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In
Maía's "Portraits," the
world is profoundly alive,
each breeze, blade of
grass, and stone, not in a
general sense, as an
attitude or concept, but
as a partner in an ever
flowing and unfolding
dialogue. This is a world
lit with—not
by—the sun of early
childhood, before
circumstances forced Adam
and Eve to first notice
they were naked, as
recalled by a visionary
all too aware of the
world's corruption. It is
a world whose vulnerable
beauty breaks the heart,
yet no impending threat
has caused the poet to
despair, to cease to
explore, to ever pause in
her asking of questions
and her expectation of a
response. In "Mockingbird
Night," for example, Maía
writes,
Silence, the simplest prayer, falls at dusk
when blue dark comes fast, and we sing what we hear,
you and I, our last late repertoire—
and for a time, all is concord.
Silence, something
passively heard by the
poet, or almost heard, in
a foreign language, is
something not quite there;
yet it is, at the same
time, a "prayer," an
action. This not so simple
prayer then "falls" at
dusk, taking the poet (and
the reader) with it. We
are swept along, consumed
by the "blue dark (coming)
fast," before being called
to "sing," to give form to
the mystery we hear, both
separately and together,
the intimate other and the unknown I, "and for a time, all is concord."
In the ten poems devoted
to Maía's literary and
artistic
"muses"—there are
poems focused on other
species as well—even
the dead come to life, or
rather, they are still
alive, with each tone of
voice, small gesture,
bodily posture, and
flicker of expression
embodied in such a way
that the reader is fully
there, watching and
listening, eyes wide and
ears attuned, even as they
wander with the author
through the rooms and
corridors and mists and
landscapes of her memory
to determine what these
moments mean.
In "Finished, Baby," a
poem about author and
activist James Baldwin,
Maía writes,
First heard your voice shimmer round the radio
cracking words like justice between your teeth, I could nearly
feelthose enormous bruised eyes of yours
from magazine portraits, eyes that've seen, you said,
too many men die
In a sequence of
synesthetic elisions,
Baldwin's voice
"shimmers," becoming
visible "round the radio,"
i.e., at a distance, and
Maía "feels" his "enormous
bruised eyes" in her
heart, as if she were
tracing those bruised
half-circles with her
fingers. Baldwin's voice
"cracks" words like
"justice" between his
teeth. The poet evokes the
several decades of
Baldwin's involvement in
the quest for social
justice—as well as
his sense of alienation
and his war with personal
demons—by describing
the way the word emerges
from his mouth.
As much as the author's
style is immediately
recognizable, there is
nothing formulaic about
these poems, nor are any
two figures presented the
same way. Each scene and
psyche is explored with
the freshness of the Zen
"beginner's mind."
Maía writes in a poem
about Soviet dissident
poet Inina Ratushinskaya.
She then continues,
Women of the Small Zone keep a secret garden—
carrot chive turnip seeds smuggled in the seams
of shirts, hems of jackets—
shapely grains, precise botanic alphabet
passed between prisoners—code
intelligible to fingertips
In Maía's poems, there are
worlds inside of worlds,
the metaphysical hidden in
the physical, the mythic
hidden in the mundane, the
political hidden in the
personal.
Irina is the one who writes, bending
over her forbidden poem, microscopic script,
minute verses inscribed on strips of paper,
four centimeters wide rolled tight…
smaller than the little finger
small enough to smuggle—
seeds in poems out
Joan Snyder, Sweet Cathy's Song, 1978
If our world is, in fact, despite its fallenness, still a garden, the greatest
wealth is perhaps to be found by looking down, by magnifying what at first
might seem the less significant, as though one were to suddenly plunge into
the space inside an atom, only to find that this space yawned open on the
stars. We might be tempted to think that the most valuable of elements, the
greatest works of human art, are to be found beyond the heavens, in the
Gnostic pleuroma, in the sky beyond the sky. Why, then, is Pluto said to
guard such stores of wealth in the caverns beneath the earth? In Maía's
poems, we are prompted to find out.
If down turns into up, just as east turns into west, any map we draw will
depend on our shifting frames of vision. Here: wind howls through an
empty factory. There: buds open on a branch. There may be patterns, yes,
yet no two moments are alike. As the author visits with her creative
muses—as much beloveds as models, and even when her model happens to
be some species other than human—she takes the visit as an opportunity to
reimagine her language, to play, to express her gratitude, to analyze and
transmute the gifts she once received.
In "Echo," a poem about author and environmental activist Rachel Carson,
whose book Silent Spring was perhaps 50 years before its time and to
whose warnings we have not yet really listened, Maía writes,
In the sea, nothing lives to itself
The great body of mother-ocean
circulates hormonal instructions altering the fate
of beings who haven't arrived yet, lives touching lives
distant in time
spruce groves and kelp, comb jellies, grey gulls,
anemones, green crabs, whelks and periwinkles,
flowering dunes, laughing women...
In the beginning… was the plankton
In this poem, we are with Maía as she walks with Rachel on the beach, both
out of time and in the urgency of time, as well as with our mother, the
ocean, as she breathes, and with the hundreds and thousands and millions
of tiny creatures that may well soon meet their ends.
If each poem devoted to a beloved muse tells us something about the
author's use of language, about twists and turns of her creative history, this
is not to say that the book does not exist as a unified whole. It is as though
the author were leafing through an album of family photos—some recent,
some of distant relatives not seen since early childhood, and some of long
since departed ancestors—all the while amazed to see flashes of her own
features in their faces. Such echoes and refractions are not explored to
serve the author's image, let alone her "brand"; no, quite the opposite. They
serve to tell us that the poet is a meeting place—perhaps the site of a lost
garden, perhaps the eye of a gathering storm—and that, when all is said
and done, no caution will protect us, no effort will serve to guard the
expectations of the ego.
There is a gentle, elegiac sadness in many of these poems, as if the author
were first recovering then leaving pieces of herself behind, as she probes
into the light, as she gives herself to an ever-widening web of
interconnection. Is "sadness" really the word I'm looking for, though? The
space into which the book calls me is an autumnal one, a space of hard-won
clarity, of gratitude tested by the surety of loss, of fulfillment, both creative
and spiritual, a space of valedictory joy.
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Top Photo: Charles Burchfield,
Gateway to September, 1946-1956
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