Carson lost her brother twice. A kind of shade in life, he lived apart from his family. Estranged for long periods of time, he kept little contact with his sister. He’d pass along snippets of information by post — his envelopes acting as clues to his whereabouts overseas. He was a brother, blood, but he existed and didn’t.  His death gave his absence a new permanence and the author was left with the odd practice of learning to grieve for a shade — giving up he who was already a ghost.  Nox could be interpreted as her attempt of reconfiguring him, erecting a monument, seeking her brother, seeking peace. In making her piece, Carson creates a solid, material presence in the face of loss. It commemorates, elegizes, and yearns for him. Both heartrending and comforting, the text exposes her wounds, but also creates a space for commiseration through the making-public, the opening out of her pain to a world of others floating in the same limbo of emotions.

Paradoxically apt then, Nox is a book that is not one.  A grey hardcover case, something like a pencil or cigar box, houses one long folded sheet, an accordion of pictures, pasted-in letters, hand-scribbled and typewritten text. This unexpected book-form embodies a different kind of connectivity between the reader and what is written. With its layered folds the construction of the accordion suggests a different relationship between story and its experienced temporality. Before we’ve even read the first line, Carson forces us to sensually read and feel the text, to understand with fingers and eyes — we read without words.  We must open the box, find its secret. Lift the heft of the zigzagging page, careful not to spill it.  We do not merely start reading, but are offered an encounter. Photocopied pages from books and articles, well-worn and folded notes, dog-eared photographs and the visual echoes of writing (a pencil pressed into a page too hard) all lend themselves to the creation of authenticity, the personal, while also expressing the lack that inevitably surrounds these traces—these things only lead back, but do not (re)capture.

An academic and poet, Carson leans on poetry, history, and etymology to answer her questions and fill grief’s emptiness.  Her questions range from the intimately personal (Who was my brother? To me?) to the generalizable or philosophical (How have people written of loss historically? How do the words and practices of the past shape who we are? How we grieve and how we feel?).  She covers the gamut examining historical texts from the ancient Greeks to historical texts from her family’s archive.  Placing these works side by side suggests their similarity as practices of collection, keeping, and knowing, that ultimately cannot offer enough truth or consolation in the face of a death’s void.  Carson records her brother’s life (or more his death?) like a history or legend.  She makes it akin to her precious academic artifacts perhaps hoping to rub more epic meaning on the ordinariness of her loss. Or, perhaps in this move, she stresses the power of context — the intimate experiences of “my life” are felt as mythic in proportion. She then invites us into this scrapbook of her personal tragedy — asks us to place it beside Oedipus and Antigone, Romeo, Hamlet.

Carson reminds us that our lives — even as we live them daily, solidly, in what we deem “reality” — are made up of things that are only close to us, or pretend to be us. We compose ourselves through the stories we remember, the stories we choose to tell and not tell, archives we endorse or simply leave behind.  Carson tries to re-member her brother through or as an object — the writing, the book.  He is brought together in pieces like Osiris, reformed, but the product is never satisfactory. Always product, never brother. A collection of scraps and fragments, this text, and perhaps all our histories, form poetic statements that yearn for context, detail and connection, but they also stand alone as particularly resonant poetic moments of open-endedness — fragments that can only create the feelings/meanings they create because of their inherent disconnection.

I can’t say that writing/building/making this text was a salve of some kind to its maker. I don’t know if it brought relief or consolation or even if consolation is at all ever possible. I can say however that the reading and experiencing of Carson’s Nox is the closest thing I’ve found to someone saying “I know how you feel. I’ve been there. I am there,” while also being the closest I’ve felt to actually believing that statement.

—

Ana Holguin writes PopHeart for The Idler.

There’s even a strip that uses a poem by the poet-in-residence at my alma mater: Diane
Wakoski.

The foundation seems to have removed the complete strips from the site, but Google Images pulls up some interesting results.

I believe in Bobby Higginson

the working class hero
my father who rises every morning
before it is morning
to hurl watt after watt like lightning bolts
from the open blisters of his palms.

I believe in being five
my father teaching me to throw
in the backyard/ our house on Crescent Avenue:
sidearm
hard
almost no arc on the ball
watched it tail

as a ten inch comet
to my father’s open mitt.

I believe in drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon
between innings
bruise like a lunar eclipse on one thigh
being knocked unconscious
waking with the ball still in my glove.

I believe in protecting the plate.

I believe in falling in love
with baseball players:
the way a man’s quadriceps change
when he is crouched behind the plate
the certain perfection of a
fundamentally sound swing

the feathery gradations infield dirt makes
on home jerseys;

I believe in the legends, the way my father
has always seemed like Roger Maris to me
all quiet statements and no eye contact
cement dust creasing into his elbows
a whole universe of power in those forearms

Joel Zumaya’s arms,
the flame tattoos engulfing them as red giants

the one gold moon
encircling my father’s ring finger

resting on his chest
when he falls asleep on the couch
covering the logo on his shirt:

Omega.

It’s a day after Valentine’s, and all I can think about is how much I love the Tigers.

LOVE LETTER POSTMARKED MICHIGAN AND TRUMBALL

It’s the legs I fall in love with,
the high knee socks and pants stopping
just at the crest of calf
small bay of knee.

They’re Brandon Inge’s legs
sublime and twitchy at third base

the shudder in Abuelito’s walk
the limp when he shuffled into the Loma
with a mistress at his hip

wondering how I’d have been so surprised
when the man I love with the knees
made of glass
betrayed me.

I must have fallen in love with
Abuelito first, then Lance Parrish,
and now these Tigers

the way every woman in my family
has learned to love any man

stumbling over the positives
(“we were in almost every game”)

waiting for next year
it could always be so much worse
as a friend says, “we could all have one leg.”

Oh, Abuelito, teaching me
to love the lost men before I knew
he was among them

to love them even more the further they went away
when one could only listen through the radio
in the driveway of the old house on Fairmont
Ernie Harwell forever notching the scores

his lovely wife Lulu eternally waiting at home
with dinner still warm

losses stepping upon losses

like the bricks of the new ballpark.

How I waited for them for years
and they couldn’t even
set the record
for most losses in one season

because that, in its own way, would be
a kind of win.

But it’s smaller—the man at the plate
when every out is a war
and every strike a reason to leave
and every pitch, my love, is a weak ankle
shattering.

1.
Firebird, Thunderbird, Sunbird
they all seemed the same to me
their headlights like eyes
unmoving, blank.

2.
The Phoenix Center in downtown Pontiac,
somewhere near the Fiero plant and Fischer Body
where Johnny Cash worked three weeks
alongside Abuelito, building the 1951 models.

3.
Johnny Cash joining the Air Force, Abuelito’s
old Aztec thunderbird medallion curling
into his chest hair
those years after the war,
open shirt, asleep on the couch
with the afternoon game on, his mammoth
cherries jubilee Cadillac parked in the driveway,

4.
four years old when he jumps off
the couch and the Tigers take the World Series,
tugging at his pant leg
and repeating what I think is the name
of his automobile

5.
car-din-al.

6.
Once I dreamed a cardinal:
on a power line
bisecting a dying oak
in the front yard of the home
I was leaving

Sean Casey’s calf muscle snapping
as a taut electrical wire in Game Two

my Abuelita when she discovered
the crimson lipstick of her husband’s mistress.

7.
Like a skipping record for days, for weeks
I look out the front window
of the house on Allen St.
three perfectly equal wooden frames
stained dark a hundred years before
spinning tires.

8.
Through the wood
of the frames/ through the glass and the branches
of the three story oak to the transmission lines
on the other side – it is the same every time.

One cardinal

motionless

balanced on a wire.

9.
In the dream is it clear, the facts are unquestionable:
I’ve seen this same bird,
fixing its tiny
repeating record eyes on me until I wake,
hundreds of times/

I cannot remember
if I’ve seen the bird/
awake.

10.
It’s the baseball day-
dreams, the two hands of Albert Pujols,
the St. Louis Cardinal

smiling across his jersey, his hands still
as the pitcher begins his motion,
the sublime strain of fabric
along quadriceps.

He’s a man you love even when he breaks you
when the Cardinals take the Series in five
and we go home alone.

12.
The cherries and the cars and the
bird and the tugging were all the same, were all real
or not real, were all some kind of way

to explain what had happened/ what had maybe
never happened, but I cannot speak
when I try to say it, lusting after Pujols

and alone at night and wearing patent red
shoes, imagining myself as Mercury
with the winged heels when I chase the bus,
waving a hand looking into each passing branch.

After making most of the American League Central look confused, outplayed and sometimes embarrassingly outclassed the first half of the season, the Tigers can’t buy a win. At least this time there’s a pretty obvious culprit: the dreaded injury bug.

Joel Zumaya, June 28, 2010 (Hannah Foslien/Getty Images)

Then in rapid succession: Brandon Inge (fractured hand) Magglio Ordonez (broken ankle) and Carlos Guillen (calf strain) fall like dominos, as though they were all single file on the third base line, just waiting their turn. Johnny Damon’s been scratched more than a handful of the last few games (flu) (back) and in the meantime, our pitching staff has had a difficult time staying in the majors, with Rick Porcello and Armando Galaragga each taking their turns in the minors.

Which brings us to now. Take a look at Sunday’s starting lineup for the Bless You Boys:

A Jackson CF
W Rhymes 2B
R Raburn LF
M Cabrera 1B
J Peralta SS
B Inge 3B
B Boesch DH
C Wells RF
A Avila C

It’s Miggy and the minors! (Note: I didn’t come up with that on my own – some Facebook friend or another said the team looked like Miggy and the Minors, and since then, I haven’t been able to get the notion of Miguel Cabrera as the “Charles in Charge” lead of a team of baby-faced baseball players – surely a Friday night sitcom. )

The infield especially – in the past few days before the Peralta trade, the infield was actually Miguel + Ramon (who, let’s be honest, only this year played his way into the position, so he may as well be a rookie). Don Kelly – the 30 year old rookie – was even taking a few turns at third.

Sure, it’s slim pickings, but the fact that our boys in blue are even scoring or not looking like those teams we annihilated earlier in the season is in itself remarkable, and a fabulous endorsement of the minor league system we’ve got working. And, as you’ll no doubt learn over the coming months, gentle reader, I am especially grateful for the opportunity to see names in the lineup that riff easily into nicknames – such as Will “Busta” Rhymes, holding it down at second and holy hell, is the kid fast, by the by.

But it’s not just the admirable performance of the “and the Minors” that’s keeping this team together. Let’s turn to Yeats. The opening stanza of “The Second Coming:”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

Disclosure: my relationship with baseball borders on the ecstatic/religious, so you’ll immediately note why I am thinking of Yeats when I say this: that the truly noteworthy aspect of this season is that, for the Tigers, the center IS holding, and the center has a name and wields a terrible bat: Miguel Cabrera.

Miguel Cabrera (AP Photo/Duane Burleson)

But it’s not just a poetry-meets-humor-meets-baseball-and-Jesus post, folks. It’s the airtight case for Cabrera as MVP, regardless of whether he rocks the Triple Crown this year or not. The man has saved more games than Valverde can legitimately lay claim to, and he doesn’t have an off night.

First game back after his new baby was born? Three homers. In. One. Game. (The Tigers did lose the game – a rare night when the boys wasted Miggy’s rare talent.)

Sure, Robinson Cano is having a great year, too, but people, I think I could have a great year too if my teammates were the Yankees.

Maybe Yeats makes the best case for Cabrera, MVP:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! …
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?