Medbh McGuckian, "She Which Is Not, He Which Is"

An elm box without any shape inscribed
Like a tool in the closed vessel of the world;
I will be flat like a dream on both sides,
Or a road that makes one want to walk.

My words will be without words
Like a net hidden in a lake,
Their pale individual moisture
My eyes will not be the eyes of a poet
Whose voice is beyond death;
This face, these clothes, will be a field in autumn
And the following autumn, will be two sounds,
The second of which is deeper.

The sky for me on any one night
Will be the successive skies over the course
Of a year, for time that I love
Will have cut up and entered my body;
Time will have gathered the roots
Of my last spring, floating rather
Than anchored, and thrust them between
The two planes of my cheek and brow.

Even now, his lips are becoming
Narrower and bloodless, ever-searching,
Razor-like; unforgettable time,
During which I forget time, a new sort
Of time that descends so far down
Into me and still stays pure.

I imagine his house as a possible setting
For the harmony between one drop of water
And another, one wave and another wave,
Where the light accustoms one to light
And each occurrence is a touch.

When we pass through some darkness,
The waiting has pulled us.
Without the help of words, words take place.

Compared with this absence, weighed,
Diluted in time presence is abandonment,
Absence his manner of appearing,
As though one received from outside
The energy to accept the swept room
As much as the sweeping.

Though each instant of light
Wipes away a little of it
We shall not lose the way
In which things receive it:

Carry me who am death
Like a bowl of water
Filled to the brim
From one place to another.

~

From Marconi's Cottage (1991)

I can't say for certain that this poem should qualify as an elegy, much as I can't say 'for certain' what many of Medbh McGuckian's poems are 'about'. Certainly her father's impending and actual death was a major force in this collection and the one after it; I considered choosing a number of other poems that arguably are more clearly elegies. What I love about this one, however, is its very puzzling nature - the final stanza seems to imply death as a character, perhaps even (one of) the poem's speaker(s) - is death then the "She Which Is Not"? Or, since the poem interrogates both time and absenve vs. presence, it seems that the dead could be "He Which Is" most present in the vacant life of the mourning titular "She". McGuckian's style is particularly suited to interrogating such issues - the limits of life, being, sense - for at a formal level they push the limits of syntax, sense, meaning, perception. In contrast to Muldoon's "Incantata"'s equivocation, McGuckian's verse seeks to talk about death, and what it means to the living, by a new way of saying.

Medbh McGuckian, "On Her Second Birthday"

for Emer Mary Charlotte Rose

In the beginning I was no more
Than a rising and falling mist
You could see through without seeing.

A flame burnt up the paper
On which my gold was written,
The wind like a soul
Seeking to be born
Carried off half
Of what I was able to say.

It seems as though
To explain the shape of the world
We must fall apart,
Throw ourselves upon the world,
Slip away from ourselves
Through the world's inner road,
Whose atoms make us weary.

Suddenly ever more lost
Between the trees
I saw the edge of the forest
Which had no end,
Which I came dangerously close
To accepting for my life,

And followed with my eye a shadow
Floating from hotizon to horizon
Which I mistook for my own.
It grew greater while I grew less,
Gliding like a world, a tapestry
One looks at from the back.

The more it changed
The more it changed me into itself,
Till I regarded it as more real
Than all else, more ardent
Than love. Higher than the air
Of a dream,
A field in which I ripened
From an unmoving, continually nascent
Light into pure light.

My contours can still
Just be made out, in the areas of fragrance
Of its power over me.
A slight tremor betrays
The imperfection of the union
In its first surface.

But I flow outwards till I am something
Belonging to it and flower again
More perfectly everywhere present in it.
It believes in me,
It cannot do without me,
I know its name:
One day it will pass my mind into its body.

~

From Marconi's Cottage (1991)

In contrast to yesterday, today's poem's title announces the solution to its riddle - without it, one might suspect this was a pregnancy poem, but it would be hard to be certain, given McGuckian's fiercely challenging metaphors. That accessibility makes this among the better introductions to McGuckian (b. 1950), whose strange syntax and imagery demands and seduces an agility and plasticity of readerly response that goes far beyond more mainstream lyric practice. Whereas Plath's metaphors were striking for their application - easily intelligible, though they challenged conventional positive views of motherhood - the entire universe of McGuckian's poetry seems, in one way, alien to the prose of everyday life. But though it is strange, it is also an evocatively convincing articulation of the metaphysical experience of pregnancy and motherhood. The first several stanzas suggest an obscure, as-yet-unrealized potential being formed, the imagery echoing gestation, the womb, the accreting fetus, the interdependent connection building towards schism. The poem also expresses the mother's sense of how her life has changed, her sense of investment in and dedication to the life of her daughter, the shift of the center to that other life. This goes beyond just sentiment to a metaphysical sense of identification with that other life, a sense of living through it, in a dual selfhood, the dependency of the child being at the same time a dependency of the mother, which will culminate in transfer: "One day it will pass my mind into its body."

(More about Medbh McGuckian: http://www.gallerypress.com/Authors/Mmcguckian/mmcguck.html
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth02D9P274512627448
http://www.wfu.edu/wfupress/catalog/mcguckian-medbh.html)