Wednesday Shout Out

One of the books I’m reading with my MFA graduate students (holla!) at Rutgers University in Newark is the debut volume by Aracelis Girmay. I reviewed this book, glowingly, when it was first released early this summer, and rereading it with a perceptive community of readers has made me fall in love with this book all over again.

The Piano
(for Katie)
I watched them lift the old body out
under a moving blanket.
With not much struggle,
they passed the spider plants
& ferns. & I sat with my brother
in the car as they lifted it into the bed
of my cousin’s white truck, & tethered it with ropes
& hooks. I remember, it looked like a whale.
It almost rained.
It was such a silent day.
& the key clicked. The engine started.
My cousin made a U-turn at the driveway
when the good, good body flew out.
Defiant, perhaps, after years by a window.
Truthfully, I cannot say if she jumped,
or if she was thrown by the velocity of an engine.
I do not know if this was always the plan,
or if she, blindfolded, simply thought she was walking out
into an air that would hold her.
I remember her wide body & how she flipped
out over the side, & there was nothing we could do,
& how she crashed into the street
with her hundred teeth & voices,
& there was nothing we could do
but run out into it, the street, I mean, keys
splintered like bones.
& my mother cried quiet. & the neighbors opened
their doors, as they will do, and looked out
from their windows. & the air
felt not enough, & the clouds felt far away.
& because we were sent inside my grandmother’s house
while they lobbed the pieces into silver trashcans,
I held my brother’s hand to take him up there,
& the two of us watched from the window
as my mother swept the street.
The hole in my heart is so big,
room enough for the sky to pass through
holding Jupiter’s hand.
I can fill it with a mountain.
I can fill it with a name.
So perfect & used-up & broken.
That the piano goes from an “it” to a “she,” gaining agency through the process of this transformation and through the power of volition (was it an accident? or did the piano will itself into flight?) is perhaps the most mysterious and curious element in the poem. The speaker contextualizes the loss of the piano the way one reconciles with the death of a loved one: shock followed by sadness followed by the emptiness that will never go away.
I am also intrigued by the mother, whose grief is quietly communicated, whose act of mourning is also the act of cleaning up. It is through the example of the mother’s dignity that the speaker internalizes the sorrow. But how interesting that the mother, and the speaker, will be returning to the enclosure of the house, inhibited in ways the wild piano was not. It’s as if the piano—wayward soul—has released the songs of transgression and freedom into the air and nothing will ever be the same again.
Simply stated, Teeth is one of the most beautiful books I have read this year. Girmay’s work is political, musical and magical. She has an unforgettable voice that invites the reader into the explorations of womanhood, culture and memory. And these journeys are never predictable; through the imagination of this poet, even familiar terrains become new.
(From Teeth, published by Curbstone Press, 2007. Used with the permission of the author.)