A new series of
Poetry Unbound has begun, and gorgeously, with Anishinaabe poet Kimberly Blaeser's "my journal records the vestiture of doppelgangers."
“my journal records the vestiture of doppelgangers”
Kimblerly Blaeseri.
Remember how the loon chick climbs to the mother’s back.Oh, checkerboard bed and lifted wing—oh, tiny gray passenger
who settles: eyes drooping closed, webbed foot lifted like a flag!
Each day, each week, I write missives—
Mayflies' transparent wings
a stained glass—fluttering across the surface of lake. An impermanence.
Imagos who transform: molt made glitter as splayed bodies on water.
I write
the red crown, mad V of vulture-wings drying in morning sun. I record
red squirrel swimming (yes! swimming) across a small channel.ii.
I barely breathe watching the narrow body (a mere slit of motion)
dark and steady like all mysterious—
paddle, paddle, and
arrive now climb bedraggled and spent onto the small safety of a floating log.
It rests. We catch our breath. Now it scurries ahead to the other log end.
Here my journal stutters with a squirrel story bigger than words:
Unfathomably, it plunges back into blue chance—into uncharted.
We are never done, it says, with a body tiny enough to know.
The world is large, it says, with a courage I am greedy to learn.
iii.
Praise here all fabulous unwritten. Each shimmer of spent body,
journey from rest to blue next. Who, I ask, is the blissful beaver
devouring each yellow water lily if not our doppelganger?
Continually, I feel paws pulling, mouth filled with flower lust—
what little rooms are words in these seasons of plenty.
* * * * * *
Pádraig Ó Tuama's commentary is, as always, tender, attentive, and personal. He seems very taken by the squirrel (as who would not be?).
It's interesting that he glosses the "imago" in section i as theological, the
Imago Dei. I read it first literally as a phase of insect development, and then psychoanalytically as an internalized image of an idealized self based on the Other -- but it strikes me that this second reading probably derives from Ó Tuama's source, Lacan having been raised within Catholicism.
I like Blaeser's use of "doppelganger," how slightly off-kilter and irreducible it is, how it makes the images not just celebratory but metaphysical and eerie - ties back into that reading of "imago."
What do you hear?
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