G. C. Waldrep, _The Opening Ritual_ (1)

 IN MY CRUSTIER moods, I complain that G. C. Waldrep ought to be published by Norton or FSG or some other high visibility outfit, but I have to admit that the Tupelo Press volumes always look good, especially this one. Take a bow, Ann Aspell.

I was initially taken aback, though, by the painting on the cover (a crow attacking a hare) juxtaposed with the title phrase, "the opening ritual," as it left the impression that the evisceration of the hare by the crow was the "opening" in question. 

I had to read no further than the first poem to learn that yes, that is exactly the kind of opening in question, and the painting is so apposite to the title that I wonder whether it was selected by Waldrep himself. Consider the opening lines of "I Have Touched His Wealth with the Certainty of Experience":

Body of a young hare quite dead lying in a corner

of the pasture. It wasn't there yesterday.

A magpie alights, worries it a bit. The magpie's head

in quick shakes, left & right, its sharp beak

performing the opening ritual. 

So, yes, we are talking about the tearing open of bodies. "The first thing the dead / lose are their eyes," we learn a few lines later. 

The title comes from a letter written by Simone Weil, which makes me wonder whether the poem suggests the arrival of grace as a physical shock, wounding, even traumatizing... or even fatal, perhaps. "Love always uses us as if we were infinite, it seems, / although it must know, by now, that we're not," is how the poem ends. 

This ritual of "opening" may be something like what happens in John Donne's "Batter my heart, three-person'd God," with its invitation to "break, blow, burn, and make me new," but in the case of Waldrep's poem there has been no invitation for the breaking, blowing, and burning, nor willing acceptance of it all, but more the bewildered anguish of "WTF, God?"

(to be continued)