Today’s fascination is a poem by Andrea Rexilius. I found it in her poetry chapbook, Afterworld, published by Above/ground Press in Spring 2020. You can purchase a copy online. I’m sharing the text as it appears in the chapbook itself.
A title creates an expectation—it tells us what to expect from the poem. The title tells us that the poem will be about that structural part of a flower known as a stem. Notice that the poem is not analyzing the structure of a plant or a tree but of a flower—the flower is centered, the stem’s relationship to the flower is structural. This is what we are given from the outset.
And what we do know? We know the stem is the part which holds the flower-head aloft or connects the bloom to the ground, its source of nourishment. In some cases, the flower is also the vessel of fertilization which enables new flowers to be born.
But the poem does not begin with a flower or a stem or a stalk. The poem begins in a very specific moment—”the day the deer died”—and the poet’s first-person voice emerges in the space around this external death event which occurred in the world. The past tense of the poem begins with this pressure it puts on the present. We realize that the title is not going to play a descriptive role in this poem. And so we are left to wonder how this will work, and what the poet wants to subvert or re-imagine.
“I was alive in my house.” Period.
That period holds us back for a split second before the repetition creates a new sense of motion that pushes us forward, that qualifies what being alive in her house meant.
“I was alive in a watery field / of glaciers.” I love the use of repetition here, as if to thicken the onion layers, to both wrap and unwrap a globe around the speaker. The house changes to become a melting world, another grief, a silence which is someone liquid—and both coalesce in the speaker’s throat in this “realm of birchwood”, a surreal metaphor. The world inside the throat maps onto the outside world in a way that creates suspense.
The poet is describing a moment in the past and yet grappling with her presence in that moment. She will do this again. Several lines begin with “I was”. And there is a subtle and marvelous thing happening in my mind as I read the “I was alive” statements placed near the wildfires, the deer dying, the time before trees, the changing interior and exterior conditions; I am wondering what it means to be alive, or what it signifies to continue living in a circumstance where the words used to describe my condition, namely alive-ness, are not modified by surrounding circumstances.
The death of a deer becomes plural. The fires are no longer the work of imagination but the reality of a landscape. There is no border between being and having been.
And yet I am here, silent. I am reading a poem about stems which has become a poem about connections and borders which has become a condition involving water and silence in my throat. I am wondering what Andrea Rexilius wants from me as she continues this pattern of retracting and qualifying statements in a way that both undermines and develops them. It’s not a dialectic motion so much as seasonal one. It’s less systemic than loosely-plotted in a form of anticipated variance. I love the climate inside this poem, or the way that it’s motion creates a sense of climate rather than climax. But it is heavy.
It is heavier than the silence after a eulogy. It is hard to carry because, like many silences, it remains expectant. It wants words to fix, explain, and pour over. And all of this world-building or world-destroying happens in the first stanza.
How does Andrea give this poem such a strong sense of motion? Notice that there are three stanzas, that we are led to believe this will be a poem about stems, and that certain words & images are carried over from the previous stanza.
In the first stanza, we find “the realm of birchwood” in the her throat, and the stanza ends by qualifying this, by making it clear that the birchwood is on fire, and the fire is “lodged” in her “throat”, and it is making a hissing sound that fire makes which cannot be described as human. The outside world is drawn inside the poet’s throat into the space of speaking. We use our words to make sense. We use our voice to express the sense we make of an experience. We use our words to shout “Fire!” but the poet is not shouting Fire!—the poet is making the sound of wet wood burning, hissing.
Why do fires hiss? The sound comes from water being turned to vapor (or steam), and then being pushed out of the material under pressure. This pressure is “lodged", or living, in the speaker. It is a sound in lieu of words. It is also a form of silence, if we understand silence to be a space of unspoken things, or things we don’t discuss. But the hissing is important. Dead wood doesn’t hiss—it crackles. The hissing sound in the poet’s throat is the sound of living wood, or wood that holds water, burning. It is the sound of water leaving a living body.
The second stanza begins with an assertion: “There is no difference between the damsel and the savior.” I re-read that a few times for its blunt dismounting of saviors. The poet brings back the drought, this time as a “silence / resourced.” The line break after silence startled me a little; we already know that drought and silence are related, so when this word resourced appears, it thickens things. There is a tension inside the word resourced—in the idea of a source or origin being used again, in a motion that involves returning, and in the noun form of resource which is associated with mining and extraction industries.
The poet never mentions mining. She never says the phrase natural resource, and yet it insinuates itself somehow. There is the stem’s relationship to water—and the water centered in the poet’s body, in the speechless throat, in the life of the plant as well as the planet. There are no clear lines or boundaries to separate these sources of life from their resourcefulness or their absence.
And the third stanza returns with the same words, rubbing them harder, making small fires of the friction between their given meanings, the meanings acquired in previous stanzas, and how the poet expands them. The “damsel’s nightgown” is the night sky, the water is an ocean, the savior is what is “rooted.” The connection to the title is an opening, an extended metaphor that is modified in each stanza, and the closest we come to resolution is in the last line, which begins with an assertive “Only”, which feels insistent, and leaves us with a word, sanctum. This is an old Latin word whose meaning has thickened over time; it comes from the Latin, neuter of sanctus ‘holy’, from sancire ‘consecrate’.. It is a meaning-full world. It designates a sacred place, especially a shrine within a temple or church. It is also used to refer to a private place from which most people are excluded. It is a bounded word, a word that creates boundaries in its association with sacredness. But sanctum also refers to a refuge, a retreat, a safe place where one cannot be harmed.
What is the place of rest? We return to the flower parts—the root, the stem, the structure. The poet is not finished; an uncertainty is implicit in this Afterworld she is trying to imagine or to survive. I think we see a deep structural criticism in this poem as well as the book. I think Andrea Rexilius is trying to find boundaries, to look at parts, to discern responsibility and function when the borders of harm do not exist.