Jake Skeets. Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful
of Fowers. Milkweed Editions, 2019. 96 pp. ISBN: 9781571315205.
https://milkweed.org/book/eyes-bottle-dark-with-a-mouthful-of-flowers
The English epigraph to Jake Skeets' debut,
National Poetry Series Award winning collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a
Mouthful of Flowers reads: "From here, there will be beauty again." The
first word of this sentence indicates movement as well as inheritence. The
second indicates the present condition in a specific location—here. The
following three words indicate a state of being at some point in the future, but
serve less as a prediction than as an assertion, as if by stressing beauty (the
sixth word, the thing itself, the subject of the sentence), Skeets might bring
it into being. But he will only be able to do so by acknowledging everything
that came before, which he makes clear with the final word—"again": a
word which simultaneously points to both the past (i.e. there has been beauty
before) and the future as conceived in the present. In literally rounding out
the sentence (i.e. from here might begin the sentence again), this final word indicates the cyclical nature of time, and
specifically, its regenerative function. It is therefore not the final
word—there is no punctuating period to terminate the sentence—and
the utterance thus curls backward (or forward) upon itself to repeat ad
infinitum.
The book likewise moves in a circle, for Skeets
pulls the epigraph from the collection's last poem—one of the "In the
Fields" series—which in turn, lifts lines from D. A. Powell's "Boonies."
Powell's poem ends with the lines "we all are beautiful at least once. / And,
if you'd watch over me, we can be beautiful again." In the
epigraph, Skeets edits Powell's words to emphasize place—the
setting of the collection—which becomes a fully embodied presence
throughout the course of the poems:
This
place is White Cone, Greasewood, Sanders,
White
Water, Bread Springs, Crystal, Chinle, Nazlini,
Indian
Wells, where all muddy roads lead from Gallup.
The sky
places an arm on the near hills. (4)
This place is "Drunktown" (1). This place is "Indian Eden" (1). This place is "split
in two" (1). "Clocks ring out as train horns" (1), snippets of description crackle
from the police radio—"Native American male. Early twenties. About 6'2",
190 pounds. / Has the evening for a face" (61)—and newspaper headlines in
"The Indian Capital of the World" read:
man hit by train
man found dead possibly from exposure in a
field
woman hit by semitruck attempting to cross
freeway
woman found dead in arroyo
man hit walking across road
man found dead near train tracks (67).
The phrase "man found dead in a field" repeats
four times before it begins stuttering back and forth on the page as if someone
shook the newspaper or the lens of the poet's camera. As if the dogs—or
the poet—who "mauled" the man's remains have strewn (i.e. sown) the man's
body "among flowers" so that he might speak again (67).
Again and again, Skeets reaches for images of
human beings becoming the landscape—seeping into their surroundings. As
"boys watch ricegrass shimmer in smoke... they know becoming a man / means
knowing how to become charcoal" (20). In "Afterparty," the speaker's "tongue
coils on the trigger before its click," and "Corn beetles scatter out / no
longer his bones" (7). Skeets titles one didactic poem "How to Become the Moon"
(40) and, in "Thieving Ceremony," lovers "become the black wool of a night sky"
(38). These poems act as cocoons from which the characters bloom into something
more than human, and the present tense always provides an opportunity for
metamorphosis:
We
become porch
light
curtained
by moth
wings,
powdered
into ash. (27)
By dwelling in the present tense, Skeets keeps
his readers in a state of flux—always becoming. But he also keeps them on
their toes by constantly changing his time signature. The flit of a moth wing
elongates into a lifetime in the second poem of the "In the Fields" series,
when the speaker comments on his lover, who "chants [the speaker's] body back
to weeds," and who will "One dayy... forget about wounds and lower himself too
into bellflower" (46). In the title poem, time compresses to an image:
intestines blown into dropseed
strewn
buffalograss blood clots
eyes bottle
dark
mouth stuffed with cholla flower
barberry
yellow
plant
greasebush
bitterweed (60)
In this case, the shape of the poem itself seems
to move—in time—with the landscape which it describes and, even as
human presences blend back into the environment through the course of the
collection, so the environment itself becomes a human presence.
Skeets manages to make geological words like
"monocline," "diatreme," and "laccolith" ring with a humanoid sexiness in the
poem "Maar," which spills over with the fecundity of the earth. Geological,
biological, climotological, and cosomlogical elements sing a pulsing lovesong
to one another where "buffaloburr veins around siltstone / mounds on the
monocline" and "flow rock smooths over into oar / cutleaf cornflower
overgrown," where "bulb liquid overflows into grasses," and "blue flax left as
moans / that foam into the sky" (28).
Like the elements in "Maar" the poems
throughout this collection speak back and forth to one another. When the
speaker in "Buffalograss "siphon[s] doubt," from his lover's throat, he recalls
not only "his cousin trying to show him how to siphon" in "Siphoning" (25), but
also the "Gasoline Ceremony" of the "boy's first time watching porn. His mouth
turned exhaust pipe" (26), and his "Virginity," which he looses with "Clouds in
his throat" (27). The reader recalls that "Drunk is the punch. Town
a gasp" (1) and that the two boys at the "Afterparty" hunker into one another
and "tank down beer" (7). The act of sucking air recalls all of the teeth in
the poems, the open mouths, the whispers, the breaths sucked away. It
highlights the constant metanarration about poetry itself and the concern
Skeets has with the way things are said. The two "In the Fields" poems and
"Comma" come to mind, but especially "Red Running into Water," in which Skeets
breaks down the pronunciation of specific Navajo diacriticals by using violently
dynamic images that recall the poem "Naked" in which Skeets likewise uses Diné
Bizaad. This is the language with which he also begins and ends the collection,
the final salutation repeated four times—stacked one on top of the
other—recalling "the creation story where Navajo people journeyed four
worlds" (24). But even this story refuses the mythic label so often lobbed at
Native America, and opts instead for a narrative of multiplicity and humor.
"Some Navajo people say there are actually / five worlds," Skeets writes, "Some
say six" (24). The people disagree through dialogue in the present tense and
pull the past along with them. Every "retelling"—every
repetition—is a little bit different in this lovesong.
Images repeat themselves as well within the book,
which is full of bottles, bones, and beetles. Full of boys trying to find their
way among "the truck and the char and everything else" (16), boys who might
"unlearn... how to hold a fist" by holding a hand (76), boys who might learn "to
be a man by loving one" (36). These poems, and the boys and men within these
poems, must—of necessity—speak back and forth to one another because
of the ever-present violence that threatens to split them all apart.
Settler colonialism makes myriad inroads within
Skeet's collection where the landscape's economic exploitation mirrors the
gernerational poverty, violence, and alcoholism that plague the Heart of Indian Country. In the first section of "Let
There Be Coal," "The boys load the coal. Inside them, a generator station opens
its eye. A father sips coal slurry from a Styrofoam cup" (21). In the third "In
the Fields" poem, "Pipelines entrench" behind a lover's teeth, and the speaker
hears "a crack in his lung like burning coal" (46). In "Truck Effigy," a man
"swallows transmission and gasket," and "an eye alters into alternator" (13). In
"Comma," a toddler sleeps, "fetaled in big snow / beneath I-40" (48), and in
"American Bar," the speaker proclaims "this town will kill you," its "steel
talons thread[ing] raw wool into sidewalks" (69). In making the environmental
degredation of the colonized space explicit, Skeets explains how
train
tracks
and
mines
split
gallup
in two
(22)
Then he adds an aural image to the mix of the
visuals of concrete, coal, and steel. After the speaker in "Glory" sees a young
boy get hit by a train, the phrasing mimics the wheels on the rails, first in
"I don't know. I don't know. I don't/ know. I don't know," and again when "it
sounds like a river," "ariverariverariverariverariverariverariver" (62). These
onomatopoeic phrases echo the "rail spike teeth" which "tsk tsk tsked" in the
title poem, the train tracks telling the listening boy that they "would catch
him if he would just only just only just only just only / jump" (60). Readers
can hear settler colonialism chugging into this place upon the myth of
progress, upon the empty promises of forever-expansion, upon capitalist industry
hammered into the earth.
These fragmentary scenes lead us to reflect on
the fact that Gallup, New Mexico is named after a railroad paymaster. The town
reeks of colonization and is perhaps best known to white Americans as a setting
for Hollywood Westerns, a stop on Route 66, or perhaps as the famous locale of
the celebrity-frequented El Rancho Motel. Skeets alludes to all of these
conceptions of this place as "white space" which mauls remains like dogs (11)
or else provides a place for scavengers like crows and letters to do the same
(58). It is "white space" on which the poetic persona arranges his "father's
boarding school soap bones" in order to call the arrangement "a poem," and "white
space" on which the face of the persona's uncle "becomes a mirror," until a
train horn
punch shatters
the
mirror
frees him from the page
my uncle
leaps from the (56)
Here, the stanza breaks off mid-thought, and
the facing page—a blank page—thus becomes the white space from
which the uncle has lept, or rather, is leaping. He exists in the
present tense, moving beyond the "white screen," "before" which he stands (52).
Skeets's use of the word "before" resonates in this instance with multiple
meanings. The speaker sees his uncle before (prior to) seeing the white
space which frames him; his uncle stands in the landscape before it
becomes (prior to it becoming) a colonized white space; his uncle stands before (in front of) the white screen
which erases the landscape—the context—in which he and the speaker
have both existed and in which they both continue to exist.
These lines appear in the poem "Drift(er),"
which comes "after Benson James, Drifter Route 66, Gallup, New Mexico,
06/30/79 by Richard Avedon," the photograph which Skeets uses as the
cover image of his collection. The photograph itself brings to mind the pages
in Claudia Rankine's Citizen in which the repeated and ever-increasingly
smudged phrases "I do not always feel colored" and "I feel most colored when I
am thrown against a sharp white background" face one another across the spine
of the book (Rankine 52-3). The utterances, which look as if they are stenciled
onto brick, seem to reference Citizen's own cover image, a photograph of
David Hammons's art pice, In the Hood (1993), which is comprised of a
hood ripped from a hoodie and mounted on a white wall. But even this photograph
includes a shadow which Avedon's photograph of Skeets's uncle does not. The
observer of Avedon's photograph, therefore, does not know from which direction
the light comes. This throws into question the time of day, the time of year, and
every other marker of setting, the photographer effectively erasing everything
but the singular subject, and thus setting the subject adrift in a sea of
whiteness.
Skeets argues through his poetry that this
subject—his uncle, Benson James, the "man with shoulder-length hair /
dollar bills fisted"—cannot be caught in a camera's eye, cannot be fixed
in a space made up of erasure. The man moves beyond the framing device—a white
sheet of paper taped to the side of a building—and beyond the lens (and
the photogropher behind the lens) that attempts to fix the man there:
See his
lips how still
how
horizon
how
sunset [...] (52)
The man's face encompasses—and is
encompassed, in turn, by—the landscape. Skeets frees him from the blank white
space by placing him in context. To be liberated from "white space" means to
return to the landscape. This book is a re-membering of the past—a past
within the whole frame, the landscape writ large and all-inclusive. As Skeets
has written of his book in "Drifting: A Cover Image Story": "I want to add what
was made invisible. I want to bring the light back so we can have our shadows
again. To give us back the morning so we can have the night."
The word "still" (qtd. above) crops up repeatedly
throughout the collection, but it always refers to survival through an
ever-changing present—a living continuity that is never stagnating, never
immobile. These poems are not nostalgic. They vibrate with queer desire, the words
coupling together in the landscape to make context for movement among them. Read
"beardtongue," "pronghorn," "pigweed," "ricegrass," "snakeweed" (20),
"Eyeteeth," "snowmelt," "tumbleweed" (76). Before "railroad" (45), "pipeline"
(46), "sledgehammer" (21), "Drunktown" (1), is "larksupr and beeplant on the
meadow" (28), is "sandbur" (30), "thunderhead" (31), "horseweed" (6), "horsetail"
and "buffalograss" (39), is "the letter t
vibrating in cottonwoods" (39). The reader can hear the "heartbeat" of the
speaker like a "brushfire" (17) as it burns through this landscape of
doublewords, a landscape which is always in a state of becoming. All of history
piles into the present, and the speaker points out that it is "such a terrible
beauty to find ourselves beneath things/ such a terrible beauty to witness men
ripen" (68). Of course the word "ripen" implies the idea of cyclical time and
the seasons, and Skeets complicates the idea of backsliding in such a schema by
repeating Powell's "We could be boys
together," but adding the word "finally" (76). He suggests that to
"unyoke," to "undress," to "unlearn" might provide a template for moving
forward (76).
Skeets has been watching over the world from
which he comes and is remaking it in the image of those who came before him, thus
remaking it in his own image and in the images of those that will come after.
The form of this book does not match its function; the form is its function. It does what it says
will be done—the past, the present, and the future couple into
doublewords and blend, couple and blend. The landscape and the people of the
landscape—the people from the
landscape—couple and blend, couple and blend. The book becomes its own self-fulfilling
proficy: it makes beauty again, from here
Nathan Bradford Dixon,
University of Georgia
Works Cited
Powell,
D. A. "Boonies." 2011. Poetry Foundation.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/54985/boonies.
Skeets, Jake. "Drifting: A
Cover Image Story." Milkweed Editions.
25 March 2019. https://milkweed.org/blog/drifting-a-cover-image-story.