Two Minds

Callie Siskel’s elegiac debut, Two Minds, archives and distills the psychic disequilibrium wrought by a father’s early death. “Somewhere on earth is my Matryoshka doll,” writes Siskel in the book’s opening poem, “Mise en Abyme,” noting that “No generation lives neatly inside another.”

“Messenger” constellates objective correlatives for grief:

Picture a symbol of what you want
to remember. An anchor for the sea,

a cuirass for a battle scene.

Elsewhere, Siskel reflects on a Jewish mourning custom: “Cover the mirrors— // Forget yourself to remember the dead.” The trope of seeing and reflection extends to poems about Narcissus: “To echo is not to repeat, but to diminish.”

Cézanne, Caravaggio, Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Chagall, and Barnett Newman are among the painters Siskel evokes through ekphrasis, while evincing a desire to break the frozen time in works of art. In “Vanitas,” about Cézanne’s “Still Life with Skull,” she writes: “I am ready to see the mouth, / the opening, that feasted on time”; in “Bird in Space,” about a Brâncuși sculpture:

I wanted to touch the bird, so I knew it was art […]

Did I want to be the artist or the bird that will not explain itself?

There is freedom in that.

Images of materiality often close a poem, transcribing grief symbolically, as in “Succession,” which ends with a description of a father’s goodbye letter: “the script so tight, I can barely read it. […] The weight of it: three sheets.”

“Further or Farther” opens “[i]n California” where the speaker’s “windows are always / open.” From inside, she can hear the howling of the neighbor’s dog, and listen in on the neighbor vaunting their new swimming pool to a guest. A photo of her parents on their wedding day sits on the speaker’s desk as she talks to her mother, unspoken valences “accumulating silently like a daughter’s / rage.”

With ironic detachment (“There’s a way to position yourself above / where your life is taking place”), Siskel situates grief as self-creation: “Grief’s call-and-response / a mirror of our own making.” In “harnessing […] restraint,” the poet gives elegant testimony to grief’s fragmentation by dismantling the fourth wall of aesthetic representation:

This is mourning—
so poised

[…]

Tell me her body

will do more
than decorate the field.