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    Extra Hidden Life, among the Days
    Extra Hidden Life, among the Days
    Extra Hidden Life, among the Days
    Ebook192 pages2 hours

    Extra Hidden Life, among the Days

    By Brenda Hillman

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    About this ebook

    Brenda Hillman begins her new book in a place of mourning and listening that is deeply transformative. By turns plain and transcendent, these poems meditate on trees, bacteria, wasps, buildings, roots, and stars, ending with twinned elegies and poems of praise that open into spaces that are both magical and archetypal for human imagination: forests and seashores. As always, Hillman's vision is entirely original, her forms inventive and playful. At times the language turns feral as the poet feels her way toward other consciousnesses, into planetary time. This is poetry as a discipline of love and service to the world, whose lines shepherd us through grief and into an ethics of active resistance. Hillman's prior books include Practical Water and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the Griffin Prize for Poetry. Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days is a visionary and critically important work for our time. A free reader's companion is available online at http://brendahillman.site.wesleyan.edu.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateJan 16, 2018
    ISBN9780819578426
    Extra Hidden Life, among the Days
    Author

    Brenda Hillman

    Brenda Hillman is the author of 11 books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press. She has co-edited numerous books, including At Your Feet by Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar. A former Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets and a recent recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for innovation in literature, she is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California and lives in the Bay Area with her husband Robert Hass.

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      Book preview

      Extra Hidden Life, among the Days - Brenda Hillman

      I. The Forests of Grief & Color

      Perhaps grief is imagined to end in violence, as if grief itself could be killed. Can we perhaps find one of the sources of nonviolence in the capacity to grieve, to stay with the unbearable loss without converting it into destruction? If we could bear our grief, would we be less inclined to strike back or strike out? And if the grief is unbearable, is there another way to live with it that is not the same as bearing it?

      Judith Butler, On Grief and Rage

      This mycorrhizal network architecture suggests an efficient and robust network, where large trees play a foundational role in facilitating conspecific regeneration and stabilizing the ecosystem.

      Architecture of the wood-wide web: Rhizopogon spp. genets link multiple Douglas-fir cohorts http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2009.03069.x/full

      … I will open my dark saying upon the harp.

      Psalm 49

      On a Day, In the World

      We had a grief

      we didn’t understand while

      standing at the edge of

      some low scrub hills as if

      humans were extra

      or already gone;—

      what had been in us before?

      a life that asks for mostly

      wanting freedom to get things done

      in order to feel less

      helpless about the end

      of things alone—;

      when i think of time on earth,

      i feel the angle of gray minutes

      entering the medium days

      yet not built-up:: our

      work together: groups, the willing

      burden of an old belief,

      & beyond them love, as of

      a great life going like fast

      creatures peeling back marked

      seeds, gold-brown integuments

      the color time

        will be when we are gone—

      Whose Woods These Are We Think

      (ekphrastic haibun)

      When they ask What are you working on now that the elements are finished i say the elements are never finished; in China they have metal, in India they have ether, in the West we are short on time. Wood has also been named as an element. In white Euro fairy tales, children are sent into the woods, probably the Black Forest, carrying baskets covered with cloth made by child laborers just as factories are beginning. When i first read the Frost snowy woods piece as a desert child in the 60s, i experienced a calm as he enters the whose woods these are he thinks he knows, though i didn’t know that many woods in Tucson or a little horse thinking it queer or a village. What would it have been like to be sent out with a small covered basket if you were a peasant child into what we now call the ecotone, the region between two environments—a marsh with striped frogs for example—then on into the woods where a peasant uprising is being planned.

      We have sent them all into the woods

      We have sent them all into the woods

      We have sent them all into the woods

      & we know exactly whose thin logged-out woods these are. What do people need from poetry during the changes? The changes are immeasurable. Perception, form, & material locked into the invisible. Many need calm poetry, especially at weddings where they feel uneasy, & i would certainly write that way if i believed calm were key to any of it, but if what woods are left are lovely, dark, deep, they are also oblique, obscure, magical, owned for profit, full of fragile unnamed species, scarce on time, time that barely exists though people base their lives on imagining it does. i hoped to find some wisdom to send back to you & that is what i am working on now, my present hopeful wild & unknown friends …

      All-night Crooked Moonrise over Mountain Pines

      Scraping, on the horizon— & the disk

      rose, throbbing, to the triple cloud—

      the enigma responded: in the forest,

      a wood mind swayed on the crest

      while the angle brought ground water,

        always a thin other, down

      to the river …  Through lace life, late life

      light rises bent /// — you stand a while;

      & if, at midnight, that raw moon

      slashes your bed

      through the cage of the blinds,

      oh now the sweet owl

      calls to its cripple

      & hurries across the meadow

      where t i m e is carried, tranquil & stretched

      —— how can knowledge spread itself thus,

      unable to sort itself out? & you might weather this:

      you feared no one would love you

      & when they did, you feared

      you would not be forgiven

      such a small word, time

      yet it is friends

      with both nothings—

      The Bride Tree Can’t Be Read

      The bride tree puts down its roots

      below the phyla. It is there

      when we die & when we are born,

      middle & upper branches reaching

      the planet heart by the billions

      during a revolution we don’t see.

      Quarks & leptons are cooling

      on their infant stems, spinning the spinning

      brain of matter, fled to electrical dark

      water, species with names the tree

      can hold in the shale shade brought

      by the ambulance of art;

      no one but you knows what occurred

      in the dress you wore in the dream

      of atonement, the displaced tree in

      the dream you wore, a suffering endurable

      only once, edges that sought release

      from envy to a more endurable loss,

      a form to be walked past, that has

      outworn the shame of time,

      its colors sprung through description

      above a blaze of rhizomes spreading

      in an arable mat that mostly

      isn’t simple but is calm & free—

      Brief Walk at Salt Point Park

      —seal pups ar-ar-ar- —

      & the skin of the soul felt a chill,

      especially the left side of the

      S, facing the Pacific (specific Pacific

      specific  Pacific ar ar ar);

      sandstock burdock human s pines

      (does the s move toward pines or spines?)

      — buckwheat hardpan up a hill

      finding the rim of the miracle—

        fear blue shade sense

          blind made what tense

            pigmy cypress trill  or  hill

      (knowledge did not wreck  experience—)

      weather warped & nations fell

        over the edge of the miracle—

      —What thus doth keep love safe, brittle rhymer

      —Depends on what you mean by safe, little climber

      (To know without fear the mind of another)

      For the Lovers Abandoned in Sunlight

         Some friends had broken up—;

          i didn’t think they should,

        but still… (The bees had also

      flown away to the chrome woods—

        maybe the workers went ahead, but how?

          No one understood—) The lovers

           lifted yeses then a no …

        Why? (let’s not

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