The
Poetry of Ralph Salisbury:
Syntax
as Vehicle for Conveying an Ethical Vision
ELEANOR
BERRY
The
opening poem of Ralph Salisbury's Rainbows
of Stone, published in the first year of the present century, articulates
and embodies a central theme of his poetry—the interconnection and
inter-relatedness of all creatures, times, things. It is, as its title puts it,
"A Declaration, Not of Independence" (3).[1]
This
"Declaration" opens conversationally, but the seemingly casual tone quickly
turns devastatingly ironic:
Apparently
I'm Mom's immaculately-conceived
Irish-American son, because,
Social-Security time come,
my Cherokee dad could not prove he'd been born.
He
could pay taxes, though,
financing troops, who'd conquered our land,
...
The
conversational style soon shifts into something hardly sayable.
The bulk of the poem consists of two long, curiously complex sentences. Here is
the first:
Eluding
recreational killers' calendar's
enforcers, while hunting my family's food,
I thought what the hunted think,
so that I ate, not only meat
but the days of wild animals fed by the days
of seeds, themselves eating earth's
aeons of lives, fed by the sun,
rising and falling, as quail,
hurtling through sky,
fell, from
gun-powder, come—
as the First Americans came—
from Asia.
Eased
into the poem by the conversational style of the opening, readers may stumble
repeatedly as they attempt to negotiate the syntax of this sentence. The
subject is deferred by two participial phrases, one nested with the other—"Eluding
... while hunting..." The object of the first participle is modified by two possessives,
"killers' calendar's," one likewise nested within the other. This is difficult
to process—and made more so by the dense texture of sound repetition. The
poet is obstructing readers' movement through the poem, slowing us down, and we
would do well to attend not only to his words but to his constructions and to
what these constructions, by their very nature, convey.
Deferral
of a subject by modifiers signals that the subject cannot be understood apart
from particular circumstances. Nesting of elements emblematizes the containment
of one thing within another. Both of these features together suggest that
nothing is simple, nothing is unto itself.
Once
we reach the subject, "I," the predicate, "thought what the hunted think,"
follows immediately in the same line, but then the sentence is extended by a
result clause, "so that I ate ...," which is itself extended by multiple nested
modifiers of the verb's object:
the
days
of
wild animals
fed
by the days
of
seeds,
themselves
eating earth's aeons
of
lives,
fed
by the sun,
rising
and falling,
as
quail, [...]
hurtling
through sky,
[...]
fell,
from
gun-powder,
come—
as
the first Americans came—
from
Asia.
Each
modifier is itself modified through ten layers of elaboration, and each of the
last two modifiers is interrupted by an internal modifier. This structure is a
veritable embodiment of dependence.
After
this breath- and brain-taxing sentence, the syntax briefly relaxes into a
simple clause with a compound predicate and minimal modification—until a
"but" launches a second independent clause:
but,
with this hand,
with which I write, I dug,
my sixteenth summer, a winter's supply of yams out
of hard, battlefield clay,
dug for my father's mother, who—
abandoned by her husband—raised,
alone, a mixed-blood family
and raised—her tongue spading air—
ancestors, a winter's supply or more. (3-4).
The
crucial information is arrived at only by digging down through layers of
syntax. The clause is repeatedly interrupted by modifiers of various
types—prepositional phrase, relative clause, adverbial phrase,
participial phrase, absolute construction. The poet's paternal grandmother makes
her appearance only as the object of a prepositional phrase, but this deeply
subordinate grammatical element becomes the tail that wags the dog of the
clause. The grandmother's agency asserts itself as forcefully and surprisingly
for readers of the poem as it evidently did for the 16-year-old future poet.
The main clause elements are simple: "I dug ... a winter's supply of yams out of
hard, battlefield clay..." But that is not all there was to it. Coming into the
knowledge of his Cherokee ancestry was not simple for this young man, and the
syntax the mature poet has found to convey that experience embodies its
complexity.
Such
use of syntax is pervasive in Rainbows of
Stone, but it was already a significant element of Salisbury's poetry two
and even three decades earlier. In Pointing
at the Rainbow (1980), a one-sentence poem, "Family Stories and the One Not
Told," deploys several of the poet's characteristic constructions to tell of his
family's concealment and his own "spading" up of one previously unacknowledged
Native American ancestor (Light from a Bullet Hole 29).
"Our
Irish mother's tongue would stitch / wool glowing needles of the wood stove
wove," the poem-sentence begins, straightforwardly enough in the first line but
already obstructing our parsing in the second. The monosyllabic noun "wool" is
followed, without any relative pronoun, by a relative clause with a long noun
phrase as subject of the monosyllabic verb "wove," and the dense weave of
assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme not only imitates what it describes
but also makes the underlying syntactic structure harder to discern. We are
prepared for a poem of dense entanglements.
The
first independent clause is then followed by a second: "and there was bread and
milk hunger made us / lovingly recite[.]" Again a straightforward assertion is
complicated by a relative clause following the complement without a relative
pronoun. The complexity then deepens, as the sentence is extended by a
subordinate temporal clause, interrupted by another contact relative clause,
then further extended by a series of absolute constructions. Lineation and
syntax come into phase at the end of the ninth line, and there, except for a
telltale comma, the poem seems momentarily complete:
while
the rattle of fast freights, empty bottles
recalled, sped Dad
north, his pipe smoke tethering in our ears
Great Grandpa's mules
no Yankee patrol could tell from grime,
But the
absolute construction conjuring an ancestor-subject of the father's family
stories is then followed by another, conjuring another ancestor, this one not
present in those stories: "Great Grandmother locked / behind a tobacco-browned
stockade, / to keep the word 'colored' from her kin[.]"
The
poem doesn't let us stop here, even momentarily. Instead, it launches, with the
monosyllable "one," following "kin" at the end of its line, a long relative
clause:
...
one
of whom would spade
with his tongue enough earth
out of his brain to raise
her coffin to blaze like a meteor,
Though
the sentence is again potentially complete at a line-ending, the poem continues
past that boundary to enact, in a final absolute construction, what the lines
just quoted have described:
her
Cherokee-Shawnee braid
loosed at last
to spread black sunshine
on a snow horizon.
The
characteristic usages of Salisbury's poetic syntax seem to have emerged as
means for carrying out the moral work of recovering suppressed family and
cultural history. There are precedents for doing such work in poetry and for
developing a syntactical style peculiarly fitted to do it. An important one can
be found in the work of Robert Lowell, who was Salisbury's teacher at the
University of Iowa. Salisbury received his MFA from Iowa in 1951, and Lowell
taught there from 1950 to 1953. At that time, Lowell was between the Pulitzer
Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle and
the breakthrough Life Studies, which
would win the National Book Award and become a classic of what would be known
as confessional poetry. He was working on the long dramatic narrative "The
Mills of the Kavanaughs," continuing to write a taut metrical verse while on
the brink of shifting into a looser, but still densely textured non- or quasi-metrical
verse (Mariani 190‑91). In a 1985 interview,
Salisbury recalls that he had started out writing free verse,
but then I began studying with Robert Lowell, and he was
doing end rhyme patterned verse. For me this probably connected with having grown
up hearing my father sing old Kentucky hill country songs which were end rhyme
patterned.
Anyway, I started writing end rhyme
patterned poems (Schöler 31).
It is
hard to imagine a greater cultural distance than that between this teacher, a
Boston Catholic patrician CO, and this student, an Irish-Cherokee veteran
raised in rural poverty. That the young Salisbury would associate Lowell's
metrics in Lord Weary's Castle and The Mills of the Kavanaughs with "old
Kentucky hill country songs" is a measure of that distance. In the 1985
interview, Salisbury implies that Lowell's influence on his work was limited to
versification:
Gradually I moved all the way back to
free verse because it was the natural way for me to grow, but I still value my
imitation Lowell period, because it gave me some insights into musicality (Schöler
31).
Perhaps,
though, the term "musicality," as Salisbury uses it here, should be interpreted
more broadly.
I
suspect that imitating Lowell gave the young poet a sense of the possibilities
of non-standard syntactical structures, together with dense sound textures, and
of their value for conveying an ethical vision otherwise all but inarticulable.
In passages from "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," like the following, supposed to
be spoken by the character Anne Kavanaugh to her dead husband, Salisbury might
well have seen how syntax could embody complexities of heritage and history. I
have boldfaced the conjunctions and relative pronouns launching the clauses
that repeatedly extend the sentence at deeper and deeper levels of
subordination.
"Our
people had kept up their herring weirs,
Their rum and logging grants two hundred years,
When Cousin Franklin Pierce was
President—
Almost three hundred, Harry, when
you sent
His signed engraving sailing on your kite
Above the gable, where your mother's
light,
A daylight bulb in tortoise talons, pipped
The bull-mad june-bugs on the manuscript
That she was typing to redeem our
mills
From Harding's taxes, and we lost
our means
Of drawing pulp and water from those hills
Above the Saco, where our tenants
drilled
Abnaki partisans for Charles the First,
And seated our Republicans, while
Hearst
And yellow paper fed the moose that
swilled
Our spawning ponds for weeds like spinach greens (Lowell 82).
The
sentence refuses to end until it has gathered into itself all the actions and
situations, occurring at different times in the past, that the speaker feels to
have bearing on the present.
Besides
Lowell, there is another writer whose work may have shown Salisbury
possibilities for making syntax a vehicle for embodying the bearing of
ancestors' lives and historical events on the present. William Faulkner's late novel
Requiem for a Nun was published in
1951, the year Salisbury received his MFA degree. There he may have read the
now-famous declaration, "The past is never dead. It isn't even past" (46).
There and in Faulkner's novels and stories of the previous two decades, Salisbury
may well have read and contemplated the power of the extraordinary, page-long
sentences in which are interleaved events of different eras, including "the
simple dispossession of Indians,"
the building of the courthouse, and the inexorable development of the town:
the
hands, the prehensile fingers clawing dragging lightward
out of the disappearing wilderness year by year as up from the bottom of the
receding sea, the broad rich fecund burgeoning fields, pushing thrusting each
year further and further back the wilderness and its denizens—the wild
bear and deer and turkey, and the wild men (or not so wild any more, familiar
now, harmless now, just obsolete: anachronism out of an old dead time and a
dead age; regrettable of course, even actually regretted by the old men,
fiercely as old Doctor Habersharn did, and with less
fire but still as irreconcilable and stubborn as old Alec Holston and a few
others were still doing, until in a few more years the last of them would have
passed and vanished in their turn too, obsolescent too: because this was a
white man's land; that was its fate, or not even fate but destiny, its high
destiny in the roster of the earth)—the veins, arteries, life- and
pulse-stream along which would flow the aggrandisement
of harvest: the gold: the cotton and the grain (Faulkner 5; 25-6).
Reading
such sentences (the passage above constitutes no more than about a third of the
sentence from which it is drawn), he may well have been struck by the
possibility of forging a syntax capable of embodying the dispossession of
Native Americans, the obsolescing of "wild men," from the point of view of a
descendant of those dispossessed and rendered obsolete.
Salisbury
was using syntax for such complex, morally charged articulations at least as
early as 1972, when his first collection, Ghost
Grapefruit, was published. "Boyhood Incident Recollected in Tranquility" is
a confession of a crime and an unfolding of the retrospectively recognized
nature of that crime (Light from a Bullet Hole 16). The poem runs for 19
irregular-length lines before it reaches a period. Before that, major
syntactical boundaries are marked by em-dashes and
colons, punctuation that signals not only reaching a boundary but continuing
beyond it. The first three lines deliver a complete independent clause, but
with the normal order of clause elements inverted and with the object
disproportionately elaborated: "A snake with the head and foreflippers
of a frog, / a frog with enormous snake stern—a boy / at the brink of
Eden stoned[.]" Reading, we, like the boy, are first confronted with the image
of the apparent snake-frog in all its monstrosity. Syntactical expectation is
then for a verb, with the elaborate noun phrases as its subject. But the verb
is deferred; another and contrastingly unelaborated noun phrase intervenes: "a
boy." Thus, the syntactical and phenomenal monstrosity is not to be the subject
of the still-awaited verb, but its object. And then the verb is further
deferred by an adverbial phrase, "at the brink of Eden," lifting the scene to
the level of myth and conveying that the anticipated action will be
determinative, will constitute a fall into knowledge. So long deferred, the
single monosyllabic verb, "stoned," has all the force of the action it names.
Deferral
of clause subjects and/or verbs is a common usage in Salisbury's poetry, and it
does far more than enhance the textural interest of language. It enables
readers to experience aspects of the meaning viscerally as well as cognitively.
Here, the long-deferred verb is followed by a dash and a line-break, marking an
end that is also, crucially, a precipitant of further development—which
will turn out to be one of understanding. Through the syntax of the rest of the
poem, we, as readers, participate in the emergence of that understanding.
Understanding
is developed through an attempt to re-see from different perspectives and,
accordingly, to re-name, what the boy saw and to comprehend the action he took
in response to the sight. This process is enacted by the syntax. The fourth
line of the poem gives the first re-naming:
"Stephen-Saint—snake-frog—God." Who or what was stoned? Stephen, who
was martyred by stoning and made a saint. The awkward compound "Stephen-Saint"
suggests a peculiar composite being, as does, of course, the compound
"snake-frog." Following another dash in the same line, "God" at first seems
another name for the victim of the stoning, but as we round to the next line,
we're led to re-interpret it as the subject of the verb "saw." God's vision of
the victim is described as one might an artist's depiction of a saint: "a halo
of red rim / stretched jaws, sash black-speckled green and whitish middle."
That is one version. The next line introduces another version, another clause:
"human scientist in that instant verified:.."
The
object of "verified" extends over the remaining 12 lines of the poem, beginning
with a string of three noun phrases, the last of which is elaborated by a
relative clause and then extended by an absolute construction, containing a
gerund that itself is followed by a string of three more noun phrases as its
object, the last again elaborated. In its multiple extensions and elaborations,
the syntax embodies the monstrosity, the monstrousness, of what the words seek
to name. Here is the whole heavily right-branching clause, formatted to show
the layers of subordination:
human scientist in that instant
verified:
murder
of fellow fauna two-fold,
a
hunt without appetite blessed with success,
empty
belly balked by a rock,
that
rules so much by ignorance and monstrous fear of what seemed monstrous ...
boy-man, man-woman in dread of the hand's doing,
cringing from knowing, simply:
the
size of a snake's mouth,
the
size of a frog's waist,
the
appetite of the world's meat
so
much more than the mouth can ever encompass
although
compelled by emptiness to try
As in the
later "Family Stories and One Not Told" and the much later "A Declaration, Not
of Independence," the crucial recognition is arrived at only in a deeply
subordinate syntactical element. It is there that, through reading and parsing,
we arrive at the knowledge the boy came to through the act of stoning and the
reflection it occasioned.
In
the 1985 interview, when asked about his use of enjambment, Salisbury spoke of
it as helping to give "a sense of voice driving at something, speaking, or with
inner voice thinking, very passionately and intensely" (Schöler 31). It is not so much occasional instances of enjambment as
it is the whole syntactical style of his poetry that creates the sense of an
"inner voice thinking, very passionately and intensely." The poem "Out of the Rusty
Teeth," published a couple of years before that interview, in the collection Going to the Water: Poems from a Cherokee
Heritage, invites readers to follow, through a syntax of piled-on
appositives and absolute constructions, a train of impassioned thought.
Trigger
for this urgent meditation is a quoted phrase, "'Trapped in dark corridor,'"
which opens the poem and is repeated twice in the succeeding lines' associative
reflections (Light from a Bullet Hole 43-4). The thinking recorded in,
and enacted by, the poem proceeds by fits and starts, through passages both
separated and connected by dashes. The poet is considering whether, and, if so,
how, the phrase "Trapped in dark corridor" might apply to him.
The
syntax is dominated by absolute constructions—most free-floating, apart
from any associated full predication—and by noun phrases in apposition to
one another—again mostly free-floating fragments. In such a syntax,
actions are conveyed as compact with, folded into, states of being: events are
never over, but embodied or, perhaps more accurately, encysted. These encysted
events insist on being recognized, as the phrase "Trapped in dark corridor"
insistently repeats itself in the poet's mind.
So
who and what is he that this phrase should concern him? There is the matter,
laid out in the poem's first verse paragraph, of his name—"family name /
from earldom and bishopric near Stonehenge, sun- / worshipers built"—and
his face—"my face like that / of the late nineteenth century / 'lesser
star' Cherokee shaman Herr Olbrechts captioned
'J'"—and of their incongruous association.[2]
Such a name with such a face, such clashing yet peculiarly related inheritances
(the "earldom and bishopric" of the poet's family name is located "near
Stonehenge, sun- / worshipers built," as the "Cherokee shaman" whose facial
features he shares was presumably, in a phrase that appears later in the poem,
"a New World sun- / worshiper"), might indeed constitute a sort of entrapment
in history's "dark corridor."
"Trapped
in dark corridor," the poem repeats at the beginning of its second verse
paragraph. Now, though, the poet refutes the implication that the phrase
applies to him. Appropriately, he does so in the only full independent clauses
in the poem:
but
my steel traps caught
fur coats for the rich for years,
and all I am
caught by, really, just now, is
time and the urge to leave a few words
other than my names
carved in stone—...
Even in
the defiant assertions of these two coordinate independent clauses, however,
the matter of the poet's name insistently comes up again, and the second clause
(more specifically, a post-modifier of its object) is extended by a linked pair
of absolute constructions that spell out its meaning—the meaning not only
of his family name, but also of his given one: "the last meaning 'Salt Town', /
'Wise Wolf' the first, in languages mostly lost—[.]"
With
its first line—"'Wise Wolf Salt Town'—" the third verse paragraph
picks up on the names in their recovered earlier meanings, then, in a pair of
appositional noun phrases, each modified by a relative clause, riffs on the
surname "Salt Town," derived (as the poem's opening passage has told us) from
an English "earldom and bishopric," in terms of the poet's personal history and
present stance:
Lord
Salt Town who
salted down bloody pelts, to save them from spring sun—
"The Bishop of Salt Town"
who preaches the saving of skins and words,
words, words, words, like "Trapped in dark corridor"—
With the
object of the prepositional phrase that ends this verse paragraph, we are back
to the phrase that has set the poem in motion.
In
this third utterance, the phrase conjures a vision, articulated in two parallel
absolute constructions, of Christian soldiers and Cherokee warriors confronting
one another by the light of tapers and torches in what is evidently a dark,
narrow space:
tall
tapers throwing my cruciform shadow onto onrushing
brilliantly emblazoned Cherokee priest-robes
and naked muscles red-painted for war,
pine
torches hurling my Cherokee foetal death-curl-
silhouette onto crosses on armor
advancing to expunge a New World sun-
worshiper, his name on three children,
less durable than stone,
...
In this
vision, the poet-speaker casts two shadows, a cruciform one onto Cherokee
garments and bodies, a fetus-shaped one onto Christian soldiers' armor, as the
two opposed groups advance toward each other. In this confrontation where a
pagan Native American is defeated, his name expunged, the poet's younger self
fights on both sides, as the next two lines make explicit in another absolute
construction: "a battle of shadows joined / in the skull of a boy..."
The
poem does not end with this articulation, in fitting syntactical form, of past
violence inflicted and suffered by ones "trapped in dark corridor" as replayed
in the mind of a boy who would become its poet-author. Instead, it continues,
through an extended relative clause, to render the actions of the boy, himself
a trapper:
...
who ran on the sun
on snow, frost white as whiskers of weasels in his nostrils,
to take, out of the rusty teeth of his traps,
common brown mink and, one time,
from the gleaming jaws of a dream, a glittering black glory
the glittering heavens may
not ever flesh again.
From the
poetry of his earliest collections to that of his most recent, Salisbury,
perhaps spurred by Lowell's and Faulkner's examples, shapes syntax into an
adequate vehicle for conveying the presence of past violence and the speaker's at
least partial complicity in it. The poem "Canyon de Chelly," set in the Anasazi
ruins at that site, is a later example of this, included in Rainbows of Stone. Like the early
"Family Stories...," it is a one-sentence poem.
The
poem-sentence opens with a locative clause that identifies the setting in terms
of two past instances of violence against its Navajo inhabitants:
Where
Americans, in
the name of civilization, and
Conquistadors, in
the name of the Virgin,
massacred Navajo braves in
the womb... (48)
Only
after establishing this context does the poet name the subject of his
sentence—"Anasazi walls"—and then he interrupts the
subject-verb-object sequence, first with a participial phrase modifying the
subject, then with an adverbial clause modifying the verb. Both modifiers defer
anticipated sentence elements with references to the site's heritage of
violence from outsiders:
...
Anasazi walls, echoing centuries-
ago-forgotten Athabascan invasion, repeat
and repeat, as if to learn by heart—
for future warning or welcome—
Only
then is the deferred object named—"footbeats"—the
noun preceded and followed by modifiers that associate it with both recent and
remote instances of nations' violence against other nations: "Japanese-shod footbeats of / an Irish-English-Cherokee survivor of
nuclear war[.]" Thus, halfway through the poem-sentence, in the object of a
prepositional phrase modifying the object of the main clause's verb, we arrive
at the principal focus of the poet's concern here—himself, with his
particular heritage and personal involvement in history.
The
second half of the poem elaborates on that heritage and involvement through two
phrases in apposition, both heavy with modifiers. A reformatting of the lines
shows the layers of grammatical subordination:
a brother,
in
prayer,
in
blood
and
in hours lived
learning
the generations
of
brick upon brick
set
about Kiva, kitchens and beds,
involuntary countryman
of
those invading [...] Vietnam
this
time,
and
of "J.W. Conway ... Santa Fe ... 1873,"
boast
carved into wall
surviving as a confession
which
could have been mine
more times than one,
that
being is not belonging
Characteristically,
the poem's crucial moral recognition appears only in a deeply subordinated
syntactical element of a sentence repeatedly extended beyond where it is
potentially complete. It then continues for another two lines—an absolute
construction that constitutes an ironic mini-coda: "the home he desecrated /
one victor's grave stone."
Part
of the work done by the syntax of Salisbury's poetry is to articulate
relationships between visually similar phenomena from different realms. The
poet's visual imagination brings them together, and his moral intelligence
makes connections between them. There are several instances of this in the
poems examined above. Sometimes they contribute to the poem's texture;
sometimes they are central to its structure. "Wild Goose, Eaten, and Owl,
Knitted to Hang on Wall," a poem in Salisbury's 2006 collection War in the Genes, is one that takes shape
from a series of yokings (or, to borrow the poem's
principal image, knittings) together of phenomena
normally regarded as unrelated (42).
Beginning
with a metaphor conveyed by an appositive—"Gray petal, soon to fall from
crimson dawn, / a wild goose"—the poem proceeds through three sentences
broken over five line-groups to connect the goose, in its hunger and in its
"migrant's flight," to the poet-speaker; in its ceaselessly moving wings, to
the speaker's mother, with her ceaselessly moving knitter's fingers; and, in
its visual appearance as a petal against a contrasting background of sky, to
blossoms against a contrasting background of branch in the wall-hanging that the
mother has knitted.
As
in the early "Boyhood Incident Recollected in Tranquility," the opening line
and a half of the poem present a striking visual image of conjunction. Here,
the conjunction is metaphorical and syntactically conveyed by apposition. The
basis of the connection between petal and goose seems purely a matter of visual
resemblance. However, as the clause continues over the rest of the opening four
lines, and as then the compound-complex sentence extends through a second
independent clause in the second, longer line-group, a dense weave of more
conceptual connections is created.
...
a wild goose, hearing me imitate a call
to join a gaggle of strangers for dinner is met
by flocks of shot,
and
life, which flew thousands of miles
through air, shared with words, stills
between teeth, retriever, resolute
as poet, struggling against
the current to bring the dead
back to the living's need.
The
gray-petal goose is now understood as a fellow creature, impelled by loneliness
and hunger "to join a gaggle of strangers for dinner." The retriever that swims
against the current to bring the shot goose to the hungry human
trickster-shooter-poet is conceived as doing work equivalent to the
poet's—"to bring the dead / back to the living's need." Wild,
domesticated, and human are conjoined by shared needs and traits. These morally
significant connections emerge gradually through layers of syntactic
modification, becoming fully apparent only through the absolute construction,
"retriever, ... struggling ... to bring the dead / back to living's need," which
ends the long sentence. This syntax both embodies the complexities of
connection that it articulates and takes readers through a correspondingly complex
process of parsing to grasp them.
The
relatively short sentence that forms the group of three lines in the middle of
the poem offers readers a bit of rest as the poet delivers a somewhat
self-deprecating and jocular reprise of the difficult articulation just made:
"No phoenix flight of trilling syllables, / my feeding-call's honks lured meat
/ for Mother to cook, for our family to eat."
"Mother,"
introduced in the role of family cook, is no sooner mentioned than, in the
poem's final sentence, shown to have been active in other ways—ways that
connect her to the migrant goose with its "ceaseless ... wings." Her poet son,
the poem's speaker, in his poem-making activity, is connected to both the
mother who knitted and the goose whose flight was directed toward its kind's
warm wintering grounds. All these connections are articulated in a single
sentence extending over a seven-line group and a final couplet.
Her
fingers, as ceaseless as wings
seeking sufficient summer, wove red yarn
into blossoms on a bough an owl's black
prey-piercing claws above me clutch, while,
stark winter years to endure, I try
to make my pen knit
another migrant's flight,
warm
Gulf, ancestors' nesting place,
a future to hope for, though far.
Interposed
between the subject, "Her fingers," and the predicate, "wove ...," is the long
adjectival phrase implicitly linking her to the goose migrating south for the
winter. Her weaving has produced a work of art, a wall-hanging showing red
"blossoms on a bough an owl's black / prey-piercing claws above me clutch." The
visual image of red knitted flowers on a bough recalls the image of the goose
as a gray petal against a crimson sky that opened the poem. The knitted owl's
"prey-piercing claws" recall the retriever's teeth between which the shot goose
stilled. The strained syntax—a contact relative clause with a heavily premodified subject and a preposed
adverbial phrase delaying its monosyllabic predicate—slows reading and
makes these details obtrude.
The
sentence, potentially complete, is then extended by a temporal clause, whose
subject, "I," is deferred by an adverbial infinitive phrase with inverted word
order (the object placed before the verb). With his mother's woven work hanging
on the wall above his head, the poet-speaker, now in the "winter years" of his
life, seeks to do his own knitting with words, to make with words his own "migrant's
flight."
With
that phrase, the sentence is again potentially complete, but again it is
extended, this time after a line-group break and with an absolute construction.
With the words of this final couplet and this final sentence element, the poet
conjures the hoped for destination of his flight—his "ancestors' nesting
place"—and completes the poem's web of connections.
Over
the long span of his writing career, Ralph Salisbury has employed in his poetry
a distinctive syntactical style that serves the essential function of conveying
his moral vision. Through nesting of possessives and relative clauses, he
represents the containment of one thing within another, often its opposite.
Through the use of absolute constructions rather than full subordinate clauses,
he gives a sense of the actions they designate as entailed in, rather than
separate from, the fully predicated action(s) of the sentence. Through
apposition as a means of presenting metaphor, he equalizes the prominence of
the items linked. Through omission of a relative pronoun before relative clauses,
he promotes the contents of the relative clause to near equivalence with that
of the clause modified. Through reduction of the copula to an easy-to-miss
sibilant, he brings subject and complement close to parity. Through repeated
deferral of anticipated sentence elements, he intimates how much is bound up
with, and contributive to, what each deferred element presents. Through all of
these usages in combination, he embodies the interrelatedness and
interdependence of all Earth's peoples and creatures, alive and dead, and all
the elements of their environment.
[1] Work by Ralph
Salisbury used by permission of The Literary Estate of Ralph Salisbury. Copyright © 2020 by The Literary Estate of Ralph Salisbury.
All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without permission of the estate.
[2] "Herr Olbrechts" is Frans Olbrechts, a Belgian-born
ethnographer who studied under Franz Boas at Columbia and in the 1920s did
field work among the Cherokee.
Works Cited
Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun.
1950. Vintage Books, 2011.
Lowell, Robert. Lord Weary's Castle; and The Mills of the
Kavanaughs. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951.
Mariani,
Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. W. W. Norton, 1994.
Salisbury, Ralph. Ghost Grapefruit and Other Poems. Ithaca House, 1972.
---. Light from a Bullet Hole: Poems New and Selected,
1950-2008. Silverfish Review Press, 2009.
---. Rainbows of Stone. University of Arizona Press, 2000.
---. War in the Genes.
Cherry Grove Collections, 2006.
Schöler, Bo. "'... I would save the cat.' An Interview with Ralph
Salisbury." American
Studies in Scandinavia, vol. 17, no. 1, 1985, pp. 27-34.