Courting the Ineffable — Fully into Ashes by Sofia M. Starnes
“The heart’s abundant feast” (from “Leaving Pompeii”) is found in relationship frequently signaled by invoking “heart,” and in things (“And the world that was wander/ and rest/ is now Thing,” from “The Fret of Memory”), and in reflection that assimilates such experience and renders it in words. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that for Starnes, language, on a par with things, offers itself to reflection as primary material; certainly, her poems read that way. “Migrations,” from the second section, demonstrates this so well that it is worth quoting at length:
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– and to heart, where we, too, appointment, pungent segment, bitter- all those stories of our fathers Tell me, darling: — p. 39 |
All of the dense glories of Starnes’ language can readily be heard in these stanzas. But she does not restrict herself to these intensely lyrical moments. The middle section also contains a poem in six sections, “The Rood of Jesse,” based on a shark attack of a young boy two months before September 11, continuing right through the attack and its aftermath.
The poem is theodicy:
In our limb, his limb-loss, a tingle in the thumb.
While we wait, red wine
courses out of grapevines into us — we, the carafe,
we, the glass transparency
and the nick, veeing.
God is good, the harvest says, wherever the rain
nourishes; yet it washes someone’s grenadines
away.
— p. 45
It is lamentation:
which is why we dream the scene larger:
not the moon, but the moons after,
not the bloom, but the salvation of the rose —
gardens of the world,
not the shadow, but a giant bending over,
blueing darkness into, out of us.
We hope God —
— p. 48
It is a cry for Resurrection and finally a statement of faith for the body corporate:
We wish someone would climb
piece-meal into our eyes. To see is to select.
Isn’t that Lazarus over the glistening steel, covering
his sores?
Look! Here, here I am? Can’t you see I made it?
— p. 49
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