l'intrigue

In the Wind River Range

The wind breathes huskily along this range.
which cuts the continent and shapes the skies;
the brilliant shadings of the mountains change
to passion where Sacajawea lies.

This was the wilderness, replete and free,
a dream of nature, reaching from the plain,
through eminence of forests, to the sea,
resplendent spirit of its own domain.

She had been taken in the autumn snow
and traded to a Mandan; sold again
to be the wife of Toussaint Charbonneau,
conversant in the tongue of whiter men.

And she, Bird Woman, guided them and told
of waters higher still and distant crests,
then dazzling rivers farther down, which flowed
as foamy expectations in their breasts.

At Lemhi Pass, they crossed the Great Divide,
then traveled though the Bitterroots and found
those westward waters running to the tide,
the vastest prospects and the deepest sound.

Against the memory of sky and cloud,
I see them silhouetted as they climb,
their faces shaded now as by a shroud,
their fingers linked to lead them into time.

A ghostly presence mourns around her grave;
the wind, which gathers fury through the pass,
stirs up the ardent sand, and aspen wave
farewell to what departed with the grass.

Sacajawea represents the “wild”, natural America before the advent of western civilization and government. The white men in the poem are dwarfed both by the vast scope of the untamed continent (especially in the next-to-last stanza) and by the equally imposing figure of Sacajawea, who is the Jungian “anima”, the guide through the wilderness of the unconscious, the embodiment of the soul or spirit of this wilderness as it was in the process of being brought under the white man’s control (see stanza three). The “grass” in the last line is the perfect symbol of this encroachment: prior to the westward advance of white civilization, almost the entire upper middle of the continent was grassland. The area from the Mississippi River west to the Rockies was known as the Tallgrass Prairie. The first thing white settlers did as they moved to a new location was to cut down this grass to create farmland, irrevocably altering its appearance and ecology. Undoubtedly much was gained, but much was also lost, never to be recovered.

Another poem in this style is “Stillwater Marsh”:

Stillwater Marsh
        —Lahontan Valley

It shivers, a grisaille, in pensive haze,
then brightens to an opalescent glass,
as winds, conceding sun, revise their ways,
dividing clouds and shimmering the grass.

A million years ago the valley filled
with virgin waters of the Pleistocene;
and beasts of marvel wandered as they willed
among the forests of this vast demesne.

Then men came later from the northern zone
to camp by shrunken remnants of the lake,
where shards of sacred vessels, shells, and stone
left evidence of vision in the brake.

And now the birds descend along the edge
by tens of thousands, tethering their flight,
and cry with feathered language through the sedge
before they reach the moorings of the night.

The distant knolls turn shadowy, and all
the being of the marsh collects in thought—
old seas, the lithic men, the birds’ wild call,
embodied movements where the dust is caught--

connecting desert dwellers to their grace,
as when the wanderers, pursuing rain,
invoked the spirits of a greener place,
dropped sacrificial tears upon the plain,

and watched the liquid manna flow, like blood
of women, fertile, mingling with the fire,
that we, too, latter children of the flood
might find the world alive to our desire.

Another rhymed and metered poem, though not of the same style, “A Taos Hymn” carries this idea a step further. It depicts the transcendent presence of God in what He has made—both in the inherent holiness of His creation and in man’s instinctive urge to emulate God by creating works of art (which seems in the poem a form of prayer):

A Taos Hymn

O Spirit of the living God,
O voice of wind, O leavened sod,
made visible in mountains’ age,
the water’s song, the rippling sage,
dark-shaded canyon, and the whine
of storm through ponderosa pine:
as Christ the Logos hallowed words
of earth—grain, lilies, nesting birds—

and, gesturing toward a desert place,
invoked repose and simple grace,
give benediction to us here
who celebrate the ripened year
in Taos Pueblo’s perfect air
with reverence akin to prayer,
admiring golden cottonwoods,
clear river, and these native goods—

retablos, silver, azure stone,
clay vessels, weavings, awls of bone—
whereby belief and weathered hands
did honor to ancestral lands
and to the great Creator’s mind,
which shares its power with mankind,
configuring the endless skies,
divinely formed, for human eyes.

So may these artifacts of earth
remain as evidence of worth,
attesting to creation’s art
and holy deserts in the heart
whose blue horizons blaze to fire
and shimmer with divine desire,
God held in azimuthal ken,
redeeming us and world. Amen.

In this poem as in many others in the book and throughout her career, Brosman returns to the roots of poetry (and of all art). In its beginnings, art was a form of worship. The role of the poet was sacred, priestly. Unfortunately, over the past three centuries, this function of poetry has gradually disappeared. Brosman attempts to revive it in her work. It is perhaps easy enough for modern man to dismiss theological sacredness, but the psychologist Carl Jung has warned us of the dangers of rejecting psychological sacredness. It seems we are genetically “hard-wired” to worship (see also the work of the geneticist Dean Hamer); if God is evicted from the throne room, something else will fill the vacuum, whether it be political, social, or economic philosophy (often fanaticism), science and technology, or such things as drugs, sex, or money. We will believe in, and pursue, something. The ending of this poem suggests that the imitative creativity of the artist (if its aim is to honor the Master Creator) has redemptive power in that it connects us with our instinct to worship.

If the formal poems propose a comprehensible pattern and structure to the world, a completely different psychological effect is produced by the free verse poems. The long, overlapping lines, and individual sentences that often run for several lines, create a sense of something visible enough, but beyond human capacity to form the mental structures that would enable us to see the whole picture or to understand the relationships between the particulars, which seem as syntactically jumbled as they are visually jumbled (like the sentence I have just written, perhaps?). There is, however, one subtle formal control to these poems—each stanza contains the same number of lines (usually six). The effect of this controlling device is buried under the weight of the seeming chaos of the individual lines, but it does suggest a hidden order to the phenomenological world.

A poem that clearly demonstrates this principle is “The Narrows”, in which the skillfully wrought structural imbalances lead the reader into an experience of the “vertigo” of the last line:

The Narrows

This country is coarse cloth, folded roughly, crumpled,
crushed, or cut in pieces; I’m the needle,
threaded with desire, stitching it together by my eye,
using the center line. As I try to reason with it,
sort it out—sew Boulder Mountain to Grand Staircase,
Bryce, the Markagunt Plateau, Zion, then Nevada--

The folds resist, unyielding, multiplied; I’m barricaded,
patience, nerves, and time the only means
of plying through: creep down an anticline, straddle
backbone ridges, cross a cindered badland, climb
a checkered mesa, mole along a tunnel, skein
the switchbacks, drop into the park. It’s not mirage;

I’ve got two days, before another desert run. What green
reward awaits? Severe, the patriarchs of sandstone
loom; great ponderosas keep their distance; piňon pine
and weathered juniper, hunkering in the upper
crevices, look petrified. In Zion Canyon, though,
beside the North Fork of the Virgin River, looping,

lolling through an ancient lake bed, meadows shimmer,
cool with reeds and willows; pools devise
ideas of emerald; manganese and iron run-offs streak
the cliffs near hanging gardens, watered
by the seepage—yellow, fuchsia, coral flowers,
leafy trains. Upstream, the walls close in, herding

cottonwoods and shadowing the current; in a round,
monolithic domes like Sacré-Coeur rise whitely.
Here, the road gives out. On foot, I reach
the buttresses and listen, cloistered, to the plain chant
of the river stones—then at the narrows, step
into the nave. Quiet and disquiet both; a cloudburst

would engulf the canyon, drowning everything; a single
rock, dislodged, contains my death; the dizzying
verticals give neck-cramps. Yet this is what
I wished to see, after the bath of barrenness,
the unrelenting light. So it is a choice of hermitage:
of sun or shade, a dry lament, a harsh and treeless

vision in the wilds, or refuge in a glade, but deepening,
and no escape save sky. Well, that’s the price,
the body in its risks, its possibilities, the self alive
in antinomiam illuminations, always drawn
to the contrary world—as presence, passage, threshold
into being, with its wilds of sun, its dark, its vertigo.

Stanza six gives us the Wordsworthian notion of “nature as temple”, but the main thrust of the poem is the violent mood swings and psychological instabilities, which are crafted with precision.

Another magnificent free verse poem is “Dust Devil”, in which the whirling chaos of the spectacle is again captured by the poem’s form:

Dust Devil

What young demiurge, discovering his powers,
sent this spinning top of powder twisting,
spiraling across the sand, outsized, devouring soil,
taunting us at the horizon, pausing in place
as if to catch its breath, then ricocheting
back and whirling on, escaping toward the distant

Navajo plateau? It is unsettling, this epiphany
of air in orange and ochre dust, disheveled, angry,
centrifuged. I follow it, a desert genie
whisking the china blue of sky, the coral cliffs,
and watch it rise, at last, the way a ghostly
presence might blow off, a bit unstable, losing

shape, while, far above, thin clouds of angels’
breath, carded by the upper currents, float
ethereally. The Anasazi, also, watched the stratus
drape the mesa tops and anticlines, wing
east to sail among great monolithic birds
of black basalt, or hover, moored by stillness,

over canyons—watched, too, as arroyos, gouged
by downpours, sank, dissolving earth and stranding
corn, when rain gods sent a year’s worth
in a day; then went away. It is the same dust
now, older by a thousand summers, ground
more finely by improvidence. A devil forms again,

playing off past the Paria River, running into pure,
consuming light. What is a life? A moment’s
turbulence, a body borrowed by wind—
or deep soil, pools where sun is sieved, and weirs
to hold the run-off, channeling its spirit
into grain and blades of grass and green ideas?

One of the primary themes in Brosman’s poetry is the discovery of the spirit indwelling (though transcending) the world of matter. The sacred artist sees the world symbolically. That is, he or she views the ‘things” of the material world not merely as objects, but as representatives of deeper possibilities. In fact, the sacred artist searches intently into the world’s objects to discover their hidden spiritual level. Whether such “meaning” is inherent in the objects themselves, or arises from the psyche of the artist, (or both) is irrelevant. The ultimate question we face is, “What is my life? What does it mean?” Two possible, conflicting answers are balanced in the final stanza. But in fact the dust devil is both—wind (a universal symbol of spirit) and dust—not one or the other. This possibly offers some insight into what we are.

One of the most exciting poems in the book is “Canyon Wrens”:

Canyon Wrens

They are the music of the wilderness, sounding
through the bedrock boulders, singing in antiphony
among the cliffs, the draws, the cottonwoods—
swooping from secret clefts of slickrock as they call,
perching where the Anasazi and the Mogollon
left memories in caves and monoliths, finding

a foothold where a holy man ascended toward
the sky. In their notes, something like joy takes hold
of me, putting to shame a touch of ennui; wings
glinting dark against the blue, I rise and soar
with them, alighting then to gather sticks and grass,
seeking a hidden place along the stream or rocks,

and weaving into a rough architecture immemorial
meaning.—There, above the ponderosa, halfway
up the canyon walls, they fly, a pair! And here
another planes, makes arcs over the abyss, and dives,
its russet flashing on the green, into the shadow
of a grove of piňon pine, its disembodied voice

outpouring to the earth its inmost being. How can
we know the world, except by such attentions,
calling out the presence and the power of what is,
surpassing all the human sense of purpose—
letting the old questions dangle in the wind, unwanted,
Why, why? blown away, silenced by I sing, I sing.

Another of the recurring themes in Brosman’s poetry is the experience of being rapturously swept into participation with natural processes, particularly the flight of birds. But it is always more than mere participation—the entering of a sensitive human consciousness into the experience adds the element of awareness to the process. In the last stanza, she further attests that this aware participation is the only way to truly “know” (on all the rich levels of this word) the world. Great poetry always has the capacity to lift the reader out of the ruts of his or her daily, mundane semiconsciousness into a vivid, energizing awareness of and participation in the deeper elements of his psyche. To end not only a poem, but the entire book, with “I sing, I sing” produces that effect in me. The poet offers us the flip side of Descartes’ famous dictum “I think, therefore I am.” Brosman exclaims, “I am, therefore I sing.”

Brosman sings in her poetry as few other contemporary poets have been able to do. She is not easy reading (in the most pejorative sense)—the sheer abundance of cultural allusions, and of image piled upon image, is often overwhelming at first. In addition, her vocabulary can be challenging. You cannot read her poems only once. Or even twice. Her work requires the concentrated “attentions” she calls forth in “Canyon Wrens”. But for the reader not satisfied with light entertainment, simple answers (and questions), and platitudes, but is searching for something deeper and more illuminative and instructive, I highly recommend Range of Light.

Reprinted by permission of The Magnolia Quarterly. Copyright John Freeman.