Poetry from NER 44.4 (2023)
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translated from the Spanish by Will Morningstar
First stroke: symbiosis. Draw the straight line of tensions and bonds that comprise a system of many organisms living as one.
Every time I write the word lichen my first impulse is to put an s at the end, because even if there’s only one, the truth is that every single lichen is itself a multitude. Lichen: plural turned singular. I have to take a moment here, to appreciate the beauty of symbiosis in this era of mass extinction, to be more than a body pervaded by death.
Two years before my father died, he told me not to talk to spirits because they tell you to do bad things. I don’t know what kind of specters had visited him during his illness, but I’m glad he ignored them.
My own ghosts are different: negative silhouette of a glacier, the emptiness left behind by the fireflies that once came to my garden by the hundreds; precipitation of fossilized calcium, the world filtered through a lichen. My spirits are sap][mycorrhiza][photosynthesis, the bones of my dead, who feed][fed][will feed the ocean for centuries to come.
Second stroke: touch. Feel the lichen’s waves on the bark of a tree.
January 1917, World War I. Corpses pile up underground. Meanwhile, Hilma af Klint talks with the ghosts of the Nordic night and draws a dotted line connecting the ethereal and the tangible: “Firstly, I shall try to understand the flowers of the earth, shall take as my starting point the plants of the world,” she writes in her notebook “Flowers, Mosses, and Lichens,” two years after finishing the series Paintings for the Temple at the direction of a spirit. A hot burning atom, the uncertainty that shapes the cosmos. Primeval. Ur-chaos.
Vegetal hauntology: Clarice begets Blake begets Hilma begets [indecipherable].
My maternal grandmother was my first dead body. My father died long before she did, but I never saw the corpse; his casket stayed closed during the wake. The last image I have of him is bound to the hospital bed. My grandmother, on the other hand, died in our house, in my childhood bedroom. I stayed by her side until the funeral home came to get her. There is something so strangely intimate in touching the face of someone who has just died.
Third stroke: vector. Follow the rising curve of thallus, scyphus, apothecium.
Between 1861 and 1871, the artist and medium Georgiana Houghton produced something on the order of 155 abstract paintings. Her memoirs describe how her spirit guides revealed humanity’s double existence: this material plane and another, in the ether, where all of us are flowers. Every watercolor is a portrait of an invisible being. Georgiana spends the afternoon chatting with her ghosts, charting translucent gardens unlike any of this world. She can see that just as the microscope has opened up new realms of air and sea, only clairvoyance can illuminate the millions of immaterial beings that inhabit the other dimensions that surround our own.
Last night I dreamt again that I was breaking. I felt a deafening crunch in my head. Beyond the cracks, I saw roots. During this great interchronic pause, this splintering of time, I am learning that it is impossible to convey to other people what it means to take an inventory of my fractures and displacements. I write in isolation; I obsess over my dead.
I am stuck in an infinite loop, chasing memories that haunt me.
Fourth stroke: synchrony. Illuminate the network of subtle filaments that connect your body to a lichen.
Finding unexpected harmonies in the past, revealing what has always been there but that we were unable to perceive in the moment. Twenty-five years after the disaster, Anaïs Tondeur takes samples of plants from Chernobyl and turns them into photograms. The paper glows: flowers, stalks, and leaves emanate radioactivity. Broken lives that, as Michael Marder says, bear witness from their own vulnerability. The specters of the second half of the twentieth century lit up by the radiance of uranium-235.
During this voluntary confinement, my text decays. I interrupt myself every half sentence to let the echo of the last syllable I uttered out loud transport me to another place. Grammatical errors, typos, begin to glow; no one can understand what is happening to me. I don’t want them to. In this time of silence, as I inch ever closer to the abyss, I remember when my father tried to punish me by making me read the Iliad and I find a new voice. I still have no idea what he was thinking when he sent me to my room to read about the Trojan War. Even today, I much prefer the Odyssey. Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost. . . .*
I see our wounds, how they bleed into one another.
Fifth stroke: origin. Close the circle, return to the beginning.
My father’s family carries its own ghosts in blood, a chain of transmission from one generation to the next, variants of the same refractory story. When my dad was first hospitalized and they told us the diagnosis, we knew he didn’t have much time. Three years earlier, his older brother had died of the same thing: a protein deficiency, hypercoagulating blood. Inverse hemophilia, all from a great-grandmother whose name I no longer remember.
There are wounds that appear twenty years out of time. My father’s bouts of rage during that last year when he was sick were incomprehensible to me. I couldn’t see that it was his animal body resisting annihilation, his very life force driving him to scream. Do not go gentle into that good night . . . rage, rage. . . . In dying, my father followed Dylan Thomas’s command to the letter.
They told me I hadn’t inherited his illness, that my tests came back negative, but now I know that I too would have beat my breast and howled in fury. My own rage allows me to understand his. An infinite tide—across deep time I draw the chemical structure of the minerals that filter out from our bones and into the body of a lichen. The world sickens; I go to the forest. I lose myself in its chiaroscuros; my ghosts summon me. ■
* Every translation is a haunting. We invoke the ghost of Homer through the medium of Emily Wilson. A purple sea; Odysseus blurs.