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articulating with millicent borges accardi

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

accardiThis week’s poem comes from Millicent Borges Accardi’s latest collection Only More So (Salmon Poetry) which I recently reviewed for Queen Mob’s Tea House.

My reading process for book reviews (or most books in general, except for novels) is to read with an index card nearby on which I jot down page numbers and key words that I can come back to for either note-taking or review ideas. This practice came out of trying not to write in the margins of books, which is all I did during my twenties, or so it feels like. Sad to say, other than a lot of underlining and the rare sharp observation, the margins of my books were primarily filled with the word “Wow!” written in various sizes. With the index cards, I’m able to have a cursory map of my reading with which to reflect upon.

I share this bit about my review process because I had a pretty strong in-the-moment/on-the-index-card reaction to its ending. While the poem deals with survival, a recurring theme in Accardi’s powerful collection, the way this specific kind of survival is articulated had for me some strong connotations beyond the poem. My note in the margin read: how poems work. I remember feeling that the way the speaker’s directions on “shaking off” the PSP have a person “curled up” and hiding, waiting for the right moment to head back, mirrors the way a poem can wait inside a person until it (and the poet) are ready for it to be expressed. I’m not sure if this makes sense, or if I can articulate the feeling any better (hence this thought isn’t in the review), but it’s a feeling that will always be a part of my memory of this poem.

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How to Shake off the Políciade Segurança Pública Circa 1970
– Millicent Borges Accardi

Walk home
determined, neither
urgent nor pokey.
Make clear cut
turns and hold
your head up high.
Carry an ordinary
briefcase. Dress
in shades of brown,
as if you could fold
up and turn back
into dirt if you
needed to. Do not
stop or pause except
to honor street lights
and stop signs. Stay
in the shadows,
but do not hug them
or stay tight
to the overhangs.
Do no pause
to peer into windows,
or look as if you are
waiting for someone
like Salazar.
Disappear. Disappear.
Disappear, as best you can
into traffic
or the pulse of Lisboa.
Do not hesitate
when the men draw
closer, turn into the nearest
side street, that is dimly lighted.
Find a building
where people are entering
easily. Go up the stairs
as if you have business
there, or as if this is your
own home, which it isn’t.
Do not look back even
cautiously at the PSP,
glance down, step with surety
into the unfamiliar lobby.
Find the stairs. Sit
in the darkness under
until you have
become the earth. Hold
your breath
until the men have gone
by. Tell yourself you are safe
and everything
is fine. Remain curled up
longer than you have to,
longer than you imagine might
be necessary before
you regroup and head back.

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Happy articulating!

José

breathing with Steven Sanchez

José Angel Araguz 1 Comment

bodyIn my microreview & interview of Steven Sanchez’s To My Body (Glass Poetry Press), I focused primarily on the use of imagery throughout the collection to explore the presence of both the physical and experiential body in a poem. It is more than fitting, then, that this week’s poem, “Human Breath Is Eroding The Sistine Chapel,” takes the body metaphors and further unpacks them in an ekphrastic poem that adds new threads of myth to a familiar image.

The travel of this particular poem is where much of the image work is done. The title starts off by placing the image of Michelangelo’s painting in the reader’s mind. We are, like the speaker, considering the famous image and this fact about human breath and erosion. A few lines in, the poem shifts and imposes over this first image the image of the speaker’s hotel room ceiling, their meditation suddenly taking on a more intimate tone. This intimacy is complicated by the third shift of the poem as the speaker digs into memory. Here, the two imposed images so far in the poem are clouded, literally, by the frost breath of the memory.

These three moves present different takes on human breath: it can erode a painting on a ceiling; it can convey smoke in a hotel room; and it is what words are carried on in speech. In each take, breath leaves the human body to have an effect elsewhere. The nature of these effects is at times unmanageable, yet we continue to look, hoping to see something of ourselves in time.

god2-sistine_chapel

Human Breath Is Eroding The Sistine Chapel – Steven Sanchez

Where else do words tarnish
paint and plaster like smoke

on wallpaper, remnants of strangers
I feel close to? The dark matter

of their lungs and mouths scours
the textured ceiling. I light up and lie

down on the motel bed, becoming
Michelangelo on my back, cigarette

stroking the air. I see the world
like I used to, making cold angels

on the white expanse of my backyard
where I watched winter enter

and leave my body, transforming
words into something invisible,

almost tangible, like Adam’s left
hand that will never reach God.

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To My Body by Steven Sanchez can be purchased from Glass Poetry Press.

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Happy breathing!

José