On Waiting

2 May 2022
unceded Lək̓ʷəŋən land

Dear Poemgranates,

Again I knock, promise I have brought you fruit (sweeter ones, this time!), hand you your robe and part and again we are Poemgranates—how very much I love this for us! I am very gently stepping into a summer, not asking too much of the light, only lightly looking about to see if the cherries are back in season. Only softly knocking to see if you’re around as I read Ilya Kaminsky’s Musica Humana tonight. Perhaps these letters will only be punctuation, only bright prosaic interludes.

I think of bright things in prosaic interludes—last remnants from the dream of deer, memories of biting into unripe apples, the lives of poets. Most of any poet, Osip Mandelstam glows into bright prosaic interludes. In Kaminsky’s Musica Humana, Mandelstam lives almost entirely in these prosaic interludes, he becomes a stage direction for a poem spoken by someone else. A punctuation. An instrument of haunting. The voice that seems to speak says, “Poet is a voice, I say, like Icarus, whispering to himself as he falls.” Elsewhere Osip is shouting within the brackets.

[A note on waiting. Once Osip Mandelstam composed a poem that opened with a loss: “I don’t remember the word I wished to say.” Every Mandelstam poem I have read has been an act of wait. Of wonder for a word that remains elusive, fatigued elsewhere. Perhaps, a wait is not so long. It was only last summer when  Osip Mandelstam, the weight of his poems, and Nadezhda who held them close and bright in her throat became, again, something prosaic and bracketed. I wrote “A Poem for Nadezhda Mandelstam” and I did not know very much about Osip Mandelstam but I must have known this haunting, this brightness that marks everything you think you’re speaking.]

Ever yours,
ALHS