On this day in 2005

The following poem was reviewed by Simon DeDeo (on his blog Rhubard is Susan). Check the podcast posts to listen to the audiocast.

Swansong of the Sea

that night i heard the swansong of the sea
the erolalias of nameless lovers
stealing a heaven and eternity

there was a crysong of a pilgrim bird
that punctuated the silence of the night
but the winds and the waves whispered a hush

i waited for the waking of the day
feeling the breathing of the earth beneath
the palpitations of the Milky Way

then Atlas moved a finger and it came
the gyrations and the sudden trembling
O the sea had wings of a tsunami!

death came without warning or a reason
to those who heard the psalms of oblivion

and then i heard the swansong of the sea...
and the crysongs of those who went away

Review

This poem rests uneasily between memorial and epic (I exhort you to go to Villafania's piece, from which this is an excerpt.) As a poem standing at the beginning of a longer piece, it exudes history and tradition, and, in particular, the invocation of the muse which is, for Villafania, going to be one of both destruction and transcendence: a kind of Christian paradox of life through death, or perhaps one of those Virgilian prefigurations.

What really stuns about Villafania's piece, however, is just the lyricism, completely unashamed good-sounding words strung together on a line, the exacting choices he makes so that the hard p and growling g come after the vowely "crysong" to rescue it from sentimentality. This is a piece whose excellence comes from making the difficult look simple.

There is more to be said about Villafania's epic reach, the way in which his narrative can effortlessly encompass both Atlas and the "palpitations of the Milky Way" (look at how that palpitation reduces down our galaxy to a little throbbing thing, a kind of toy for the poem to play with, a counter, almost on a checkerboard.) The way, in particular, a kind of circumlocution, a kind of epithet, merges seamlessly into the language: "stealing a heaven and eternity."

The theme of death as listening, death as coming to those who have paid attention, is just one aspect of the paradoxes that simmer just under the melifluous prosody here; one of the sharper points to notice is the way in which only the speaker himself emerges unscathed, Ishmael-like to tell the story having heard the "psalms of oblivion."

Source: Rhubard is Susan (April 25, 2005)