Strange Meetings

Despite its diminutive name, “Microliths”—a collection of Paul Celan prose fragments featured in the January 2017 issue of Poetry—offers some grandly resonant ideas about poetry. “The poem,” Celan writes, “puts up with the shared cognizance of the one who ‘produces’ it only as long as is necessary for its coming into existence.” Rhyme is similarly touch-and-go:

a chance meeting at a place in language-time nobody can foresee, it lets this word coincide with that other one—for how long? For a limited time: the poet, who wants to stay true to that principle of freedom that announces itself in the rhyme, now has to turn his back to the rhyme.
—Translated by Pierre Joris

Meeting, leave-taking, even alienation: for Celan, poetry embodies all of those phenomena.

Often enough, it describes them, too. This issue is full of strange meetings, of attractions and repulsions, doublings and rupturings. Take, for instance, Caroline Bird’s “Megan Married Herself.” Conventional marriages bond two people into a single couple, but Megan’s splits one person into two:

She arrived at the country mansion in a silver limousine.
She’d sent out invitations and everything:
her name written twice with “&” in the middle,
the calligraphy of coupling.

Similarly, before kissing a mirror, she offers a mirrored vow—“I do. I do”—that suggests she consists of two “I”s, two selves. Bird shifts her pronoun use, affirming the transition:

Not a soul questioned their devotion.
You only had to look at them. Hand cupped in hand.
Smiling out of the same eyes. You could sense
their secret language, bone-deep, blended blood.

From “she” to “they”: this marriage at once joins and sunders, or joins what was already sundered. (For doesn’t marriage to oneself suggest—along with a perfectly matched union—the existence of two divergent selves housed within a single person?) Bird’s language is familiar from descriptions of wedding scenes, though usually terms like “same eyes” and “blended blood” function metaphorically. What’s the effect of their literal use here? Might it point to our impossibly high expectations of identification within a couple—expectations satisfied only if you marry someone unfeasibly similar to you?

While the bride celebrates, another mirror image of her—in the person of a man named Derek—eyes his wife and remembers his old proposal to himself: “I’m the only one who will ever truly understand you. / Marry me, Derek. I love you. Marry me.”

                      “Is it too late for us to try?” Derek whispered
to no one, as the bride glided herself onto the dance floor,
taking turns first to lead then follow.

As earlier in the poem, Bird uses conventional language to describe an unconventional situation. A married man watches a newly married woman and whispers his longing—but he isn’t longing for her, he’s longing for himself. Or is he? He whispers his plea “to no one”—a reminder that this bride’s plan hints not just at her multiplicity but also at her singularity, her solitude.

Multiplicity and singularity are also at play in Hieu Minh Nguyen’s “Changeling,” another study of identification and difference. The speaker is a mirror image of his mother, who is (fittingly) gazing into a mirror:

Standing in front of a mirror, my mother tells me she is ugly
says the medication is making her fat. I laugh & walk her
back to the bed. My mother tells me she is ugly in the same voice
she used to say no woman could love you & I watch her
pull at her body & it is mine. My heavy breast.
My disappointing shape.

One thinks of Bird’s term “blended blood”: this mother and son blur thoroughly. The mother used to insult her son as easily as she now insults herself, and as he watches, her body turns into his (in an echo, perhaps, of his birth). He mentions his “heavy breast”—a peculiarly maternal description of his form—and by the next line, he’s insulting himself, Mom-style, citing his “disappointing shape.”

Toward the end of the poem, Nguyen provides a “mirror-image” sentence: “I tell my mother she is still beautiful & she laughs.” It’s an inversion of what happens earlier in the poem: rather than insult, he praises; rather than his laughter, hers. And then something stranger happens: “The room fills / with flies. They gather in the shape of a small boy. They lead her / back to the mirror, but my reflection is still there.” Nguyen is playing with the tradition of the “changeling” child—the magical child once believed, in certain traditions, to be substituted by fairies in place of the real one. Here, a swarm of flies—symbol of disease, and thus a fitting match for this sickbed scene—is taking on his youthful shape.

The theme of change (if not of changelings) runs through the whole poem: the mother’s aging and illness; her anxiety about growing fat; her body’s transformation into his and his attitude into hers. Yet after flies adopt his childish form and lead his mother to the mirror, his reflection has stayed as it was before, beaming back at his mother, as if to assert that son and parent are, after all, one and the same.