firefly ghosts

Natasha Rao, “Old Growth”
 
Backward crossovers into years before: airy
afternoons licking the wooden spoon, pouring soft blades
of grass from a shoe, all ways of saying I miss
my mother. I wish I could remember the gentle lilt
of my brother’s early voice. Instead I hear clearly
the dripping of a basalt foundation. What gets saved--
 
My father fed my sick goldfish a frozen pea and it lived
for another six years. Outside, pears swathed in socks
ripened, protected from birds. Those bulbous
multicolored days, I felt safe before I knew
the word for it. But how to fossilize a feeling, sustain it
in amber? I keep dreaming in reverse until I reach
a quiet expanse of forest. The dragonflies are large
and prehistoric. Mother watches from a distance
as I move wildly, without fear.
 
Natasha Rao, “Old Growth” from Latitude. Copper Canyon Press/The American Poetry Review. Copyright © 2021 by Natasha Rao. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
 
 
Marilyn Kallet, “Fireflies”
 
In the dry summer field at nightfall,
fireflies rise like sparks.
Imagine the presence of ghosts
flickering, the ghosts of young friends,
your father nearest in the distance.
This time they carry no sorrow,
no remorse, their presence is so light. 
Childhood comes to you,
memories of your street in lamplight,
holding those last moments before bed,
capturing lightning-bugs,
with a blossom of the hand
letting them go. Lightness returns,
an airy motion over the ground
you remember from Ring Around the Rosie.
If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies
again, not part of your stories,
as unaware of you as sleep, being
beautiful and quiet all around you.
 
Marilyn Kallet, “Fireflies” from Packing Light: New and Selected Poems. Black Widow Press. Copyright © 2009 by Marilyn Kallet. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            Here we are in the heart of summer. If you can’t feel Rao’s torrent of summery muscle memories this week, you never will—from “back-crossovers” (as we used to call it) on rollerskates, to dumping grass from our shoes, to time enough for batter-licking. But the summer memories are troubled in “Old Growth,” playing in the tension between freedom and safety, fearlessness and protection. The poem recollects a feeling of childhood safety that evades the adult, attainable only in dreams. “But how to fossilize a feeling, sustain it in amber?” This, the poem’s central question, expresses a frustration we can all relate to, hoping for more in the category of “what gets saved” in our memory bank. But the frustration of this wish appears when, in the place of a beloved’s voice, the speaker gets stuck with the sound of dripping basalt. The slow drip that builds a foundation is a powerful image for accruing memories that stick. We use the foundation of memory to build a safe structure. The unwieldy, dangerous flow of memory, like lava, is cooled into basalt, an igneous rock. These are all ways of keeping things forever frozen, fossilized. And yet... and yet! When one approaches memory in this way, things get lost, like the lilting, motile voice of a loved one. Rao’s poem is perfect for describing the ache of wanting it all back. Kallet offers us an alternative.
            Adult fireflies live only three to four weeks; by mid-July firefly season is already fading fast. As if bioluminescence itself weren’t mysterious enough, the transience of these little phosphorescent dancers makes them all the more magical. Fireflies have been likened to ghosts in many traditions, although perhaps most poetically in Japanese haiku. So no surprise when the poem first compares these ephemeral, vanishing sparks to ghosts. But then! Kallet extends the analogy to encompass the flashes of fleeting memories that fireflies can themselves spark in us. Anyone who experienced fireflies as a kid is visited by the ghosts of memory with the glimpse of the summer’s first firefly. The use of the second person—“your street in lamplight”—includes the reader in this shared memory of catching lightning bugs, holding them in our hands even as we were “holding the last moments before bed,” and “with a blossom of the hand / Letting them go.” Like Proust, Kallet offers a model of remembering itself. She suggests that when we catch a memory, we first free it from our clutch and then stay with it, following where it leads. That is to say, when we hold onto our story too tightly, poking it repeatedly in the hope that it will light up for us, it becomes engrained in our psyche in one particular way. It loses beauty, spark, life. But rather than actively doing the thing that is remembering, as agent, we can instead soften our grip and just let ourselves be bewitched by recollection. When we let memory enchant us in this way, we are being remembered, or re-membered. If we allow a memory to fly free and simply linger with its natural drifting patterns, it can move and shapeshift into something new and different. Our stories are freed up to change, changing us on the way, not unlike a dream: “As unaware of you as sleep, being / beautiful and quiet all around you.”
            The key here, in our approach to memory, is in the pun of lightning/lightening. The independent life of a memory depends on a light touch. The metonymic chain of light witness sets the light presence of memory free from sorrow, remorse, and our heavy-handed recollection. We look up and around—rather than down at a captured memory—to follow the glancing movement: “Lightness returns / an airy motion over the ground / you remember from Ring around the Rosie.” Stephen Cope notes that the enthusiasm of a child, whose spirit leaps up toward the object of interest, is a perfect reflection of the word’s etymology (en theos, the god within). If we were to take our childhood mode of interest as a sign of divinity within us, how would our memories reach us differently?
 
 
PRACTICE
            Maybe the dying of the fireflies suggests a reprieve from adulthood, where we instead linger with the simpler, more joyful moments from summers past to remind us of that childhood way of being—remembering who we were in those moments when we were lucky enough to feel safe and surrounded by quiet beauty. To be clear, this practice does not depend on a happy childhood. In fact, memories of lightness might be easier to find when they sparkle out from the rubble of trauma. “Do what you loved at ten” is a practice I learned from my mother. When she retired from academia, and found she was unable to calm her racing forebrain with anything but Tetris, she turned to the one activity that afforded her ten-year-old mind some ease and chill: collecting reptiles and amphibians in her backyard. Observing and tending to these animals calmed her. So she began, at sixty-four, to collect frogs, fish, and turtles. The turtles, especially, became her teachers, with their slow, steady, determined, dinosaur-ancient wisdom. She amassed twenty-three turtles, including Homer, a one-hundred-pound tortoise. Eventually her home became a state-certified turtle refuge. She duct-taped broken shells, tenderly handed frozen shrimp to their chomping beaks, constructed complicated homes for them, and watched. And watched. My mother learned a new way of being from her rediscovered enthusiasm for turtles. In her crone years I actually think she has achieved enlightenment, as en-light-ening. She was always a spiritual seeker; from her first book on spiritual conversion narratives to her last book studying the lives of foster parents caring for (and releasing) children with HIV, she hunted down the spirit within. Until she found it. A couple of years ago when I asked her about her current Quakerism she replied:
            I’m not really interested
            in spirituality anymore…
            I’m more interested in the weather
            The sun at every time of day, and rain
            I love rain.
            I really like weather.
En theos finds us, dances for us, enlightens us, inside the simplicity of interest.
            So what did you love at ten years old? Picture yourself at ten and imagine a slideshow of photographs, real or imagined. What is an image in the carousel that stands out particularly vividly? Place yourself in the Star Trek beam and allow yourself to be transported. Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? What are the conditions: the season, the color or tone of the light, any smells or ambient sounds, the weather? Can you identify any distinct sensations in the child’s body?
            A cliché in American yoga classes is that we hold our past in our hips. Let’s just try on a playful frame of mind, and some suspension of disbelief, for approaching this. Here’s a doozie I found online, whose author is unknown, about wanting to be a glow worm: “A glow worm’s never glum. / ‘Cause how can you be grumpy / when the sun shines out your bum?!”
           This practice video offers three minutes of humming, set to Kallet's poem. You might want to find an object that reminds you of childhood somehow, to bring more sensation into your revery (I chose a daisy, my favorite flower since always). Or, from the book's practice suggestions:
          What if you tried childlike movements like skipping, hopping, or galloping, but backward, leading from your firefly bum? If tush-centric actions aren’t calling you, consider the general area of the hips as your light source. As a young child of five or six, I learned dance professor Cheryl Cutler’s trademark movement style, which initiates movement from the hips. She taught us to imagine our hip points like headlights. You might quite simply take a walk, imagining the two bony protrusions at your hips steering and guiding your body. How does your state of mind shift with your gait when you initiate movement from the ground floor of the torso? Perhaps sneak in some earnest expressions of catching fireflies and setting them free. Just be sure to keep your exploration light (pun intended). Sometimes when we grant ourselves permission to play, those moments of lightness dip deep and scoop up poignant memories.