pisces season

Mary Oliver, "Humpbacks"

Eleanor Stanford, “Instant Message from Salvador, Bahia”
Today was sunny and the beach
at Itapuã was crowded and I thought of you.
I cut my foot on the coral beneath the tide pools.
 
On the screen, the greenish script glitters
like the dolphin who flipped
his body up into the sun. Suddenly
appearing, then
it’s gone again.
 
I saw the whales last week, passing through.
Their backs and haunches turning over,
like a slow thought
in the mouth of the Bay of All Saints.
 
Here it’s dark already: austral winter.
Can you see our shadows
flit against the unlit
background? I see your sons
move in and out of the frame--
their faces older,
Changed.
 
Do the whales make their way that far north?
Is it possible we move
in that same dark medium,
that same ponderous physical world?

Eleanor Stanford, “Instant Message from Salvador, Bahia” from Bartram’s Garden. Copyright © 2015 by Eleanor Stanford. Published with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Carnegie Mellon University Press.
 
 
Eleanor Stanford, “The Poem I Meant to Write”
It breathes among the breakfast dishes, gilled
and fickle. Gurete in the kitchen wields
a knife: a scythe of scales gathers on the floor.
“Today is your day off,” she says. “Therefore
you can help clean fish.” The lines
that caught my waking in their tangled twine
unreel. The poem turns a silver fin and dives
for darker water. I roll my sleeves and give
my hands to the rhythm of slit and gut.
Talk skates the mirrored surface of the skin. Gurete
laughs as words keep slipping from my grasp.
The shiny bodies split themselves in heaps: what’s
useful and what’s not. The thin blood
spreads and darkens. In my hands, the bones unclasp.

Eleanor Stanford, “The Poem I Meant to Write” from Bartram’s Garden. Copyright © 2015 by Eleanor Stanford. Published with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Carnegie Mellon University Press.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            Even as the Chinese elemental system of nature takes us from water to wood, this week the astrological calendar plunges us from Aquarian air into the water of Pisces season. Both systems share the theme of the call in early spring to birth something new out of watery creative gestation. This week the Northern Hemisphere enters the final trimester of winter, harkening back to our own fishy prehistory in the womb where we all knew how to swim. The first poem sets us on the beach at Itapuã, with its long fishing and whaling history, during the reproductive period of the humpbacks—a great time and place to see them breach. The texts to and from her beloved are compared not to a breaching whale but to the sudden display of a dolphin who “flips his body up into the sun,” like the transient messages flashing on her green screen.
              The poem then follows the gradual roll of the whales by slowly rolling out a thought about her sons, moving in time toward maturity “in and out of the frame.” The ambiguity of the referenced frame is haunting, like staring into the sea: is it the frame of her own imaginings, where her shadow flits with her absent love? Or the containing frame of the cell phone, which might catch a shadow of her sons, there wandering with her on the beach at Bahia? The poem turns us slowly in the “dark medium” of its own uncertainty, until the last lines reveal the implied analogy between the swimming whales and our own movements in the “ponderous physical world.” The murkiness of this movement blends time and space, one lover North of the other, inside a temporal flow where their sons grow and change and ultimately drift away. Part of creation, of fertility, of continuance, is a kind of burdened, sorrowful release, like the pull of the womb each month as it strips itself.
            The tone of “The Poem I Meant to Write” couldn’t be more different. Here, writing a poem is like catching and gutting a live fish. They’re slippery things, thoughts! We dream the lines that elude us in our waking, and we have to cast the line out, tangle them up, pull them into the shore of our minds. The process isn’t pretty: it requires that roll our sleeves up, wield knives to slit the skin, blood spreading as we struggle to grasp the slipping words, splitting the bones into what’s useful and what’s not, mercilessly discarded into the “scythe of scales” on the floor. The labor involved in creating anything at all is not for the faint of heart.
            These two Stanford poems are characteristically and gorgeously enigmatic. We could trace many of the same elements in Mary Oliver’s three best-known fish poems: “The Fish,” “Dogfish,” and “Humpbacks.” Oliver’s Piscean view of creativity contains all the stages: bodies feed one another, tangle and slide through cracks, and rip through their watery surround to finally break through the surface. In “The Fish,” the fluidity of container and contained—the speaker is the fish, and the fish is in her—reminds me of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me! I’m Mickey!” In this poem, the pattern of old life feeding other, new life, is not only the mystery of nourishment but a mystery that nourishes—we need this cycle, like food. Science is only beginning to glimpse the scope of the co-mingling that takes place in pregnancy: microchimerism, or the two-way flow of cells between mother and fetus, reveals some wild phenomena. But we all, breeders and non-procreative adults alike, are chimeric beings, constantly absorbing and becoming the amalgam of cellular material we take in through food, breath, skin, and fluids. Science has yet to determine definitively how the body absorbs cellular information from sexual partners, but this too might be part of your intuitive experience. Note the poem’s blunt carnality, cousin to Stanford’s poem, when the fish is eviscerated and eaten. Oliver, like Stanford, acknowledges the darker side of bringing anything new into the world. The degree to which we are mingled with all the stuff we absorb is something we are only beginning to comprehend.
            “Dogfish” is a candid depiction of the realities of the food chain. The scene of big fish hunting little ones becomes an analogy for self-renewal, where one version of the self must die for another to be born. The poem ripples from the big shadowy dogfish and the impossibility of kindness to the waterfall metaphor for plenitude (of sunlight or life’s song). We can revive our capacity to love, but it happens slowly, like the pace of the dogfish. Oliver splits the poem neatly into three parts, with lines that issue a punctuated direct address to the reader, like a wake-up call that drags us into the struggle. We’re scooped from our comfortable witness seat and thrown in to swim with the fishes. We can’t just float around complacently waiting for something simpler. The poem’s urgent message: to really stay alive, we must meet the exigencies of our changing world. It’s a picture of movement and regeneration as high-stakes hard work.
            The breaching whales in “Humpbacks” are likened to the human soul, which can barely be held back from flight. Against stable-izing gravity, the whale flies straight up toward the open sky, like Stanford’s dolphin. It’s not that this poem is about birth, but its tone is transportable: the incredulous glee with which the speaker celebrates the awesome spectacle is a pretty good description of the birth scene. I’ll never forget my mom’s voice ringing out like a bell when my daughter hit the scene: “IT’S A BABY!” And that wasn’t even the first time she saw me give birth. 
            “Humpbacks” echoes this kind of breathless wonder at nature shaking out her mane. Part of the poem’s superlative mode are the repetitions of key words leaping up off the page. Creativity can feel like this, too—the barely-held-down pull of soul against bone, always longing for flight. I think of the poem’s Biblical reference to the fifth day of creation, ending just like the others in a vision of goodness. Whatever my dog does, I find myself exclaiming, “Good dog! What a good yawn! Such a good belly.” It’s like the bottomless well of fascination and surprise that we have with sunsets, or ocean waves, or our creations: it’s a baby! (or sculpture or non-profit or whatever-is-your-thing!)
 
 
PRACTICE
            Assuming that you’re not going to gut a fish or dash over to the pool for a swim, the next best thing for embodying these themes would be a bath. Epsom salts? Great! Fishify yourself! You are mostly water! And for the first six months of your life, you were a master of the innate primitive reflexes that enabled you to be right at home underwater, decreasing heart rate, closing the glottis, and chilling out your need to breathe. These amphibious reflexes, which humans share with seals and dolphins, can be strengthened by bathing in cool water. Warm water has its own perks though, affecting blood pressure and the autonomic nervous system, for starters. No matter how you go about it, the health benefits of bathing are huge (as many cultures, from Japan to Rome, have always known), and its effects are related to processes of renewal. The rising body temperature actually (I read somewhere) grows and repairs the cells in your body. You are, in short, rebirthing yourself.
          Perhaps you could create a ritual around this fact. You might begin by just living into the quiet stillness of your submerged body, occasionally moving as a fetus might, suspended in the warm amniotic fluid. Getting out of a bathtub isn’t much of a birth canal struggle, so you might embody the active motion away from the past and toward what is to be by sloughing off dead skin cells, perhaps with a loofah sponge. When you breach and rise, are you more tuned in to the dreams of your body-made-new?