A Brief Introduction
As they took shape, the pieces in this sequence of prose poems did not so much engage in conversation with the work of Nelly Sachs as they seemed to inscribe circular paths around specific phrases in the individual poems collected in Glowing Enigmas. Hence the title: Nelly Sachs Cycle—A Circling. An image of planets moving around the sun came to mind as a kind of metaphor. However, unlike planets tied to their orbits by intractable cosmic forces, my poems came forth filled with a wild spirit of autonomy.
All attempts of mine to bring them to heel, to obey my will that they behave like poems in a tribute to a poet of major literary stature, failed utterly. My poems knew what they wanted to say and that was that.
I had first encountered the work of Nelly Sachs several years back in a workshop offered by Ilya Kaminsky. Since then, I have found myself returning to Glowing Enigmas at irregular, seemingly random, intervals. I did not stop to interrogate myself as to what the draw was, the compelling pressure that her writing in this book seemed to exert on my imagination. I did not even conceive of this project until quite recently. When I did, finally, sit down with the intention of writing in relation to Sachs’ work, I became aware of how I looked to her lines in Glowing Enigmas as to verses in a prayerbook.
This is peculiar because I do not engage in prayer, at least not on a conscious level. I considered the possibility that a clue to this riddle is secreted within the room of Sachs’ on-going relationship with God. Evidence of this bond is everywhere present in images that invoke the ideal of unity. Of making whole that which has been shattered, splintered, incinerated. It is perhaps to this element of Sachs’ character that comes through in her verses that I owe the major impetus toward writing poems that circle around hers as around a larger star at a time when, in ever-mounting anxiety and despair over the degradation of human society and the natural world, I seek solace in some form of hope.
And too, there is an inward sense of outrage I bear in regard to the fact that although Sachs was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize, her masterwork, Glowing Enigmas, has fallen out of publication in English translation while the oeuvre of Celan, her closest friend and ally, continues to be celebrated in what has become a veritable cottage industry that has built up around the translation and publication of his work. Nelly Sachs Cycle—A Circling yearns to redress the wrong.
Nelly Sachs, for those unfamiliar with her name, was born in Berlin to German-Jewish parents in 1891. In 1940, after receiving a tip that she and her aging mother were about to be deported to a death camp, she fled with her mother to Sweden where she was granted asylum. She died in 1970, on the day of Celan’s burial in Paris.
What Sachs is most widely known for is her earlier work consisting of more conventional elegiac poetry. In Sweden however, where she worked as a translator of contemporary Swedish poets, she learned Modernist technical strategies which changed her style of writing. Her later work is characterized by disjunction, dislocation, and fracture. It is highly elliptical and associative. Though hard to parse, this work offers the patient reader a wealth of gorgeous imagery that springs from her major concerns, including the experience of exile, the invisible realm, and the limits of language. It has been conjectured that the murder of Sachs’ fiancé by the Nazis, the shock and grief of that excision from her life, was an underlying subject of her poems.
In terms of process, many poems in Nelly Sachs Cycle—A Circling use lines from Sachs’ poems as titles. Phrases from her poems often found their way into mine as borrowed language. Several dreams I had while immersed in this project provided flashes of insight into matters of metaphysics and language. Additional sources of inspiration came from Sarah Maclay’s H.D. Sequence—A Concordance, especially the poems, “Our Lady of Cicadas” and “Our Lady of Snow,” the work of Anne Carson, an illustrated biography of Sachs that included photographs and images of artifacts from her life, Sachs’ correspondence with Celan, and from my attention to an assortment of paintings, including those by Odilon Redon, Edvard Munch, Kazimierz Stabrowski, Salvador Dali, Winslow Homer, and John William Waterhouse.
As differentiated from ekphrastic poetry in which the writing illuminates the visual artwork, I selected paintings that embodied qualities specific to certain of Sachs’ poems or to distinct events or aspects of her life. I then allowed for a kind of interpenetration of images and emotional valences – those in a Sachs poem or life event and those in a painting – to take place.
L.A. Reed
Notes
The italicized titles in many of the poems are lines by Nelly Sachs, with the exception of the title of “where eros is lack” which is by Anne Carson.
The italicized lines or phrases within the poems are by Nelly Sachs with the exception of the last lines in “at the end of July trying to quiet myself,” which are by Anne Carson.
as have the stars
I’d thought for many years that what filled the yellow sail
was a paradisal wind. that she wore the scarf so that her
black hair not flap about her face. that the boat was a
boat from before. but it is after, and beside her the fiancé
has been dead for decades. and the scarf, for mourning.
and the boat, only another place in the world from which
whomever they might’ve been have been banished.
as have the stars from the sky overhead. as has the beloved’s
reflection from the water. and no wind, no wind.
The heavy word that wants to be breathed lightly.
—Paul Celan
outside grew the minute full of flowers
no matter how many times she reminded herself,
“they were never yours,” referring to the hushed
dawns, the blue window at evening, there was no
moment in which she didn’t hear the dark wind
hissing in the nightweeds. she went on encrypting
loneliness until the day she turned a corner and ran
into herself. so, she remained alive! in the flawless
light of an April sky, she gazed upward,
waited for deviation from what was expected. and it came: the
shift toward peace, soft, barely there. tenuous as the
color of dawn.
queen of the butterflies
there was no real solace in the recurring rhymes cut out of
blackness, the insects that fluttered through her
thoughts. now the whole truth is plain on her face;
her features are serene. having made her own poultice, she
wields not one but two scepters
you heard/something new
what kept stopping her was the erotics of doubt. how
to get past it? the crystal sphere grew warm in her
palms as she waited to intercept messages. on her desk,
the human skull canted at an angle to the heavy, black
tome. it wasn’t as if she hadn’t prepared. then, her ear
turned outward, she heard it: the sign that claimed her
attention. the alien cadences that seemed to come from
every direction. sound beyond violence. was this the music
of the dustless realm?
words in flight to their immortal hiding places
the crux of it was, the things that rushed by
wanting to be caught were not meant for
anyone’s ears. those words in flight which the
universe piloted into silence were known only by a
select few. how she envied them, the ones who
existed in eternity’s instant! the ache of lacking
that knowing, knowing that it poured forth
abundance and favor. that on it, all worlds
hung like a cluster of grapes. she kept coming
up to the edge of the mystery. as with the child
who leans over the bannister, taken with the
strangeness of the empty stairwell.
weep away the unleashed heaviness of fear
buttoning her coat, it suddenly came to her. placing
a hasty call to the psychiatrist’s office to cancel the
appointment, she made a mental note to check a map
before setting out. then she gathered up her selves
and carried them across the city and into the
borderlands. there they were burnished by the sun,
black and silent. she brought them back and piled
them on her desk. they had begun to shine.
as I wait here time yearns out at sea
facing the expanse of water, she can’t help but notice
how time is pulled back again and again by its blue hair.
a man’s blue. she knows this because her betrothed
stands a few paces behind her. as though ready to
become distance. she wants to ask the sea about
eternity. but it is preoccupied, gathering moments.
I paint on the wall the suicidal words
which is not what she’ll tell the new psychiatrist. nor,
when he pays his next visit, will he hear anything about
the invisible universe—how, as of late, the dead have
taken to kneeling between the table and the iron stove,
waiting to be redeemed. and then the business with
God withdrawing. leaving her to shoulder the entire
burden. no, she’ll steam out the wrinkles in her linen
suit. she’ll serve a bowl of amber grapes, lightly chilled.
a good, aged cheddar. Chablis. the subject of increasing
her dose of Haldol won’t even come up.
we rushed into/ the dungeon of parting/ backwards
awakening the next day helpless with regret, she wept
into her pillows. she’d forgotten that the shadow-black
had already been given over to the extinguished. there
was never the intention to step on any toes. it was just
that, given her state of mind—
no hide and seek with pain
the waves were what she loved: swell, crest, crash,
repeat. she stood (in pain but dry-eyed) before the
ocean wanting to be ocean so she could love what she
was. the poets who spoke about nothing but their
rooms of pain made her impatient. she didn’t want to
be one of them. decades ago, in her philosophy course
back in Berlin, the professor wrote in big letters on the
chalkboard, State of Mind. he’d pressed so hard the chalk
broke into several pieces. the lecture had been on
Heidegger’s claim it was our human moods that kept us
somewhere other than in the natural order of things.
but precisely where that somewhere was the professor
never said, preoccupied as he was with picking up the
small bits of chalk from the wood floor.
and that which is wordless heals the ailing star
she took a look around and saw she was awake among sleepers.
small wonder there was no space to hold her grief. while walking
in the woods, she spotted the crystalline shapes. shapes of sleep.
shapes of the “you” toward whom she was always moving. the
shapes were dozing among the ferns. in the language, a shadow.
stealthy as a fox, she crept up on them. she gathered up as many
as she could and took them back home. they glittered in the dim
light of the single bulb above the kitchen table. hastily, she
arranged them in a circle on the linoleum floor. almost smiling,
she stepped inside.
where eros is lack
nothing but boulders on the foreign shore. where else
can she sit in her long, white dress? save for the ghost
of her betrothed, who shows up only to vanish again,
she is alone. no, there is death: the one who comes
between. where eros is lack, there have to be three. for
hours, although the edge of the stone is biting her
thighs, she doesn’t budge. nor does her beloved stir
from his place in her brain. and what is death, if not
stillness. she would give her garnet earrings to stop
thinking about human things.
whitely I crave you, death
more than anything, it seemed like a cross between
something she dreamed and a portrait of herself as
features in a snowy landscape. she wrote it down for
the Swedish psychiatrist. the redacted version reads:
“the parts of me don’t resolve. half-starved fox that I
am under the bloodlust of crows. that’s one self. the
other is this treeless ridge, the absence of shadow. no,
that’s not it. noon is noon. what then? the trap nearly
buried in snow? the steel mouth closed around my
foreleg?” what was omitted from the original was the
bit about the sky over the ridge, that it seemed to be
ripping. and how she was that too, the blue lacuna—
the very hue that was accumulating around her violent
desire to be, finally, one thing.
my hands belong to a wingbeat stolen
in a moment of inattention. or was it lassitude? it was hard
to think things through with all the mad people in the hallway
screeching about the future. they harmonized with the dark
birds outside. was all of this due to the drug? the small blue
pills the new doctor said would help with the nightmares?
what interested her most these days was the disappearance
of matter. she wanted to disappear and come back as roses.
I have just fastened the planets to truth
the curtain pulled aside, the last of the daylight made a
path across her desk. it stretched from the piece of
quartz that served as paperweight to the glass tea mug.
something came back from before: branches of an
apple tree weighted down by ripeness. she wanted to
paint a picture of things that brought the visible
together with what couldn’t be seen. to make a single
coherent fact. the song was the tunnel she passed
through. on reaching the other side, she swallowed the
night— at its center, her own shadow.
midnight the dark eye has been covered by the shroud
it was a problem of speech. she insisted on standing in the gap
where it should have taken place, that conversation. she stood
there making sounds, babbling. pointing to the void where it
burned. for the sake of appearances, she made concerted
efforts to engage in Geschwätz, everyday chitchat. what she
despaired of was something she could not see or speak to. or
of. a separation that lay between her and what was: moonlight
across the white forelock of the sleeping horse.
at the end of July trying to quiet myself
early evening is chiaroscuro across the planks
of the backyard fence, blackberry vines
overhanging. the mutual need of unveiling
between me and the maple— a crystal bridge.
the tree’s ambered leaving is a song my blood
understands. but what do I know of a time
and place where Nothing comes forward like
a form of eros? where the black
sun prints black on the etching plate.
and the color, Nothing, addressed me
it was when she turned into an unlit lane off the main
boulevard. what I still can’t fathom is how. in the total
absence of sun or lamplight, with all that blackness
swirling around her ankles, she recognized as her own
the shadow that lay down like a small child, or a tired
piece of clothing in the crook of her arm, asking to be
carried.
© All Text by L. A. Reed
