{"id":47725,"date":"2019-10-20T11:14:16","date_gmt":"2019-10-20T17:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=47725"},"modified":"2023-11-13T13:55:35","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T19:55:35","slug":"distant-truths-unusually-near-jacqueline-osherows-my-lookalike-at-the-krishna-temple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/distant-truths-unusually-near-jacqueline-osherows-my-lookalike-at-the-krishna-temple\/","title":{"rendered":"Distant Truths Unusually Near: Jacqueline Osherow\u2019s “My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Li-Young Lee, in a recent interview, describes a spiritual practice as \u201cfundamentally orienting, compass-like, pointing the soul toward its primary source,\u201d and that placing any other thing \u2014 politics, for instance \u2014 at the heart of the matter \u201cmust lead eventually to confusion \u2026 a form of dis-orientation.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Consider, then, poet Jacqueline Osherow\u2019s \u201cMoonrise, Salt Lake City,\u201d wherein the speaker makes an appeal to the moon, after mistaking it for an \u201cearly Renaissance annunciation\u201d:<\/h4>\n

Don\u2019t worry, moon; we all lose our bearings.
\nYou don\u2019t have to rise. Stay here instead.
\nI\u2019ll spot you; we could both use an ally
\nand rumor has it disorientation
\nis the least resistant pathway to what\u2019s holy.<\/h4>\n

In her latest book, My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple, <\/em>the poet, in her reliable avatar as a restlessly traveling, beauty-thirsting, devotion-seeking song-spinner, takes us through a myriad forms of disorientation, so that we can look with her at the holy and the beautiful. No chance, though, that we\u2019ll do it in any way straightforwardly \u2014 that we\u2019ll aim, like the compass needle, directly at the numinous. That seeking knowledge, practicing devotion, making or giving in to beauty, are anything but straightforward is both subject and method of these poems.<\/h4>\n

The speaker of these poems wants to edge nearer to what illuminates, but also mistrusts both her own tendencies and even, at times, her yearnings. In the gorgeous \u201cTilia cordata<\/em>,\u201d the speaker allows the perfume of lindens in June bloom on her street in a desert town, her home, to cast a synesthetic spell:<\/h4>\n

The breeze, sporadic at best, unloading cargo<\/h4>\n

Just to stay afloat, quickly abandons
\nany pretense of carrying a scent. Only the lindens<\/h4>\n

(a whim of early dreamers on my street)
\nfrom some inner surge of altruism, conceit<\/h4>\n

or pure naivet\u00e9, choose this instant
\nto loose, enmasse, their all-consuming scent.<\/h4>\n

I could spend its all to brief duration
\njust sitting on my porch, breathing it in.<\/h4>\n

This heady moment transports the speaker in memory to Darmstadt in Germany, where, three years ago, she considered, then rejected, a visit to the Judisches Museum \u2014 \u201cWhat I needed was another history\/\/ or at least a place where mine was less conspicuous.\u201d She finds herself in a city park where lindens are blooming, profuse, saturating the air, \u201cmore intense than on my street, the very linden\/ that kept me on my porch for hours dreaming.\u201d<\/h4>\n

It was, she says,<\/h4>\n

as if the trees themselves were in collusion<\/h4>\n

to throw me off completely. How could this
\nthoroughly alien, unnerving place<\/h4>\n

have anything in common with my home?<\/h4>\n

The question the poem goes on to take up is nothing less than the moral burden placed upon us by the coexistence of beauty with the great evils of history. How can the poet \u2014 how can any of us? \u2014 rightly turn our attention to the \u201cearth\u2019s loveliest offerings\u201d when its horrors, historic or otherwise, loom with such menace? The poet insists on self-correction, though: \u201cSurely it can\u2019t be good,\u201d she argues, to insist on “infus[ing]” the linden trees\u2019 blooming \u201cwith human beings\/at their very basest.\u201d<\/h4>\n

The give and take of Osherow\u2019s arguments, embodied as they are in narratives of travel and in lyric topoi, is one of her most potent instruments. Her voice is lithe, capable of, in turn, demanding, entreating, singing, and turning as if on a dime to switch between any of these modes. This is nowhere more effectively used than in the title poem, with the speaker imagining the look-alike, invoked by the owner of the restaurant where she gets her kofta and dal: she describes a rapturous sequence of perfect saris the look-alike might wear, each more subtly beautiful than the last \u2014<\/h4>\n

(yesterday: opal-colored, spangled gold
\ntomorrow: amethyst with gold-flecked edges
\ntoday, a remnant from her mother\u2019s dowry,
\ndiaphanous, if threadbare, near-black lapis
\non which the temple\u2019s oil lamps detect
\nsmatterings of milky white-gold pinpoints:
\nher mother\u2019s legacy a moonless sky
\nnow miserly, now profligate with stars)<\/h4>\n

She also imagines the look-alike as a perfect devotee, who repeats the words of an invocation with unwavering attention, contrasting it with her own wandering mind and focus. In the middle of a moment of self-excoriation, the speaker reconsiders her elaborately embroidered vision of the look-alike\u2019s clothes:<\/h4>\n

Chances are, she\u2019s pawned her bangles, if she
\never had them, wears the same all-purpose
\nsari (a hand-me-down from Gopal\u2019s mother),
\ncotton shawl, hemp sandals, every day.<\/h4>\n

The doubling and tripling back to posit, then critique, her own tentative claims reads as an honest set of obsessions, and it\u2019s disarming, but it\u2019s also cover for a rigorous investigation: the speaker tells us her own practice \u2014 on \u201cany given\/Shabbat morning,\u201d she tells jokes in the back of the synagogue, and deems herself a \u201cfraud, a hypocrite, a foul-weather\/believer,\u201d but even given this, she declares herself unwavering in \u201cdevotion to those words,\/the more incomprehensible, the better.\u201d<\/h4>\n

She\u2019s talking about the recitation of the words of the Torah, the words of God himself speaking to Moses, naming \u201cHis unnamed Name.\u201d The accomplishment of this poem, in its braiding of the speaker\u2019s confession, the summoning up of her Hindu double, and the dilemma, the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of ritual devotion, arrives in a gorgeous peroration: the speaker imagines, one more time, the look-alike, opening an ornate box to find a sari made of something perilously close to ineffable materials, one that the speaker urges the look-alike to put on: \u201cKrishna\u2019s awaiting you.\/ And I won\u2019t lie, look-alike, I\u2019m waiting too.\u201d As if the speaker, in imagining herself as devotee in the Krishna temple, awaiting an audience with the God, attends upon her own consecrated self, once removed.<\/h4>\n

What makes devotion, as practiced and articulated in these poems, beguiling is that it is both human-scaled and potent with the promise of astonishment. In \u201cFez Postcard\/Call to Prayer,\u201d the speaker conjures the vivid, multisensory medina, its scents and colors, textures and sounds, opened into prayer, as \u201cevery vista turns devotional:\u201d the prayer mats people carry with them, unrolling them for prayer, are evidence that \u201csanctity is portable,\u201d each mat \u201ca small\/ but resolutely holy house of prayer.\u201d Like the prayer that punctuates the day, the poems in this book create an<\/h4>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 atmosphere
\nnever without at least a telltale<\/h4>\n

smattering of freshly distilled attar
\nof the unabashedly eternal<\/h4>\n

as if a vial were always running over
\nready to anoint each head with oil.<\/h4>\n

The book\u2019s riches are almost overwhelming: the heartbreaking elegy \u201cBackyard Meteor,\u201d the villanelles (one of which appeared first in 15 Bytes<\/a>) and a ghazal, and the sonnets, the dexterous informality of which are a magic trick Osherow can perform seemingly at will, their deftness only pretending to be casual.<\/h4>\n

The poems in the last section of the book take as their sacred location the Alhambra, palace and fortress of the Moorish monarchs of Granada, Spain, which allows for a sustained consideration of order and the systems cultures devise to describe and enforce it; the terrible, bloody course of human history at this crossroads of Islamic and European-Christian cultures, as well as the launching point for Columbus\u2019s voyages to the Americas and all that followed; and, more generally, the expulsion \u2014 and worse \u2014 of the Jews; and the stories to which one might have recourse to imagine something better: the myth of \u201cthat golden interim\/ of Muslim-Jewish serendipity\/even if it has<\/em> been exposed as sham\u201d:<\/h4>\n

If history founders, I\u2019ll escape to myth;
\nif myth collapses, I\u2019ll pair up each word
\ntransfiguring each chiseled wall with faith<\/h4>\n

to one my own shepherds overheard;
\nand if that proves hopeless, there\u2019s still architecture,
\nits prophecies directly overhead.<\/h4>\n

Art, beauty, faith, myth, history: each gets its say in this beautiful, searching book, but the speaker is, finally, after something even rarer \u2014 a music that might take its origin from a harmony of the spheres:<\/h4>\n

I, for one, believe it\u2019s there,
\nthat my seventeen symmetries of length and breadth<\/h4>\n

are part of it\u2014their song that pure \u2014
\nthat they\u2019ve just stopped a while to catch their breath.
\nSoon, they\u2019ll be singing in my ear.<\/h4>\n

The reader of this book is very lucky, to stand so close to one whose ear is so finely tuned.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple
\n<\/em>Jacqueline Osherow
\nLSU Press<\/a>
\n<\/em>2019
\n<\/em>104 pages
\n$19.95<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Li-Young Lee, in a recent interview, describes a spiritual practice as \u201cfundamentally orienting, compass-like, pointing the soul toward its primary source,\u201d and that placing any other thing \u2014 politics, for instance \u2014 at the heart of the matter \u201cmust lead eventually to confusion \u2026 a form of dis-orientation.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1664,"featured_media":47727,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[1068],"class_list":["post-47725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-jacqueline-osherow"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/mylookalike.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-17 22:30:33","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47725"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70715,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47725\/revisions\/70715"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}