Kerri Webster, LAPIS

 

 

Primrose, Orchid, Datura

To say I lived on honeycomb is not enough. I lived
on milkfat, garnets, whiskey bottles under the bed,
lotion pearlescent on pink skin. I slept half the day,
woke late, ate ridiculous bouquets, milked austerity
for gorgeousness – blossoms collected in jars,
granite thieved from silt. I napped and architected
a decadent inwardness. I did not know that the Christbody
would take up residence in the next room, in a hospice
bed, until the whole house smelled like nightblown
Gethsemane, or that this would go on until the world
ran out of sponges from its acrid seas. Once I was a girl
who wore feathers and ivory, a woman who let
the tap run in the desert past all decency. Forgive me.

The fourth full-length poetry title by Boise, Idaho poet Kerri Webster, following We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone (2005), Grand & Arsenal (2012) and The Trailhead (2018) [see my review of such here], is Lapis (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2022), a collection that “writes into the vast space left by the loss of three women: her mother, a mentor, and a friend. What emerges in the vast space grief makes is a newfound sense of living with the dead, of a matrilineal lineage both familial and poetic.” Moving across structures and syntax, from prose poems to line-breaks, compact bursts and extended narratives, the book is shaped in four numbered poem-sections, opening with a single prose poem, “oh each poet’s a / beautiful human girl who must die,” and ending with a pair of closing elegies, “Elegy” and “Eyelets.” Webster’s book-length Lapis sits as an elegy unto itself, and works less to describe or contain her experiences than allow her grief to overflow, articulated across and through an assemblage of shaped lyrics. The extended sequence “Seer stone,” for example, works through elements of care, through her mother’s dying and death, and the ways through which time shifts, stops and unfolds (elements I myself recall, during my own father’s extended period of similar), as she writes: “Year of: // how long have I been asleep / what has transpired / why [.]” Or, further on:

In May my mother decided not to get out of bed again, her lungs two oil slicks. What seemed like a sudden decision was, looking back, her waiting for the academic year to end so that I could be there to administer the doses, arranging the pillows, watch her mind go. This took four months, time out of time, time outside of language, time both sides of the veil, and when it was done every cell in my body was transfigured. I will never again be that exhausted. I will never again be that God-struck.

Webster touches upon elements of faith and ritual, including early Mormon history: elements that can’t help but seek the surface when moving through the dying and death of a parent: memories of past events, and even past selves, through the ether. Some reminders are startling for their distance, after all; even further, more startling for how close they sit to the surface. “The Lord bless you before the light.” she writes, in the same sequence. “I spend a fair measure of time these days / talking to the dead. Sometimes all I have to do is roll my eyes.” Webster’s title refers to lapis lazuli, a deep blue coloured stone used for thousands of years to make beads and gemstones, among other things (think: the Ishtar Gate). Her title suggests value found, value shaped and ideas of not only age, but time passed, and passing. “The dead say Are you trying / to save someone again.” she writes, as part of the twenty-nine part fragment-sequence “So Many Worlds, So Much to Do,” a sequence that makes up the whole of the book’s third section, “No. On / the striped body of Christ / I swear I am not.”