![\"flicker_lisa_bickmore\"](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/flicker_lisa_bickmore1.jpg\")
<\/a>I am drawn to these truthful, soulful poems in Flicker. <\/em>They are natural in their telling, in a voice that trusts itself, and is wise, although it doesn\u2019t mean to be. The poet tries to transcend grief through repentance, to know what will work, searching for a way, here on the cusp of accepting her two lives: \u201cthe tranquil one and the conflagration.\u201d<\/p>\nIn Jane Hirshfield\u2019s mind, poetry that is alive has \u201cthe ability to include more and more shadows, colors and possibilities inside any moment\u2019s meeting of self and world.\u201d Bickmore\u2019s deftly made poems have shadows and possibilities that flicker as our lives do, here between ashes and fire.<\/p>\n
Her shadows include the aftermath of a long-ago divorce, the illness of a son, the loss of a girl she is close to gone to a town in some unknown place, perhaps a daughter or niece, a \u201cflame-colored cat\u201d she has named Lorca, and a god she offers prayers to because she feels responsible, whose voice she thought she heard, but is unsure she does.<\/p>\n
What also makes these poems so good, and memorable, are how the book\u2019s losses are ignited with her love of this world and its earthy textures: light in her Utah garden, passionate moments with a lover, the many birds she watches as they fly in, make nests, and surround her, the green scent of rosebuds, a meal she makes of red potatoes, asparagus, and a red pepper, for her children \u201cto eat and grow strong,\u201d and her dog\u2019s need to bay in the garden\u2019s lemon verbena each night, \u201cunveil[ing]\/from his blankets the dog-and-a-half\/of his body into the dark rapt air.\u201d<\/p>\n
She looks to the passion in music and song in other poems, which she naturally develops into metaphor. In \u201cOccasional Music\u201d she is lying in bed with her boy, looking at the slim moon, and thinks of the oncoming storm, both a literal one, and a portent in her life as \u201cfurioso, appassionata.\u201d<\/p>\n
She muses about the relationship between June Carter and Johnny Cash in \u201cRing of Fire,\u201d and questions \u201c\u2026Was she still married at the time\/Was he? Everything ends, country songs, marriages\u2026\u201d The poet runs her poem, and her past, over their heated love affair, wondering how June, who grew up on folk music, had fallen into that fire, even though the end of the poem suggests June\u2019s voice in her own alto version of the song was still passionate, though a bit rueful.<\/p>\n
\u201cHymn\u201d is the poet\u2019s own song that is to a male muse who has loved her for her own voice and whom she has not had to court, like a god.<\/p>\n
The above poems take a different turn from \u201cStation,\u201d where she seems to look for meaning, a place to speak, and be spoken to, finding herself in a church. However, there is a kind of song by the end of the poem.<\/p>\n
She is kneeling in a cathedral hearing a penitent whispering \u201ca way back to God,\u201d and examining the details of angels in tableaus, represented in the Catholic Church in contrast to what she remembers from her early Mormon faith: their wings are \u201cperidot, pycantha berry.\u201d Or \u201cshed[ding] yods of flame\u201d as:<\/p>\n
bright beatitude, leaves from a fiery tree.
\nIn my native religion, angels do not
\nhave wings in color, nor wings at all,<\/p>\n
I learned such attributes as pagan embroideries.
\nAngels do not cross species, are not fantastic
\nlike griffins or unicorns. They are men and women,<\/p>\n
as you and I, but with no blood,
\nand exalted\u2026<\/p>\n
In her comparison between the two, and even though she finds solace in the Catholic angels, with their colors, connections to the nature images she loves, she is eventually drawn back to what wings nature itself offers: an \u201ciridescent pigeon\u201d the wings of a \u201clittle blackbird with a red eye\u201d or the \u201cwhir of hummingbirds\u201d where she finally hears a voice that calls her name \u201cinto stillness.\u201d I feel the poet\u2019s gift, in choosing symbols of flight, yes, but also of humble uniqueness, their beauty in variance that perhaps allows her to accept the variances in herself.<\/p>\n
While voice is so important for the poet, the real voice, the natural voice, as well as looking to nature for some voice to help her, it is the poet\u2019s own nature she frets about, heartbreaking guilt over a human need for love and passion she has found. Encounters with a lover in a variety of places are beautifully written with an undercurrent of unhappiness for these times.<\/p>\n
For example, in \u201cLimit\u201d she says, \u201cIt is the afternoon after\u201d while she is at a pool where some children, strangers, are playing, and she watches a \u201cglissandi of water\/lift and fall, hang in the air, circulate\/through the grass, over bare skin.\u201d Here inside this image of lightness that screens the circular movement of her thoughts, the speaker tries to understand her vulnerability, needs, as well as limits:<\/p>\n
Then I wouldn\u2019t say, trying for dispassion,
\nthis is something resembling heartbreak.
\nI\u2019d know how to read the languages of birds<\/p>\n
crossing my path. For the last three days,
\nthey\u2019ve come near, two hummingbirds,
\nfawn-colored hoverers, one in the canyon,
\nanother by the stream; then a bluejay<\/p>\n
diving across the road. Wholly in the flesh,
\nor nearly, I\u2019d let their flight brush my skin,<\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The body, the body<\/em>: I say it as if some new things from which to learn And in \u201cThe Blade\u201d she speaks of a ghost-like child, a waif, she imagines as a watcher, and wants to write to him, as if he is her son:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019ve never dreamed, never written, this child:<\/p>\n or have always drawn the curtain, as I do now, pressing against the curtain, against the child\u2019s eyes\u2019 This connects with the following poem, \u201cI am driving home from the hospital,\u201d where her son is, and<\/p>\n the dark god,<\/p>\n the one whose name is on the altar, the one in a cold grip, and says to me, like a fool in the inhabited moment, And in the final lines of this poem, the dark god says:<\/p>\n Tonight it is your blond boy on the altar. in my house, and you will pay. But, The poet comes back to the body, weighing appetite and pleasure, suggesting the illness of the son is somehow related to pleasure as well, and that is why her guilt is hard to lose.<\/p>\n In the final poem, \u201cMedicine Mountain,\u201d she visits a medicine wheel built of stones, where Native American ceremonies and healings take place, the wheel\u2019s rope fence weighted with bundles and kerchiefs others have left behind. She looks for solace here in this sacred place, in the wilderness:<\/p>\n I looked west<\/p>\n into some far nation, the whole mountain floor So old \u2013 at least centuries \u2013 I wondered I\u2019d not heard of it, is long dead, and who still visits it for purposes I heard of a man once there, witness to the ceremony, I heard it might be the lodge where spirits reside, <\/p>\n Flicker<\/em> parts a moving veil where loss must somehow become a strength, passion become a transformation. Lost loved ones, still on the poet\u2019s shoulders, can never be left in the past, but will feel lighter in time.<\/p>\n I am struck by the originality of these poems, by how they lead us to surprising places in the poet\u2019s consciousness, dipping along with her between this world and the worlds of the past, and how through their writing and tender shaping show us how they might be the only peaceful way we have to reconcile the worlds we make.<\/p>\n These are poems that readers will want to savor for their astonishing craft, their truth and humility. As Yeats has said of memorable poetry: \u201cTake some line that is quite simple, that gets its beauty from its place in a story, and see how it flickers with the light of the many symbols that have given the story its beauty\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Flicker<\/em> <\/p>\n
\nit were the name of a deliverer,<\/p>\n
\nthe hard lesson of limits, when
\nI am spent and still full of longing:
\nwhat takes me, then says, here \u2013 no further.<\/p>\n
\nagainst him, against his feet in the gutter water,
\nagainst the heedless water rushing. Wake and write,
\nwake and write, now shut out the daylight<\/p>\n
\nsquint: he can\u2019t see us, nor into our solitary locked empire,
\nbut sees instead the nothing we leave behind,
\nsince we dream away in a room where we reign and reign.<\/p>\n
\nwho demands sacrifice, broken hearts, contrition.
\nthat god of this world seizes me<\/p>\n
\nyou believed that you could have
\nwhatever it was you wanted, you believed<\/p>\n
\nin the full days and nights of desire,\u2026<\/p>\n
\nHe says to me, you have stopped listening
\nto the voice of justice, you\u2019ve been a thief<\/p>\n
\nhe says, not from your own
\npocket. Take the coin from the boy.<\/p>\n
\ndescending away, rolling, submerged in an ocean of air.<\/p>\n
\nand upon inquiry its secrets still held: who made it<\/p>\n
\nbarely written and uncirculated is not saying:<\/p>\n
\nwho found himself floating above the ground.<\/p>\n
\nI heard it might be where the dead are:<\/p>\n
\nLisa Bickmore
\nElixir Press<\/a>
\n72 pp.2016<\/p>\n