The best thing I saw this week: this poem about a mother
The best thing I saw this week: this poem about a mother
This Mother’s Day marks the 15th anniversary of my mother’s passing.
My mom and I had a complicated relationship, to say the least; it came as no surprise that she managed to time her death just so that it overlapped with Mother’s Day.
If you’re one of the many who find this Hallmark holiday painful as a tub of Morton's in a stab wound, I’m right there with you.
Something I was not expecting on this irksome week was to walk into a poetry bookstore and stumble onto a book of poems that utterly rattled my motherless soul. AR:RANGE:MENTS by Esther Kondo Heller was turned away from the rest of books on the shelf at Open Books, so that the cover was facing out. No note to explain its reason, author, or vintage, just its very cobalt blue, paper cover face looking back at me. I opened it.
I imagine being in the city with you sometimes now, Mama, us holding hands, me telling you some random fact about a place where the ice cream is good, you ask me something
. . . something
A jolt. Did anyone witness my soul crack in public—the strangers to either side of me fingering through spines?
It was the part about the ice cream that got me.
And the random fact.
Because that’s how it always is, isn’t it? The dumb little things so banal and random they don’t register in the mind, let alone in the memory, but that, once wakened, you grope for fruitlessly. Also all the dumb, banal, and fantastic things I ache to tell her about, on a wandering walk: That I got divorced, then married again. How I became an artist—she'd be proud (though still judgmental, no doubt). How I'm still trying to learn to sew—we'd laugh. You know that guy on tv, yes that one, he’ll become president—twice!
I do get to talk to her in my dreams sometimes. I'm grateful for that.
Esther Kondo Heller's mother didn’t appear in her dreams until almost 19 years had passed. The book describes the dreams when they do come. As it progresses, AR:RANGE:MENTS feels like it's peeling back layers slowly, unfolding a story told in intimate little puzzle pieces. The poems themselves are visually ethereal, a spare and spacial kind of poetry concrete. Or maybe composition is more apt a description—a soundless musical score that maps out and taps into the place where language, on its own, fails to fully go. The poems at times appear as erasures, cropped photos, subtitled film stills, and other forms of lacunae, scotoma, voluminous moments of silence, and, of course, wordplay spun of muttering, of Mutter herself. It is a grappling, across the spectrum of language, for a tongue that speaks the dialect of dream and death. Taken together, the poems comprise a sort of speaking in tongues. It felt like a secret language to come across it, Heller saying things I hadn’t heard anyone else speak aloud in 15 years.
mama what should I call you now that you are gone?
froth: spirit: marrow: wind
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Open Books: A Poem Emporium. It's a special place, cozy and welcoming, that's right around the corner from Cherry Street Coffee in Pioneer Square. They have lots of great events, which you can find here. Next time you're passing by, stop inside for 15 or 20 minutes and wander the shelves. Go with no agenda other than to leave with something that cracks your soul open in public. Or at least makes you tingle a little. Odds are, you'll find exactly the thing you didn't know you were looking for.
Amanda Manitach is a visual artist and the editor of Public Display Art. The daughter of an evangelical minister, she spent her childhood in Kansas and Texas drawing on the backs of church bulletins during long Sunday sermons. She eventually dropped the faith, but not the pencil. The best thing I saw this week is an ongoing documentation of art encountered in the wild.
