By Michelle Bitting
It is not static, not one thing alone.
We came for the aspens, lake, the stars
And immersed our bodies in its scumbled eye,
The crater’s blue slap, the needled scepters of pine
A protection spell surrounding us
And the darkness swirling about our ankles and above
Our heads we raised to the night,
Hoping to be showered with dust
From the Pleiades,
Unafraid of the cold pearl,
The sting of leaves hosting secrets
In our skulls’ ghost canyons and trails
That somehow always lead home
When the telephone rings
And I hear my father
Has leaned back far into his chair of distressed leather
As we, too, were gazing at the wicked electromagnetic
Shooting out from nowhere
Zapping the ridges of the brain
Like a sudden storm of split constellations,
Dead memories and drink.
So hard was this coming meteor,
He bit his tongue nearly off
And lapsed into a shadow of himself
Where my mother found him,
Running to the breathless rattle, his head
Jolted back and tilted on its axis,
Mouth agape and quietly gasping
As she pressed her open O to his
And joined their planets for a moment, crossing,
Collapsing into a vacuum
Of sputtering seconds
Violent hours,
Galactic decades sucked and stalling,
Expanding and contracting like a nova
To a nebula of red alarm,
A blinding point of unstable giants—oxygen and gas—
The anointing molecules,
A cross of ash
And chrism of lips
I can press to my forehead, now, imagining it.
And—Isn’t that a kind of joy,
When you hold it
To your mind like that?
That sad, beautiful star
Falling through the universe, flashing
Before it dies—bright stroke
That once spit you, human,
From its convoluted core
And lit a torch to the future
Like lovers rapturing do, licking
The lap of death, flaming
Oblivion with burst light,
A final streak, a slash
Of seed against the black
Before they disappear completely?
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
My work as a poet and prose writer has always been concerned with rummaging memory and personal past to understand the present—in service of moving others through art—which is, at once, an act of defiance, survival, and resistance. These “political” creative impulses have continued to bloom and expand through persistent attention to practice, community pedagogical & presentational connection, and my ongoing returns to study creative writing and mythology in MFA, Masters, and PhD programs decades after my undergraduate work as a theater major in college. Also, in the wake of my older brother’s suicide in 1995 and the birth of my first son soon diagnosed with autism in 1998—devastations echoed twenty-five years later when my younger brother took his life. This, coupled with memories of violence in my childhood home, incited a volcanic force in me to “write or die” to free myself from it, or at least transform it into song and story outside myself—a mystical, survivalist activity. I try to expand beyond my suffering into new articulations by making stories others respond to. This, then, becomes a political and feminist concern, in how patriarchy and generational trauma impact future generations. And yet, without compassion and understanding for each other and the failings of those who came before, what are we? A critical and troubling predicament at this time of turbulent change. We are not the first to struggle through dark times. I’m a dot on the temporal line puzzling the facts and past into something that helps me “organize chaos” through language, image, persona, sound. The best we can do is keep singing.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
This poem was inspired by Zadie Smith's 2013 essay "Joy" published in the New York Review of Books and a more recent generative writing workshop led by Victoria Chang.
