“World at large / world at home”
Most striking about award-winning poet Carolyn Hembree’s third full-length poetry collection, For Today, are its wide stretches across time, event, and emotion—a father’s death, a friend’s terminal illness, the challenges of motherhood, the various threats of gun violence, environmental disaster, and the pandemic—which teach the ways life’s vastness might be accessed and held, beautifully and tenderly, by us all. The title of the collection is especially telling in that it exceeds its intention, For Today figuring as a dedication of sorts, a mantra—today, I will notice this; today, I will notice that—when, in fact, today signifies all days, a window erroneously small in scope with an infinite lens: “Any day, I could go onward, past my house / And I go—onward in my mind’s eye as if the day will never end / past the pet goat in its pen, the clawfoot tub-turned-fountain / past the mini-mart: Po-Boys Deep Fried Peanuts Fried Pie Cold Beer / dive bar, opera house, clinic” (54). For Today is a thus a deeply existential book, the speaker’s insistent “onward” echoing that necessary sense of resolve in the face of extreme grief and personal and social upheaval. The only antidote? To trust everything matters and to enact that trust with an exacting rigor: “There is healing— / healing, how?—incision” (9).
This instrument of healing is especially potent in that much of For Today concerns the speaker’s attempts to reconcile the death of her father with the coinciding birth of her daughter, a dilemma immediately apparent in “Some Measures,” a gorgeous and ambitious sonnet crown which opens the collection and illustrates the torrential, conflating nature of grief and love:
What’s taken,
what’s taken in—not my milk (she fasts), but a dirge
she heard through coral walls. At your noon funeral,
my pregnant shadow pooled under me. Amen.
Just a womb-field where sound waves echoed, I kept
spotting. But today, oh day, my rootling roots,
this paper kirtle leaks, the heavy earth falls.
Father, rise from cilia grass, gyral knolls,
cerebella shanty. Latch on. (3)
Images of negotiation and spillage persist, wild as mother nature and wild as if nature, as if to survive, the speaker must make room inside the body for grief and love to be each other’s host—
“you love your grief” (3)—just as lines of a sonnet crown agree to repeat, to latch on, and live again. Throughout the collection, Hembree makes use of language the father can recognize as well, a patchwork of texts shared with the speaker when she was young, the means of communication between parent and child rooted in the literary. The language of grief becomes the language of the apprentice, the speaker infusing lines of Christopher Marlowe, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sir Walter Raleigh with her own to construct a bridge to the dead where earlier echoes become legible messages. That language presents itself as both tool and raw material is purposeful, allowing the speaker to reflect on the viability of poetry to process experience in the aftermath: “our poems / are towers I ascend, bored, robed orb, folds / falling behind me, until stairs drown and days / slope off, unseen—even skies don’t hang / with me. When will you let me go?” (6). The answer: never. Because to cope is to organize, to return again and again to poetry for answers despite the fatigue. But, as the speaker laments, a desperation to thin the partition between what is knowable and unknowable can result in ravage: “To move / your mind to what’s unfixed but shared is like // interrupting a dream that is a chambered vibe, // prepared to wipe away the walls their faunal / assemblage, floor its living blooms” (9). Beauty spilled in the same measure as grief and love.
Transgression or not, what’s clear is Hembree’s capacity to endow poetry with humanity. Some of my favorite lines of the collection present poetry as alive as the speaker, the poem breathing, frolicking, imagining, interrogating, doubting, and discovering in earnest:
To pull oneself like an arm through
the open sleeve of the poem’s life
Button or three undone (décolletage)
Poem, pencil, comb, phone, cash, keys, earring in pocket
Go-cup, sun hat
What part do I play today?
Today I float freely as spring restyles desire and poetry
Siri must the poem end?
Sorry, I’m not sure about that (70-71)
Hence, Hembree’s interest in the long poem which resists beginnings and endings and instead commits to attentiveness. The titular poem, “For Today,” is a consummate example, accounting for the fourth and final section of the book and bursting forth with wide-eyed exhilaration: “Our gate flung open // Every gate in the neighborhood flung open // World at large, world at home // Hand in hand // Any spring morning” (29). What follows is a 61-page observational feast, the neighborhood a playground for the speaker’s imagination and a means for her to marvel, inquire, rage, love, and record:
I remember how we began, Kiddo and
I, naming one thing over another—
last month we read from alphabet
Christensen’s apricot trees exist
apricot trees exist so we began to add
letter by letter, day by day, “azaleas exist
azaleas exist” “bees exist, bumble-
bees exist” and three days ago, Sunday
“magnolias exist,” magnolias older than
bees, our riverside neighbor’s magnolia
what about today? palm trees and what else
exists? (32)
It is a radical act to catalog in this way: to insist a thing “exists” without assigning meaning to it, to gift the bees and magnolias an inherent freedom while every additional detail is accounted for: “a pothole-turned-birdbath (finch ablutions!)” (30); “someone asleep under the awning (ear to sky / as if waiting / for a call)” (34); “last season’s carnival beads strung from branches” (43); “the river where visible and invisible gather / tupelo trees, cypress / alluvial-fluted trunks / self-baptism” (46); “no twig, but a worm diverting my step!” (53). Here, the lushness of language reflect the speaker’s urgency while the parentheticals serve as an accountability structure, the humility the speaker must draw on for accuracy: “What do I know of anyone’s inside lives? (door open—look!— / A whole house under that sunny riot of cat’s claw in bloom)” (31). Presumably, the collection is set in New Orleans given its references to levees, barges, streetcars, Hurricane Katrina, etc., yet Hembree never makes this distinction, as to name a thing is to claim more than can ever be earned: “[mental note: what is my?]” (38). Rather, the speaker conjures a sense of place—a palpable, pulsing emotional landscape that emphasizes the intimacy of the neighborhood, the neighborhood of the heart—the only collective we can reliably belong to.
Of course, the speaker’s relationship with her daughter mirrors her relationship with her father, the speaker now sharing a deep regard for literature with Kiddo (a moniker I adore!) and encouraging her to develop her own ethics of attention. Continually, we witness the speaker anguish over how to protect her daughter from rising threats, such as the pandemic and gun violence, alongside those inherited traumas that manifest more subtly but are equally ominous: “What has she gotten used to? // guns exist, Inger, yes, but where are the caves to hide our children? / Where will we hide our children in this swamp? / Where will our children hide? / Where will our children hide / from us?” (85). Again, language figures as a means for the speaker to communicate the love that always underpins and transcends the obstacles, as seen with the speaker’s recollection of having once briefly lost her child a few aisles over while shopping: “I found her. Sensory glass doors that clung. Now / slide open. I felt I feel like a natural bridge must feel / falling, finally, into the ocean // my child a seagrass meadow thousands of years old” (47). Panic, poetry, beauty, relief, calm: the bridge still aware and durable, love-filled, despite collapse.
The long poem captures this hardiness of spirit as well, yet despite the speaker’s resilience, she is not without understanding of her own finitude:
Did he know I would, one day, need poetry and doubt?
Or did he teach me to need them?
Or is poetry a
scintilla of doubt (39)
And yet, because everything exists, everything matters, which is the most consequential lesson of For Today: the idea that anything can be its opposite: the plural, the singular; the fleeting, the eternal; grief, love; today, the archive. As the speaker notes, “Today stone is stone and sky too” (62), which is to say doubt, too, can be trust: in this case, trust that the long poem will not end, does not want to end, nor knows how to end, its superpower the inability to participate in its own demise—the body as breath, but even more so: the poem as breath. And so, these final words from the speaker, which must also be from us: “lets go” (89).
