooted in a web of reified notions, particularly those of life and death, dreams and reality. Dickinson frames the notion of suspension as a loss of familiarity, of the estrangement of the self. Her engagement with this points to a dissolution of the bright edges of things, of time and of the meaning of self, and of the sense of loss of self. The tension between the union and dissolution of subject/object, particularly in the experience of trauma, suggests a beginningless past and the expanse of the infinite future, the ambivalence of which, as Rovelli notes, troubles and frightens. 

In the body, awareness of sensation, whether pleasurable or painful, typically occurs in the present moment as a phenomenon of the nervous system, but the mind possesses a strong tendency to project meaning in many directions, especially as it copes with emotional distress, often creating a cascade of associative symbols, each with its set of charged emotions. In the weeks following my mother’s death, I would wake at night with excruciating pain in my legs. The image of a large boulder, sometimes a guillotine, hung in the air above my bed. I couldn’t stop the boulder or the blade from falling. I wasn’t particularly close to my mother. She’d suffered from a severe form of episodic depression, which prevented her from being emotionally available. I felt very protective of her, however; her death at 49 came not as a surprise, but the way my psyche expressed the pain of her loss stunned me. I realize now that these images of deadly threats served a purpose. They allowed me to open the empty space of my mother’s death with an image of my own. Certainly not a welcome vision by any means, but one that may have helped me metabolize some of the trauma of this loss.

In Farris’ “Marriage, an Exercise,” pain has its own volition, as I will show in another of Dickinson’s poems, and the ability to eviscerate a sense of self. The body feels the pain and devastation of loss before the mind understands the depth and breadth of it:

you can

distinguish between the 

instance of 

severance—

how pain enters 

their face

like a hand hunting

inside a 

puppet—and the

moment they

understand

they’re now empty

as a sock.

In Dickinson’s “Pain has an Element of Blank,” pain becomes embodied as a thing unto itself. It separates from the body, or perhaps, from what we understand the body is capable of when she gives it the capacity to know past and future within its “infinite realms.” Yet, she leaves the idea of embodied knowledge as a puzzle when “pain” remains a mystery — it cannot know its own etiology. Susan Cameron, in her book Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, puts it this way: the poem “annihilates temporality, and it does so partially for the purpose of returning to a present uncompromised by temporal passage or at any rate, not cognizant of it. Thus, the pure space (space as absent as well as space as domain) to which consciousness is reduced mirrors the space that has replaced the lost object, mirrors loss itself.” And, as on that snowy night as I circled the Empire State Building, with all the feeling and awareness of an empty sock, the buildings, and familiar landmarks, too, became empty, blank of what I knew of them. The rhythmic sound of my footsteps in the snow created its own meter to frame a temporality I could not grasp. The sudden and bewildering return of a loss not fully grieved, of grief so deeply and quickly internalized, was nothing but an empty space, returning to inscribe itself on an outward domain. 

Pain — has an Element of Blank —

It cannot recollect

When it begun — or if there were

A time when it was not —

It has no Future — but itself —

Its Infinite realms contain

Its Past — enlightened to perceive

New Periods — of Pain.

In Farris’ poem “Standing in the Forest of Being Alive,” the projected space appears as the future of her death, at the same time still situated in the past as a dream or memory, but in a past where the bounds of language are breached. The past becomes an ever-unfolding origin, a negation.

I stand in the forest of being alive:

in one hand, a cheap aluminum pot

of chicken stock and in the other,

a heavy book of titles. O once, walking through

a cemetery I became terribly lost and could not

speak (no one living knows the grammar).

No one could direct me to the grave,

so I looked at every name.

Madness hung out over the gravel paths,

swaying like laundry.

A heavy bird flapped its wings over someone’s

sepulcher. Some of us are still putzes

in death, catching birdshit on our headstones.

Some of us never find what we are looking for, praying

It doesn’t pour before we find our names; certain 

we’re headed in the right direction, a drizzle begins,

and what’s nameless inside our veins

fluoresces, fluoresces in the rain.

The concepts of being and not-being embed notions of time within them, each an end stop for the other, each porous. The poets I’ve written about here explore imaginings of both being and not-being — Farris and Ritvo in the context of a serious and known threat to life. Dickinson does this through her rather urgent spirituality, her passionate desire to exist beyond “reality,” a condition that may be related to her knowledge of an existing illness that would end her life prematurely. As noted earlier, Dickinson haunts Farris and Ritvo’s poetry, infusing sensuality within the context of what each imagines as the coming of their near-term death. On this front, their work contains voluptuous descriptions of pleasure, devotion, and humor woven into the crosshairs of their respective threats to life. With Dickinson, they share an ebullience that speaks to a lusty embrace of life, of pleasure, as strewn as they are among doctor’s office and hospital visits, biopsies, and scans. 

In a broader context, the idea of la petite-mort shouldn’t be overlooked here. Semiosis, the meaning-making capacity of language along with the accretion of layers of experience, the latter for most people, containing layers of sedimented trauma, feed into the generative stream of art, illuminating it, making art possible even under great duress. This dynamic clarifies Dickinson’s exclamation: “the vision of language.” The vision of language makes present what might sink under the mud of the unknown yet contains the possibility of opening into an ever-unfolding invitation to know.

In the quiet of falling snow with the exquisite sound of snowflakes landing on the skin of tree limbs, the steel of fire hydrants, clicking against windows, and onto each other, I celebrate in the immediacy of sensation with these poets, its holding in abeyance the past and future, while at the same time fully acknowledging them. 

 In “The Wheel,” Farris traces the rounded contours of pleasure:

I like a pebble in my mouth,

how it tastes like beets.

I like beets, how they taste like dirt

and cool white wine,

drinking as your fingers work their way

between stockings and thigh.

 Coming full circle, “The Wheel” envisions the poem as voyeur:

What is not hell is whispering I like my body 

when it’s with your body; the way 

the poet Cummings, a mannikin,

crawls from between my teeth and

over my lip, watching us, his hands down

the front of his pants.

“An Unexpected Turn of Events Midway through Chemotherapy” treats the reader to musical exuberance and an absolute delight in language, play, and, well, sex:

Philosexical, soft and

Gentle, a real 

Straight fucking, rhymed

Or metrical—whatever

You’ve got, I’ll take it.

Just so long as we’re naked.  

“Hi, Melissa,” from Four Incarnations: Poems, one of many poems in Ritvo’s full catalog devoted to his wife and the pleasure of her body with his:

I have spoken to you of heaven—

I simply meant the eyes are suns that see.

Seeing is the faces’ nervous delicious Lord.

Listening to you makes me naked.

When I kiss your ankle I am silencing an oracle

The oracle speaks from the hill of your ankle.

Dickinson’s “Had I known that the first was the last,” breaks the bounds of present-moment pleasure I find in “An Unexpected Turn of Events Midway through Chemotherapy” and “Hi, Melissa,” but then this circles me back to poetry’s teasing the edges of awareness. Dickinson finds sorrow and regret in resisting the present moment, a condition that both eclipses and telescopes our ability to know life as the catastrophe that it is. In its most boundary-defying forms, poetry continues to point to a truth: no one is declared “home-free.” We are naked.

Had I known that the first was the last

I should have kept it longer

Had I known that the last was the first

I should have drunk it stronger.

Cup, it was your fault,

Lip was not the liar.

No, lip, it was yours,

Bliss was most to blame.