CONVERSATION
WITH THE STONE WIFE
Nothing interests me
anymore. A garden is too enthusiastic
to be alive for its own
sake. The highway, now that is something.
I want to be paved into
colorless stone. Because you don’t
believe me anymore and
you’ve lodged with too many sisters,
am I correct in saying
the engines of trucks sound arcane,
that you love the
unbelievable smoke of winners? Define desire:
when have I ever made
isolation difficult, it is my primary vocative
as when cars pedal
their blood-speed down the interstate.
They bend as you,
swerve around struck geese as you word
your desires. Define
for me a body. I guess as its opposite: crows lift
heavily from powerlines
at the scattergun of a flabby man,
everywhere the smell of
ersatz semen from dogwoods. Bereft.
These hours spin, are
the aspirin dust of every horse gallop.
I’ve ceased my worries
of being fathomed. I am stone. Sex.
No need for coddling,
no need for linear paths of diction.
In the parade, I am a
distant cousin’s milktooth rattling
a mason jar. Someday
the man with his gun will lift his legs
into a fabulous pair of
corduroys. That sound will be a caw,
not the soundtrack of
desiccated desert bones. But the highway:
crowded buses move the
forsythia with definitive violence
in a way I know means I
will never know touch. How cruel
to be so heavenly a
body without body, the charge and wail
of skin and the city
and distance. Last winter the life of a batter
could poison the oceans
forever—how could I tire of this?
Since then the Arctic
seas have warmed. Disasters loom
with smug portending. I
want to be opened, for someone’s gaze
on my fissures. To be
smelled for the ice age inside me.
I’ve
been curious about poet and editor Natalie Eilbert’s first full-length poetry
collection, the expansive Swan Feast
(Atlanta GA: Coconut Books, 2015), a book, as Julie Carr writes on the back
cover, composed as “a twenty-first century hymn to the Venus of Wilendorf, a
30,000-year-old figuring whose ample body is a protest against all that seeks
to diminish us.” Swan Feast is set as
a conversation with, and attempting to voice, the Venus of Willendorf, “one of the earliest images of the body made by humankind.” According to Wikipedia
(another source of information sits here): “The Venus of Willendorf, now known
in academia as the Woman of Willendorf, is a 11.1-centimetre (4.4 in) high
statuette of a female figure estimated to have been made between about 28,000
and 25,000 BCE.” Through the collection, Eilbert explores and works to
articulate a connection between herself and this lost, ancient goddess through
conversations on privilege, empire, and gender and cultural violence,
occasionally wrapped up in information that may or may not be biographical. This
book is, as Carr writes, written as protest, and pushing to be heard, yet the poems
in this collection are incredibly intimate, self-questioning and self-aware,
focusing her gaze as much on the self as on anything else, as she writes in “WE
WATCH AS IF WAITING FOR THE ARTIFACT TO OPEN HER EYES.”: “I am pregnant / with
another myth’s god, you know.” Hers are poems that channels rage, frustration
and an autobiography of a “fallen goddess,” attempting to speak to and through
the image of the ancient stone woman. In the first of her two poems titled “THE
DEATH AND LIFE OF THE VENUS CITY,” Eilbert shows how she allows herself such
permission to speak for and through the goddess/statue:
What will amount to our
kingdoms, our Willendorf in the sand.
Can I speak for the
Venus, alien object, the way one walks
over seeds buried loose
in the snow, can I speak for her
the way a grave-good
decorates a ritual, the way styrofoam brims
laughably in the
municipal trash. I will speak for her as I spoke
for myself as a girl
behind her bedroom door. When I found her
she was marked in
Grandpa Leo’s anthology an ugly thing to watch:
in her image the hands
still combed her form, a log against nothing.
Swan Feast is
structured in eight sections-as-mirror-image, from the central point of the
third section, “CONVERSATION WITH THE STONE WIFE,” rippling out to untitled
second and fourth sections of shorter lyrics, to first and fifth longer, more
expansive sections titled “THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE VENUS CITY,” to a final
section constructed as a single poem, bookending alongside the opening poem, “With
Queen of Willendorf” (why the final poem is considered a section, while the
opening poem is not seems a minor question of structure). The shorter poems,
which themselves are long-lined and stretch down the length and breadth of the
page, are powerful, but pale in comparison to the rush of sentences that make
up the first of her two “THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE VENUS CITY” poems. The piece
is vibrant, and occasionally overwhelms, containing some fantastic lines,
enough to stop any reader dead in their tracks, from “The city sun sets every
day now like Muybridge’s horse, suffering time.” to “Discovery renders /
archaeologists sole creators of their artifacts, just as man is sole creator /
of man.” Through Natalie Eilbert, this is very much a feast, enough that it often
requires portioning, and yet, the effect of the rush appears deliberate: she
wants you to be overwhelmed. Through conversation, Eilbert’s collection exists
as a study on a variety of violences against women, and a call for action
against such violence. This is a powerful book, and one that requires a great
deal of attention. Later in the collection, one of the most striking poems has
to be “SUPPLICATION WITH THE VENUS FIGURINE,” that includes: “It’s true I’ve
stared at my breasts long enough // in the bathtub until their fatty geographies
// become something other than what they are.” The poem opens:
The rupture of our
little red lives, V.
Should I name blames
when I say the sun
when it hits the
floorboards right here
pushes a lonesome into
the tip of my finger,
pushes my mother off a
ledge so she is the city
I worship with $4
coffees. I’m late again
and will cancel the
therapy I need to not starve
and feel good about
starving because lately
your gut is a ballast. My
navel smiles deeply
in the folds as I round
my back for rabbit’s pose.
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