The Business of Being Human

Jane Hirshfield’s “Mountainal” begins as a catalogue of natural wonders: “This first-light mountain, its east peak and west peak. // Its first-light creeks: / Lagunitas, Redwood, Fern.… // Its night and day hawk-life, slope-life, fogs, coyote, tan oaks.” For all that they include, these lines lack a single verb.

About halfway through the poem, Hirshfield’s focus shifts, and so does her grammar. “To be personal is easy: / Wake. Slip arms and legs from sleep into name, into story.” In describing the business of being human—our identities, our narratives—she uses full sentences, those building-blocks of story.

She concludes: “I wanted to be mountainal, wateral, wrenal.” Paradoxically, this wish to be impersonal, to be outside narrative, is the most personal moment of the poem, as well as one that implies a story (we might wonder: why “wanted”? Does she no longer harbor the desire?). Those three inventive words, of course, don’t exist in any dictionary, signaling the impossibility of ceasing to be human. In “Mountainal,” language—with its verbs and preformed vocabulary—traps the speaker into personhood.

 

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In “father’s last escape,” A.K. Blakemore describes a man who passes away—only to come right back. “He first reappeared as an insect…. / … there he was, very green and flat as a tapeworm.” His wife is “relieved by the attentiveness / of his small yellow eyes,” but not everything feels right: the insect “was so small and silent he could be easily lost around the house, sometimes / for days.” In this way, the missing man disappears all over again.

Finding these absences intolerable, the wife takes action. Her child relates: “i came home one day to find his body, so very like / a blade of grass, pinned to the noticeboard.” In an effort to keep her husband present, to put an end to his “last escape,” she has killed him—a suggestion, perhaps, of the impossibility of keeping the dead alive.

 

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Kevin Coval and Langston Allston’s excerpt from “Everything Must Go” blends word and image: in the midst of a square of text, by Coval, lies a square of illustration, by Allston. The design brings to mind tabletops, menus, coasters—all those familiar features of a bar, the subject of the piece.

A bar, Coval writes, blends intimacy and alienation in a perfect social cocktail; it’s a “thanksgiving family of strangers” where “people know your name and forget it.” The figures in the picture reflect this balance. The two young people at bottom right gaze in different directions, each wearing a disengaged expression—yet their bodies touch. The woman at the bottom left is sitting too far from anyone else to converse—yet she watches others talk. Like the rest of the drinkers, she’s looking away from us. But even in establishing distance, they include us in the bar’s lonely fellowship.

 

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In “Lark-Luster,” Eamon Grennan explores a quirk of the bird: it sings solely while it flies, and “only when song goes / as breath gives out does the bird let / itself down the blue chute of air.” The poem itself runs on a single breath—it’s one lengthy sentence, and its arrangement on the page, in a narrow rectangle, forms a “chute” of words that we descend as we read.

“Lark-luster” calls to mind “lackluster,” and the poem toggles between those two concepts, between the exalted flight of the bird and the mundane march of the humans below, walking “our grounded passages” in a “mind-defeated” state. The lark, which occupies both air and earth, connects the two. In “long silver ribbons of song,” it binds “lit air to earth that is / all shadows,” keeping us “alive to / whatever is over our heads.” Perhaps writers—with our chutes of words—can perform the same service.