Number 287
April/May 2001

True Light
RUSTY MORRISON
Copyright © 2001 Poetry Flash

CANDY NECKLACE, by Cal Bedient, Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1997, 96 pages, $11.95 paper, $25.00 cloth.

"How beautiful you are I see," Cal Bendient quotes Gertrude Stein as preface to his first book of poems. These words are a small stone idol set in homage to Stein's mastery, but they are also an accurate miniature replica of Bedient's own virtuosity, and indeed perhaps even a little map of the journey upon which this remarkable first book of poems embarks. First, with the word "How," the quote offers the same sense of questioning, and perhaps awe, that is relentlessly present in these poems. Then we receive the abstract ideal, "beauty," which is the primary quality pervading the atmosphere of this poet's universe, and is, in essence, the lens through which he teaches us to see---whether that sight is of the wrenching complexities of fatherhood, the heady rush of carnal indulgence, or the violent paradoxes suffered in our world at century's end. It is because of Bedient's relentless reaching through the astonishing beauty of such subjects that we come to face into the naked "you" in each of these poems. Finally, in what is the main clause of Stein's quote---and cornerstone in all of Bedient's poems---we meet the maker, ever-present behind the scenes, the "I," whose hands twist the dials to focus our sight. Such placement reminds us it is only through the voice of that inevitably fallible "I" that any sense of a "you" is rendered. The "I" of these poems is cannily contructed so as to reflect upon the ramifications of this relationship, which Stein's syntactic structure suggests, even as the presented subject of each poem steps immediately forward through Bedient's lip-tickling, mind-savoring lyricisms:

Wasn't it in feeling space that the Greek gods disported---
"disported," lovely god-like word---and that the armada
of pomegranate seeds floated in Persephone's blood

all spring, red-sailed, cutting the boring blue?
(from "Love-In Mit Wittgenstein")

The various subjects of these poems, as made manifest through the speaker's often deftly exposed subjectivity, are most "beautiful"---most lushly and vibrantly described, most impossible to turn away from---when they embody nothing of what might typically be seen as "beautiful." Bedient's world fails to make running buddies of the classic partners of beauty: symmetry, unity, perfection. Instead, paradox, difficulty, and ruin are his world's unshakable cohorts. Although Bedient's most directly expressed metaphysic entertains a Platonic relationship with the ideal: "All is from God, all are fragments torn from God: that is how Plato saw it," the potency of Bedient's vision is brought to bear on the fragments themselves, in the glory of their fragmentation---the frays, the splits, the disunities, the terrible beauty of their torn-ness. "To be alive is to spill out of the cut, as the moon was squeezed like a red egg from the upturned belly of the mountain." What a gorgeous spill it is when seen with Bedient's eye. And what a rising into life are these sensual, language loving, dynamic poems. But what gives nearly every poem its greater dimension and compelling power is the moral consciousness of the poet at work within it. Whether focused self-reflexively upon the act of observation and reportage, or turned directly upon the subject under scrutiny, it is a consciousness that cannot ignore how much of the world's confusion and suffering we create for ourselves, and inflict upon each other:

…The eye of the child
is ripped fresh today by the look the father gives the mother

when leaving home: so this is hatred, this is unhappiness.

In all the suffering, pain, destruction of Bedient's cosmology, "there is no beast of the Apocalypse, only small terrified wantings. Many wantings without humility." Our failings, our corruptions are our own, "how far they are from God." Still his eye does not look away, does not avoid, but instead burns its way to each core, and in so doing imbues even the terrible with a kind of incandesence.

The first poem of this collection, "The Night Is Cold. The Earth Is the Weakest of the Flames," which I have quoted from above, begins with:

Milling inside on the lookout windows hundreds of moths
blot the cobalt beauty of heaven. A mass that neither finds itself

nor flies apart. Like buttercups floating in profusion from under a bridge,
their appearance equally strange.…

So much of the pure Bedient panache is reflected here. Just like these moths, Bedient's truth neither "finds itself nor flies apart," and while all the work, the "milling," only seems to succeed in "blotting the cobalt beauty of heaven," still the moths' delicate wings immediately call forth the image of buttercups "floating" in their own dizzy "profusion." Paradoxically, this failure of sight exposes the strength of the imagination in all its immediate, if radically unstable, beauty: the hard, static "cobalt beauty of heaven," which we do not find, pales beside the power of mind which can find these moths become "buttercups floating." Worth noting, too, is that the phrase "neither finds itself / nor flies apart" offers a subtle reflection of the paradox of our own natures. Interesting, too, that the sounds of the words seem busy making the link with heaven that supposedly failed visually: "blot" with "cobalt" and "beauty," and then "buttercups" and "bridge."

Later in the poem we see the moths again:

Stiffly the moths turn and turn back, bumping like
bumper cars in an all-night amusement park,

mimicking the upward sideways uncertainty of fire.

The bold humor of those alliterative 'b's, and the slipperiness of the phrase "upward sideways uncertainty" exemplify how Bedient's language burns with the sensory feel of every aspect of the rides of this life---be they the "amusement park" variety, or those that are more ominous in their offerings of "uncertainty." But it is worth underlining that Bedient knows how to give us a good time, regardless. In so many of these poems, Bedient relishes the ridiculous, the sensual, the sensory, with a youthfully naive, zestful carnality. In the poem, "Spring Rights," we find:

Come, Time;
flap for me, fish;
thump as you die, I never tire

of your theatrics.…

And the beast that rears up,
showing its dangle, is
me, ten minutes into tomorrow…

But concomitant with any exuberant hilarity in Bedient's language is his canny presentation of the potential in each instance for death, for loss. His virtuosity with sudden shifts of tone in these poems makes reading a fearsome and yet fully engaging experience, that resonates with the surprises and frights that life has to offer us. And though the "beast that rears up" may turn out to be "me" in the space of a few lines, this may or may not be at all comforting. Such convolutions show the complexity of psychological understanding and the emotional depth that Bedient can extract from such seemingly simple diction and pleasing irony play. But, of course, Bedient offers no answers to the psychological paradoxes he poses, which leave us with no more than the "uncertainty of fire." Now, did I say, "no more than"? I must be careful not to discount what is a potent, recurring image, which transubstantiates many times throughout the collection. In the first poem, if we follow those moths just three lines farther, we learn:

The moths will die here, where they were born,

in this cube unshuttered to combat the ecstasy of fire.
At dawn, I'll sweep the floor of soft rot, stiff rot.

Here is death's "soft…stiff rot," and the insular inescapability of life's cycle emphasized. And here is the moth's fiery dance with desire, proposed as a combative but ecstatic experience, which, regardless of its volatility, is more real, more substantial, than anything promised to us after death. Here, too, is the hint of sun's fiery daily renewal in the mention of dawn, which raises to our awareness the endlessness of the cycle of all life, the immanence of the natural world, from which the ego, the mind, is shut out. I can't help but think of Keats's old struggle, his desire for the immanence of the blackbird's song---the same song sung by countless generations of blackbirds---its union with a kind of endlessly repeating beauty, which no poet's song can ever achieve. Of course, Keats' attempt to capture his feelings for the birdsong in words, and thereby share in its immanence, draws him only further into his own crafting intellect, his heightened awareness of the mind's alientation from the natural world. In the light of Bedient's dawn, how sobering it is to see what little remains of the night's ecstatic combat. It seems that what is alluded to here is the artist's struggle as well as the man's; both burn brightly in Bedient's work.

In the poem, "On Leaving My Son's Wedding Before the Cutting of the Cake," the speaker, the bridegroom's father, twists the myth of Orpheus so as to grieve the naiveté of youthful hubris while addressing his son: "Tall and slender in your funeral sheath, you'd rescue Eurydice / from the fathers' clutches, though they've already stained / all things woman all things sweet and glad?" Such arch phrasing not only layers the myth's associations of loss and failed desire upon the scene, but also suggests the elder generation's complex role in influencing the younger generation's fate. And, Bedient's speaker is wise and world-weary enough to not only see himself in his son, but also to acknowledge the impotence of his fatherly admonitions, even as Bedient, the poet, expresses the intimacy between the two men, and the perplexing shifts and surprises of such love:

…A son
grows through the middle of his dad, custom hot, incurable.
You brush skin-ash from my shoulders I am father again smoldering loved.

Here, fire underscores the difference between youth, burning with hot-rod intensity, and age, which merely smolders. But while the brightness of hard-earned insight cannot be passed from father to son, still, these two are kindred spirits of physicality, of the sensual fires of the body. And a deep awareness, re-igniting their kinship, is passed---in this loving, caregiving gesture of brushing the shoulder---this time, from son to father. Bedient is expert at expressing the price of such intimacy, the pain of loss which is inevitable in fatherhood, even while his language glows luminously: "My green my hay-dust my blackening star what I love is not mine and it burns."

In another of the poems, "blue fire," we find:

The heart drives its stakes
into the garden's breath,
but it vanishes, narcissus, hyacinth,

it vanishes up the flues of the wind,
happier, even so…

Here is the heart itself, caught in the act of desiring, hard at its gardening, driving "its stakes into the garden's breath," attempting to have something of itself become permanent. But no such permanence is possible in Bedient's garden---flowers live their brief lives, and then the petals fly, ash-like, and "happier, even so," freed from the struggle. Their vanishing "up the flues of wind" is not unlike the bodies of Bedient's moths, their "soft rot" swept up. But how can we not return, as readers, to swirl those syllables across the tongue: "vanishes, narcissus, hyacinth." And, in so doing, don't we feel the poet has driven his stake into our hearts, and done a bit of planting? No surprise when these lines, with their subtle allusion to the poetic process, arrive in the poem:

Feign anything, it's still fire. A tinge
of the shadow of death,
a tinge of wind and sperm

make the flame hurt
like wine poured on frozen
fingers.…

Other issues are also alluded to in these lines: sexuality, which arrives with luxuriant force in so many of Bedient's poems; and the Eucharist wine of religion, with its failure to raise the deadness of those "frozen / fingers," the frozen reaching of the devout spiritual seeker. But it remains the "anything"-ness of what Bedient expresses with his image of fire, and by implication, the everything-ness of its mutability---in the calamitous and in the splendid alike---which the speaker can neither turn from, nor successfully contain in language. Of course, these are the very qualities which obsess him.

The fire banks
but does not go out.
This language skin I dangle

from the knife of my light
and the thumb of my bruises
(language blue

to those who know the legend of blue fire,
how it carries
the black into the white)

may never be the true
red of dawn's apple,
but the sun is my angel of fever,

the moon my angel of dry ice.
Between is not alone.
Everything is here…

Nearly everything of the creative struggle is here: our fascination with legends and beliefs; our endless interpretations of signs and symbols (how many ways might one interpret these blues, this black and white, this sun and moon!); our desire to be one of "those who know." All of which is set in relation to the artist himself thrusting with his vain attempts at truth, which "may never be true." Certainly this language can never be "true" to its original referents, whatever must inevitably remain occluded behind such wonderful phrases as Bedient's wily "true / red of dawn's apple," with all of its elusive, allusive relation to origin and Eden, as well as to the hellish fire that our desire for knowledge has supposedly wrought. But we can relish the language Bedient artfully uses to attend this dawn, which is imbued with both the implications of renewal, and of paradise lost. Nearly everything is indeed here, and yet, of course it isn't. Here is only the "language skin" of it all: these words, which this author can merely "dangle" in such an evocative, shocking, even repelling way from "the thumb" of his "bruises."

In the last section of his book, Bedient chooses to move us into the darkest realms of his vision. Yet, even in these last poems, we face what is most repellent with compassion: "openly weeping because we're killers, yes" (page 87). Even in these difficult poems, Bedient's clear, articulate eye, an "eye painted open" (page 86), is able to catch in his "language skin" this fragmented, often incomprehensible world's true light. It is a terrible, beautiful fire.

Rusty Morrison is an M.F.A. graduate of the Creative Writing Program at Saint Mary's College, Moraga, California. Her poems and other writings have appeared in Nimrod, Fourteen Hills, and many other literary magazines; she has poetry forthcoming in VOLT and ZYZZYVA.