REPRODUCTIONS OF FRESCOS
Travel back. Because of a misstep, I saw a crevice in a home’s knee in place of brigands. Play of light and color off their helms. Reading in the original French. Reading to be elsewhere. I look past it, first conception.
I read Proust. In wide-sleeved houppelande, she incarnates. Swollen fruit of her manly form a solid allusion. Prod that membrane edged with ribbons of watercress or cuckoo flower.
For each word, a word in another language means part of the same thing. When I look up “midwife” on the university website, the only reference is to Plato. Theaetetus, he suggests, is in discomfort because he is in intellectual labour. Socratic Method, maieutics without a uterus, the skill of drawing thought from a latent mind.
I too want to be a scholar. I want a new vernacular of milk.
Echo, echo, on my perch
with my library. Well-stocked dictionary sends me Latin, lygeum spartum
cultivated or not present here.
Many of these poems began with reading Proust in French, which I read well but not perfectly, in search of words I did not know and could not make a confident guess at. I used these words, my guesses based on context, strange collisions, their etymology, French dictionary references (sometimes only to the Proustian sentence in which I’d encountered them), and the guts of my beloved OED for drafting material. While much of what this process generated has been trimmed away in revisions, I’ve gratefully retained some plants, some syntax, some atmosphere, and many titles.
I am fascinated through the way she shapes her poems, whether prose poems or her prose-attuned lyrics, attentive to the shape of the sentence and the accumulation of phrases, and the deep music of her flows and shifts and pauses, breaks. “Now bathysphere,” she writes, as part of “SWEET TEA,” “I house a slow advance. Brain and bone.” Or, as she writes to open the prose poem “AN EMPTY MEASURE IN MUSIC”: “That the dead could linger. Measure to the first knuckle of my littlest finger. Hand-worked guipure, light wool for a shawl. My body a shroud, lost all, lost all. Flicker, spark, and softest fall. // I count the beats in stillness.” Through Tate, we experience a lyric where language and the body intersect, and meet; a confluence of words and cells, each offering their own set of simultaneous possibility. She presents both an abstract and deeply physical and straightforward narrative space, one that articulates how perspective adapts, shifts, stretches and reshapes, from the immediate of the body to what that represents, moving through and against the language of Proust, and such a generous and affirming song of being.
UMBILICAL
Blue umbilical pulse to
cut, my last placenta
Stuck, the doctor scrubbed
elbow-deep, that flesh
Suddenly neither of us,
excess, would rot inside me.
I held him, purple still
and scrawny, bawling.
Hot blankets, shivering,
sweat-wracked, hormone high—
What is in the body,
yours, mind, all mouth? We are
Our parts, not a self
apart, grow new ancillaries, collaborate
On blood. My son nears
three now, swipes and taps
Glass-faced watch-hands,
asks if the umbilicus plugs
Into the wall. Charged up
on Coca-Cola, wails, “hard peaches
Are my favorite.” He
wants what’s unripe. I slice and macerate
With sweet and salt and
mint, tired now beyond cheek’s fuzz
And bloom. New one, I made
you a room inside my mind.
Still you’ll split my
skin to quit me.
