|
Review by Chloe Garcia-Roberts
…/ what I could not say / is an echo
that reverses itself / forever I will
take you home / in the world / I
found with a map of black stitches /
made with my pacing / stung and
lost / in our dried stalk meadow /
white flowers / the crows / drop
in the tall grass are gone /
the smoldered weight roped to my
back / is a prayer / do you see / I have
wrapped / my hands with mourning
cloth / because the world has broken
/ its truth / without sorrow / yet other
worlds opened
—Examination
Thomas Heise’s Horror Vacui is an elegiac travelogue of grief. It is a map of a passage through mourning, and like all journeys of such nature, Heise’s is not willingly but forcibly made. In Horror Vacui, Heise gives us an account of the aftermath of his father’s death that could be compared to Aeneid’s visitation of the underworld, as he turns his poetic focus not inwards to rue his emotional circumstances, but rather outwards to study this new and strange landscape he finds himself existing in. By doing so Horror Vacui preserves for the reader this phase of the objective clarity temporarily glimpsed after a death, the process of nearing an understanding regarding the relationship between the dead and living and then healing back into ignorance, a process that is as immutable as death itself.
Geometrically, Horror Vacui covers the period of closest proximity between the grieving and the dead, as it documents the exact point at which divergence begins, that moment seemingly suspended in time where the two continue intertwined before separating permanently, when they are still close enough to be visible to each other before becoming severed. That there is a connection between the grieved and the grieving is palpable throughout the book, though it becomes less so as time goes on. It is important to note though, that there is always a barrier between the speaker and the dead however much that separation might be transparent. In the third of the collection’s Examination poems, the speaker has a one-sided conversation with his dead father,
“And I ask father how can you
depart when the year’s late light
[ I walked ] rends us [ back and
forth ] to other hues each darker day?
[ in our dried stalk meadow]
And I ask where will you go [ with
white flowers fastened in the hair ]
without your wool coat full of holes I
hung [ decaying. ] from a low bough
to dry and kneeled below?”
It is the lack of reply that constitutes the presence of the dead in the book. This hollow that refuses to be filled is the only signification of the dead that translates across the separation. And it is this hollow, this substance of absence that provides the foil, the weight on the other end, making these poems not monologues but dialogues, even if the only audible voices are those of the speaker before and the speaker after.
As a result of this transcendental connection, the speaker can intuit and see the relationship between different possible planes of time. Between place he can watch as the death behind him in the past erases his projected future, though not before he traces the ghosts of these anticipations along the landscape, as in Examination, “…and the path I had paced/ [sadness] in the tall grass was gone/ [bent by the wind back] yet others/ had opened.”, and also later in These New Days, “Then a city of spires/ bloomed in a full aura of my last hope, where, faraway, / I was waving goodbye, or was it hello, / from a future I no longer recall.”
This parallelism or braiding together of different temporal specificities is also reflected in the shifting forms implemented by the author, as evident in the writing, rewriting and “translating” of his father’s obituary or the four poems with the same name, Examination, and different content that punctuate the text at regular intervals each signifying a quarter turn of the speaker’s emotional cycle. In these poems reality is shattered to move in fragments on the surface of the speakers grief. Images and words are rearranged and inverted to render different configurations of the same happening. As the speaker progresses, his relationship with the dead and with his own grief is continuously renegotiated resulting in new translations of a constant absence.
Besides these different layers of temporality, possibility and actuality there is another element of separation which is slowly blended together as the collection progresses, that of healing versus hurting, or the process of raw grief slowly being numbed into loss as the speaker moves from complete embodiment of his grief to a conscious exit from that grief. Heise states in Ghazal for the Body “Nothing is endless, not even winter. Not even the walled off space/ between waking and this or that failed enterprise. Look the door to/ the lawn opens.” Whether intentional or not the speakers time of existing within his grief must come to an end. And through his traversal of this place he has, as he says in Exeat, “walked it forward” finding himself now able to escape, to “lower my window as the wind flows inward. I follow the wind out to light to willow”.
Finally, it is necessary in analyzing the speaker’s surroundings to read the delineations of his role within those surroundings. It is not by coincidence that the questions the speaker poses at the end of the collection’s title poem, Horror Vacui, are not answered.
“What shelter shall I assemble
against this? Could I hammer a narrow boat
from this barn’s old frame. Could I
assemble an empty boat from this
old hammered frame? Could I frame
an empty boat for this old body’s
frame? I could frame an empty body
in this old broken frame? Shall I
break an old body to fit this narrow
old frame?
They cannot be. In reading Heise’s collection, it becomes clear these questions of how to accommodate, endure or contain grief are rhetorical, as at no point does the speaker attempt to alter his circumstances. As he states in These New Days, “…I know it is another to augur the hereafter, /then long to shove the world back into god’s awful mouth.” The speaker’s role of witness is not one he chose, “I was tired of finding/ I had returned once more to [what/ was still there] a part of me I had/ left broken…(Examination)”, but it is the gift he resigns himself to as he shuffles and reshuffles his emotions, memories and interactions with the dead into structures that will allow comprehension or acceptance but never evasion. As he says later in These New Days, “No one is a winner/ There comes a time when the song/ must be put in a cage and the cage/must be lowered by pulleys/into the river.”, for the speaker that time is now, and his resignation to his fate comes from his knowledge of that fact.
When someone dies, what we grieve for is the altered future, what we will no longer experience, though ultimately grief can be numbed by the friction of days, months and years. Faces and memories will slowly become callous, and grief transformed into the bearable. However, this transformation ultimately alters the substance of memory as the grieved are refracted through the time that widens between now and the moment you lived with them.
In Horror Vacui Thomas Heise attempts to process his grief with a scientific lens, documenting for the reader the slow clouding of memory that is the result of the healing, the purity of pain that works against the inevitable encroaching of the scar. This is a moment which he does well to revisit, as it is a moment which is always shifting along memories, it is a moment that once healed can never be experienced again in its pure state. However, Heise has done more than preserve this space for us, he has willed it to us:
“…. I have
memorized this room, margin to
shadow. The chair in the corner faces
the window. The face in the window
is in the chair in the corner. I leave
you a ruler to measure your sorrow
and the width of the heart of your
unborn daughter. On the mattress
where I’ve rested and risen, I leave
my imprint for you to lie down in.”
—Exeat
He has handed over his habitation within this landscape, knowing that all of us at one point or another will come to inhabit it. It is in this that the success of the collection is hinged, that despite the clarity with which he renders the specific face of his personal grief, it is stretched over a much larger wound, one that we all share.
|
