~LYNN STRONGIN~
THE
HAZARDS OF "ANY HOLY CITY"
(PROMISES WE KEEP FOR LOVE
& THOSE WE BREAK): MARK CONWAY'S ANY
HOLY CITY
Conway’s book is entirely
rooted in modernity,
imbued
with the twenty-first
century. It is the here and now
which the poet maps
italicizing the fragility
of human life. We internalize
loss. We are
blessed
to the extent that we
keep, and err to the extent
which we
neglect the covenant. What this covenant
is Mark Conway does not
explicitly state; it is implied.
ONE
“I came back”
Poet Brother Antoninus
(William Everson) has written two books of poetry which came to my mind
upon finding Mark Conway’s Any Holy
City. Antoninus' two books are titled The Hazards of Holiness and The Crooked Lines of God. The title
Any Holy City clued
me to look for the spiritual in the work. I found it. I also
thought that the holy city would be one which a person could look ahead
to, euphorically in an afterlife, or else which a person could look
back upon the radiant nostalgic Eden of childhood.
I was wrong.
Conway’s book is entirely rooted in modernity,
imbued with the twenty-first century. It is the here and now which the poet maps
italicizing the fragility of human life. We internalize loss. We are
blessed to the extent that we keep, and err to the extent which we
neglect the covenant. What this covenant is Mark Conway does not
explicitly state; it is implied. (It involves the hazards of
holiness,
is written in God’s crooked lines.) The hardest silence is broken when
we are able to reach one another at the deepest level it is possible
for
one to know another. These poems are religious in my reading, both in
the Latin roots of he word re-ligio
(to tie together) and in their concern, to the point of obsession, with
the life of the spirit against a backdrop where good and evil clash,
the Biblical and the profane vie. His background is North America where
the “Software is incredible,” at the Midway “while the light /
dissolves behind our heads.” “The darkness / deepens as we travel the
electric divine.” Opposites are yoked, making a certain burnished irony
a signpost of the poet. Idiosyncratically, one turns back and gazes
ahead in order to re-find the inner Holy Land.
Riddled as life is by broken promises, or at other
times exalted by hard-won ones, how can
we keep track of what we sacrifice? (A child demands of us that we keep
our promises. An adult knows better.) Wrought, like finely tooled
silver, or leather, these darks and lights create a chiaroscuro
holy city. The myth of the eternal return braids the poems in the first
section. In “When You Come Back,” the speaker comes back “Not as the
dead / return in dreams or a sick child in a miracle,” but in an
ordinary moment as his beloved walks across the field. Yet this moment
perceived sharply enough confers miracle.
In “Before Alexandria” Conway speaks of what
will always be: “the river and then a rise / from a white bed.” The
trees here become members of a tribe “elders / limping at night,
singing through cleansed // secrets, the night-scent of needles.” Are
these needles an addict’s needles? Addiction is one of the things which
must be sacrificed. Addiction is seen in terms of a city, “the
Forbidden City.” With distinct Biblical overtones, Conway writes, “Now
that you have eyes, / now that you’ve seen, / you’re certain,”
mirroring
Christ’s admonition: you that have neither eyes to see, nor ears to
hear.”
What do those who become addicted rebel against?
“The endless jobs” may be one target, jobs that are “mindless.”
We are shown the “you” to whom the poem is addressed as faithless.
Relapse, it is implied, occurs: “because you will leave again, wrecked
/ and filled by a breeze, / a rush igniting the upsweep / of your
neck.” Suddenly, the addicted one, the ill person, the sufferer turns
and sees “the trees / just finished moving.” But he is powerless to
speak. If he could it “would be for everything / to be as it was.”
“Snow / geese ride / their white road south." This is the world where,
cured, the one punishing himself can come home. If only. . .. The
onlookers gather and whisper “and wonder what it’s like, the burning,”
but the addict knows. The one that got away, the ineffable longing for
early times pierces one. There is no way to get thru but to get thru. At the end of
Wretchedness Lane, perhaps, shines salvation.
Salvation is as problematic as the Holy City. In
“The Past Described, As a Figure,” Conway asks, “What were those days
like? Remembering / is like remembering // white, or water.” The words white and water recur, white as concept as in
Henry Vaughan’s “I Saw eternity the other night like a great ring of
pure and endless light.” What are those
days? Biblically titled, this section, “The Days of Isaac Burning,”
portrays ominous hours and whole seasons. Alexandria took fire and
libraries burned like candles (reminiscent of the Holocaust), or like
suet. "As for the manuscripts and their similes, / nothing was lost —
it was like a fire.” Evil, destruction, is pitted against salvation.
The third section of the book begins with a dark quote from Jeremiah:
“Who . . . indeed, would risk his life by coming close to me?”
Then comes one of Conway’s metaphysical time warps:
“Before this life, / there was another.” Desolate, this time was
dank: it was ignorant, “rain and lowlands / we might. . . might /
go on forever.” In a complex vision, the poet states that we were in
error, in fact we were “forgiven, you see, in that life / we were
young.”
Taken consecutively, the poems move from “Addiction”
to “Marginalia on Our Bodies” with its drug language,
“retro-rockets” progressing in graduated steps toward “vespers, /
singed / by a slight twist / of vodka,” clearly hair of the dog.
Earmarks of drugs, the ashen scars' "scrawled marginalia” are “left
fading.” Words sink back into the vellum of a purer time. Finally, is
there not redemption hovering near? In that night, “When workers
come to gather us” they see “Sanskrit praising the gods” going
back to ancient times “scars used to mark / where we’d been hurt.”
“Numbering the Thunder” is one of my favorites.
“Sitting in a single canto of torchlit May,” the poem reads to me like
a hiatus in an emotional storm. (The crooked lines of God begin to
straighten. The hazards of the holy city to be made safe, healed.) The
poet and his beloved count numbers between volts of flash lightning:
Seconds between bolts of lightning akin to jolts between bouts with the
drug. The magnetism of this poem is its mystery. The final three lines
remind me of Emily Dickinson’s poem on what dying is like: “First
chill, then stupor, then the letting go.” Listen to the rhythm: “First
the broken barn. / Then the cold. Then the gathering in.” In “Before I
Begin,” which I read as a love poem, Conway asks in his ultimate line
which he wants more: To be burned or to be burning? This question
threads Any Holy City,
charting the solitary individual’s struggle of passage.
• • •
“Divinity is contagious, / some sticks to me, / like
dust, or / drugs.” Here, personification is used, since it is a
word that speaks. “I pain / not. Nor shall I pant, / or want.” There
are washed up days. “I’m not Vishnu” (for me, not a best
poem), and there are days in which the poet and his family marvel at
the “scarcity of ocean.” [“Life on the Prairie, Continued”] Astounded
by “an aroused sense of lilacs,” the poet loses track of what he sacrifices,
for this is the poem in which that key line occurs. By a leap of
imagination, plains become mountains, “mainsails” can be seen “rising
in the wheat.” There is something visionary, miraculous about this. In
such flat country you can “find your body where you left it,” but the
main prairie message that goes along with a level horizon, with
flatness, is: “it’s customary to wait.”
And wait the poet does. What connects the dots
are epiphany moments. I find the opening of “The Midway” haunting:
The software’s
incredible, while the light
dissolves behind our heads—the
midway.
We coast on an unlimited sequence
of yes and
not-yes. . .
The darkness
deepens as we travel, the
electric divine. . . .
This electric divine is what the poet seeks and what lights
the sky like a thin line of lightning.
Like coal miners, “We do our best work in the
dark.”
After all, what is that work?
Escape has a dome of sugar, “a portable sky.”
Escape is not labor, akin to prayer.
Escape beats “sleeping on the knife.” Maybe our work is sleeping on the silver knife.
TWO
“Inside the end of the walkway”
“The Book of Isaac, Burning” locates us
in one of those God-forsaken twenty-first century mind-scapes,
land-scapes depicted often by painter Edward Hopper in the last century
— “Inside the end / of the walkway, entering dusk,” like standing
inside a cracked geode. This poem portrays children “to be born” who
“sit outside the evening, one / already there in the cold air.” It is
about being outside versus being inside. As parents begat the child,
they also “spoke / of other things / separate in the dark,” and there
is a piercing loneliness to this.
A poem with religious diction and imagery “Anonymous
Annunciation, Circa 1450" begins:
In scrolled aves
and erect
seraphic wings,
no one notices, her eyes.
Look far enough into her eye and find fear. For one is now
“On the Outskirts of the Lost Cities.” Who is anointed? An
anonymous holy woman? We do not know, but are made to see down that
violet tunnel, lapis lazuli, her eye.
“On the Outskirts of the Lost Cities” we perceive
“that the wandering / would be the more-favored” role because it
is “unexpected, exceptional.” Even its pain is exalted, “Even the gnaw
of the names, // faces shawled / against the dust.”
Interestingly, the poem is set in the unusual subjunctive: “That the
wandering." Again the temporal plays a key role: “later the trees bent
/ like wind stopped in mid-breath” which would “make him miss the
wandering," circling us back to the opening line, “That the children
and their children” thrive, sicken, die “very near here.” Place is
sacred. The very hunger is cherished. Lastly, “Like the hymn he sang /
praising the road that took him,” — the poet is exalted to praise his
journey and the amazing end “where a son finds himself // staring out
from his father’s face.” The inescapable loneliness of the journey,
wanderer through life, is eased for a time as he is separated from his
father, “only years and anger.”
Anger is a strength in this volume expressed with a
cover painting in violent red which depicts the great San
Francisco earthquake throughout the poems. “There's joy for the
well-turned / shin-bone, praise for the wrought / torso," which joy I
find, as well, ironic. Shin-bones are not usually well turned, nor
torso “wrought” (which suggests iron, steel, metal, something hard, not
pliable as human flesh, or marble in its translucence mirroring human
flesh).
I find Any Holy
City travels deeper and deeper into a dark night of the
soul. We were virtuous, but was it not, after all, for reward, “A
white stone castle / to teach . . . courage, small guns / to set the
blood”? We know on which side our bread is buttered. We are
students of war, “close, hard / against the fire.” The keeping close is love’s, but the
world at large is war. Bitterly, with overtones of Plath, the
poem
winds up: "After- / math, blood puppet, my salvation, / dream has come
to dream.” This is to say tenderness is close to a blood support and
everything self begetting.
• • •
If one looks to see the past as a figure
it’s like writing
in water: water and white are
recurrent words. The tone of Any
Holy City becomes bleaker until “White
Echo,” where intense loss is echoed in the father’s unnatural loss of a
son. Other characters come in, in Biblical fashion. These are “The
Daughter” who “Tells of her Dream” in which, out of the smoke, she gets
a sister. The two sisters are “threshed / and laid straight in the
furrows, / this was before the harrowing.” Reminiscent of Hieronymous
Bosch, “Birds with kind faces examined / our bellies, we laughed / at
the tiny bites.” “The nursemaid descended / from her patch in the
desert, / slapping the stones from our hands.” There is no comfort in
this nursemaid who has stolen the bread from the children. If the
daughter’s dream is foreboding, “What Isaac Knew of Forgiveness”
(number 8 in these Biblical portraits) is even more sombre:
He counts on me
like he counts the corn,
worrying down to Harvest.
The moon fattens on cheese while the father sleeps, the
child’s “little
head on fire.” When father leaves, he will forget cigarettes, The
amazing lines punctuate the darkness with sharp bright:
In the morning I still
like
to see the thorn riding
its rose.
I am struck by the image in these poems of holiness, based
upon
Biblical models and oratory, the
thorn is indeed riding its impaler,
its crucifier.
This reminds me of Medieval ballads in rhythm and
image. “The mare
blooded / on the flanks” will return and Isaac will clear “her eyes
with water.” Love creates anger, it is so intense: “he said I am
forgiven. / I only have to ask like the bid / for seed.” But the
speaker of the poem slams the bird’s beak shut, saying cruelly, “Sing.”
Remember, this is Isaac speaking.
“The First Temptation” deals with evil, also. Gods
are “soiled,
mindless / as children, // bandaged” who come to “parley, at / the
ransom.” Only the old ones, who are relieved, nod when a priest claims
knowledge of their language and says: “Give up / what you love
most.” This is the highest sacrifice of whom we love most.
Ironically, “The gods are always with us / as strangers, // as birds.”
Full of venom, visible from high on the hill the gods leave “as geese,
/ braid into the clouds / with their cry.” This is a desolate view of
human life. It is the first temptation: that one give up whom one
loves. The sacrifice by Abraham of Isaac makes the stark claim,
“There may be justice / in retribution, but it isn’t // human.” The
knife confirms the wound in our short life. In the wake of murder
“gulls circle / crying like misers for the seed.” Again there is the
cry after the seed. The ultimate six lines of this poem are some of
the bleaker lines I know in contemporary poetry.
A father will drive
his son
into the burned ground
like a post where he
leaves him
to learn patience, he
leaves him
the opened field,
the laughter of the birds.
This is a post-fall world, or worse, one which has no
God.
THREE
"The end of sacrifice"
“The boy is curled / at my side, as
though sleeping.” The boy is the close of life and its summation. I
perceive no hint of a Messiah in Any
Holy City. But I do glean Conway’s belief that we can be granted
more complex and luminous perspectives on our daily life akin to
climbing a hill or mountain and pausing to look back on the towns in
the valleys we have passed so far along the way.
If Any Holy City
doesn’t end in darkness, it does end in
disillusionment. Postcards come from the “Holyland." Cypresses turn
before “the hooded gaze,” suggestive of the hangman. We glean
postcard-like portraits of W.H. Auden "slouched / in a New York daze of
snowflakes.” Then there’s pictured the “funereal bar, Dublin,” where
Joyce strums a guitar, and Salvador Dali is present, the Florida years.
None of these years or portraits is celebrant. In fact, “At last, a
haloed old woman.” Those the poet embraces include “The cast-off, / the
disregarded,” saved but “somewhere else, not / in the Portrait Hall /
of
nostalgia." He climbs like Judas to have “sold / our teacher to the
guards” an astonishing claim, but not “for the purse of gold.” All that
the poet wanted was the recognition. “And the kiss....” This is
deeply disturbing for is it not the Judas kiss?
“Where Is It Written” is about the ghostliness, the
eeriness of family
life. Arguments are waged against tomorrow, children who discuss plans
to be enjoyed without parents. The poet marks “the spot beneath the
graphs / of stars where we built the small houses.” How strange a
montage of trees, paths before our houses. Stars give out in morning:
the world looks sprung, “the white, / connected room where we live”
implies a disjunction. We do not know the beds in which we have slept,
made love, the kitchens in which we have broken bread, and nourished
each other.
• • •
Then come three poems which, as I read them, deal
with death: “Out of
Nowhere,” "Before We Are Raised,” and “With All We Have,” my favorite
lyric composed of four quatrains:
When I’m nothing
beneath the tree,
skin burned in memory of the sun,
lasting the greater part of
Tuesday
in relaxed and ample ignorance
When I have done
enough to lay
my glasses down. . .
Before the end, when all is done, looked
at before he leaves, he
promises he will “watch / the white air work its damage in the trees.”
Beyond clock hours, he will look back at luminous time working its
paradoxical labor. Here the skin “burned in memory of the sun” differs
form the skin of the addict, the tattooed skin, “Marginalia” of
the opening poems of Any Holy City.
If the early poems in this volume are about relapse,
the final ones are
about resolution, however paradoxical.
I expect the
garden to gleam
more and to yield
redder
flowers
A lake glistens “where foreign friends
glide / laughing about //
perfections of / summers.” The poet’s life is more humble, ordinary.
Silence will be here, like a child or stone; one will be alone “with
nothing else” for help. But the ears of the ears will hear, the eyes of
the eyes will see. “We'll hear / bees whirring in / armor.” And this to
me
is the unfolding of the holy city he has been seeking.
CODA
Escape does come “by sea.” “Ulterior
Summer” arrives in which the poet
swims back to the raft, surfacing to see wife and son “remember what it
was like / not to be there.”
Not being there can be both a good and a fearsome
thing: “Eternity may
not be too long to be gone,” says Conway in “Hearing of the
Astronomer’s Death on the Road Home from Moorhead.” For Conway there
is, however, more than one eternity: there’s “a third eternity
slipped / between the two others.” In this third eternity the poet is
driving “through Manitoba / while late static clogs the radio.” The
static of daily life is beyond him. This is lonesome land, radio land.
But the word is the poet’s “imperial tool.” The word
is powerless to
“relate wonders” until the poet breathes life into the syllables,
thus takes the inanimate diphthongs, vowels, consonants, to impart
wisdom. “First Body,” singles out how we came to love this life — “by
wanting / the next.” Like hill overlapping hill, there are the three
eternities for Mark Conway. In a strange way, could one be
eternity-present; the middle one, eternity past; and the third the
sweet hereafter, or eternity to come?
• • •
A child demands of us that we keep our promise. An
adult learns that
promises are often broken. Neither romantic nor stark realist, Mark
Conway comes to me as a romantic
realist inspiring one to dwell upon
forgotten ecstasies of childhood, and to experience the luminous,
particular bliss in the present moment.
An eidetic image hangs in the filmic air, white,
ethereal (after the
projector’s motor is cut.) The Midway floats in the mind’s eye, perhaps
a rollercoaster at night, “The software’s incredible, while the light /
dissolved behind our heads.” We travel “the electric divine,” the
darkness deepening into which we are moving at the speed of thought.
Conway’s is a deeply problematic, ironic vision of human life on earth.
But as he would have it in “Miners on the Prairie,” “we do our best
work in the dark,” a noble dark of our own making who dwell in a world
of bee boxes and "A whirring spiral / rising like the mayflies / by the
lake.” “It is no mercy to have lived your life,” it has been an
adventure, an advent. Mark will travel with his dead brother whom
he never knew in a journey as symbolic as any in the book. He will ride
“through / the market of Tyre, oh, any holy city” until he realizes
what the stillborn lacks is something that he, living, still requires.
This is a first book, but not one launched by a
young man. It is set
forth with assurance and conviction. The poet is way beyond nonage.
Here we have language enshrined the way a handsome
silver beaker,
a gold chalice tooled by Benvenuto Cellini enshrines artistry,
enchants the eye. Conway portrays the uneasy, fragile human condition,
the clutter and dailiness of our lives. Deeply involved with time
(that dust and body which comprise history), we see the wings form,
“trying to fly away / from the body.” It is the inevitability of this
attempt and the ultimate impossibility of its realization which make
“the robins scream / over scattered barley” and make the poet sing.
Conway, Mark. Any Holy
City. Eugene, OR: Silverfish Review Press,
2005. ISBN: 1878851225
$14.95
© by Lynn Strongin
