Today I’m fascinated by Jennifer Horne’s poem, “Voice,” which can be found in her chapbook, Borrowed Light (Mule On A Ferris Wheel Press, 2019). Read it slowly.
Voice
For burning bush, substitute smoking stump.
For tablets, this tattered notebook with your wisdom notes.
Waking to sunlight, the smell of last night’s bonfire in my hair.
You left my dream only moments ago.
If I leapt from bed and ran down the straight dirt road,
could I catch you?
Wraith-smoke. Spanish moss.
Coffee in an old diner mug, heavy as a serious thing.
All day the rain continues, and I resolve to do as you urged:
begin my true life, start now.
“You’re not afraid of not liking it,” you said.
”You’re afraid you’ll like it so much it will change you,
demand a life as big as you can imagine,
a voice to match.”
1.
This is the final poem in a chapbook that explores inherited light, or the way in which various forms of light can be an inheritance which shapes and speaks into the present. The poet’s mother appears frequently in these poems—and I think you can feel the way she is both the beginning and the going-forward of the poet’s voice, or what the poet needs to say.
From this chapbook, we learn that a mother leaves multiple forms of light in her wake. We learn that Jennifer Horne’s mother was a poet, a female that lived with unabashed zest at a time when any zest in mothers was suspect. I sense a tension between the mother’s uninhibited spirit and the poet’s, and this is part of the legacy the poet brings to the page to understand.
The poem begins in the middle of this exploration, in a soft repudiation of Moses’ patriarchal visions:
For burning bush, substitute smoking stump.
For tablets, this tattered notebook with your wisdom notes.
The poet is sitting in a space where something has burned, and she is looking not to the stone tablets of a male god but to the notebook written by a human mother. The authority of some man’s prophecy is replaced by the words and visions of a particular woman, and her reckoning with life.
2.
At the end of the second stanza, the poet wakes up from the dream and wonders towards the mother’s voice:
If I leapt from bed and ran down the straight dirt road,
could I catch you?
I love how the poet’s voice mingles with the mother’s voice. I love the stark brush-strokes used to depict both dream and waking, to dissolve a clear line between them. I love how the You of this poem is murky, almost incorporeal, and how this contrasts with the heavy seriousness of the coffee in a diner mug. And how Horne tacks back immediately towards the voice and what it asks of her:
All day the rain continues, and I resolve to do as you urged:
begin my true life, start now.
And I think of my own mother—the way she took up space with her laughter and lust for life—and how the things which embarrassed me about her as a child are the things for which I admired her as a woman.
3.
Having a passionate, bohemian mother, or one whose spirit plays a predominant role in the visions of the child, often means that her stories frame the world more convincingly than other authorities, including peers, media, and friends. I recognize an urge to record the world for my mother since her death, to substantiate her stories and warnings somehow, and to keep her alive in this.
Is this what it means to be my mother’s daughter? To keepsake her fascination with life, her insatiable hunger for new experience, her commitment to her sensuality? Am I holding the world for her in what Dan Beachy-Quick calls “the hut of the poem”?
4.
We have reached a point of awareness about agency, and how the words or images or symbols we lay over others may be a form of disrespect. It is easier to have these conversations in the abstract than the particular. Yet, as writers, we struggle with staying in our lanes, or trying to discover which ghost shares the lane with us, and how that intersects with permission to poem them.
What is the line between elegy, tribute, portrait, and appropriation in a context where each person is the sole arbiter of their own life?
Whenever I write my mother, I worry about theft.
I worry about whether I’m recreating her in the way I want her remembered. Or whether I am ruining someone' else’s memory of her by writing my own.
I don’t have any answers or rules. I don’t know my lane when it comes to my mother who was many things to many other humans, each of whom has a different claim to remembering.
5.
I return to Dan Beachy-Quick’s essay, “The Hut of Poetry” (found in his Wonderful Investigations: Essays, Meditations, Tales). He writes notes that a poem doesn’t have to be “funereal in its relation to death.” He continues:
“To read is the most common form of encounter with the dead. The dead on the blank page need not remain dead. Time in the page is different from time in the world….. Death in the poem is only a pause before rebirth. Death is but a delay inside the form.
Language offers a method of experiencing death without dying…The poem on the blank page houses a creative center infinitely larger than itself, than its own lined confines, but a power that has no useful ends without suffering the impossible limit of the poem’s form. The forging of limit through form is the poem’s most fundamental work, and the result of that work is that the poem becomes not a vessel of knowledge conveyed, but a dwelling where knowledge occurs.”
There is a sense in which form is actually what pushes through and re-visions death. I see this in Horne’s poem, in her syntax, in how she builds long lines like trails of crumbs in a forest where every child misses her mother—and all the bad things that happen to a child are linked to the lack of knowing which voice to trust, or what to believe of their own.
6.
In this hut of this short poem, the mother warns the child against fear—against reticence—against holding back from living a “big” life. Notice the role of the bigness here:
“You’re not afraid of not liking it,” you said.
”You’re afraid you’ll like it so much it will change you,
demand a life as big as you can imagine,
a voice to match.”
And so the poem ends with the mother’s words, which—when recorded, when heeded, when hallowed—become scripture or prophecy.
The book ends with this poem. The ghost has the last word about the future. Yet the ghost belongs, inextricably, to the daughter’s voice, to its bigness, to its motion forward.
To quote Dan Beachy-Quick again:
“But a home is never the world—a home is a separation from the world. A poem is never the world—a poem is a separation from the world. The world we read, and in reading see, never stays a world. Language’s gift to us is it’s failure. The enchantment of language is superseded in importance by its disenchantment.”
The mothers are gone. Neither the male prophets nor the wolves can help us. The poem is a temporary respite in which time and corporeality are overcome. The ghost is beautiful for this singular, liminal instant. She urges us to use our voice, to make it big enough to hold her—and big enough to wonder alone.