Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The Errancy_ (4)

 "EMERGENCY," I HAVE decided, ranks among my favorite Graham poems. It's a somewhat longer one, four sections over six pages.

Section 1 connects to some of the collection's "aubade" poems, in that Graham (or "I") is out walking at night, perhaps making a "'fore-day creep" as Willie Dixon put it in "Back Door Man," or perhaps just suffering from insomnia...anyway, it's a pitch-dark, moonless night, Graham is out walking by a river. She is "a woman, in a good-sized American town, alone, / late night, along a river's finery, / downriver from a power-plant, / upriver from a reservoir [...]". Due to the lightless circumstances she can only hear, not see, the river. The river is there, plainly enough, and through sound and memory she can imaginatively construct what she cannot see, but the subtraction of the seen arrests her, focuses her attention in a way that would not have happened to her in ordinary daylight. 

In Section 2, the river speaks to her--so the main pronoun here is not "I" but "you." The river seems to know a lot about her and to have decided opinions on what she should do next: "There is novelty, feel its blades, says the river, rippling, / push into perdition, your fault is eternal, exciting, exciting with seeming-- / the river falls over itself explaining -- / why do you expect to drown yourself in me [...]". What really got my attention, though, was the line--

(the garmenture of river, the light tucked into its raveling hem)

--which makes the river something like Pascal's manteau, a garment with a secret in its hem. And then, since the river (twice!) says "the stars are in me," the river is also Magritte's version of Pascal's manteau, starlight glimmering in infinite space through the cloak's holes.

Section 3 begins with a kick in the gut: "When she hit the child she felt something multiply." We have shifted pronoun gain, to a "she," a mother who has been stretched to her breaking point and is now conscious above all of silence...Pascal's eternal silence, maybe, given how utterly alone the mother seems to be. 

Section 3 put me in mind of the third section of Yeats's "Easter 1916," which takes us miles from Dublin into the countryside, a lively natural scene that seems unconnected to the politics and  personalities of the Easter Rising--only to turn out, once we get to the fourth section, to be eerily congruent with politics and personalities, setting up the impersonal, pleading, honoring voice of the fourth section.

In "Emergency," Section 4 is a prayer.

Let us pray. Why? Let us pray to be a torpid river, Lord.

Why? Whom shall we compose to be the speaker

for this void?

"I," "you," and "she" are all rejected, and we turn from river containing stars to Blaise Pascal himself, or more properly his sister, she who did the actual sewing of the Memorial into the hem of the manteau. After describing the sister's labors, the poem subsides into a series  of questions (as does "Easter 1916"), but I felt as a reader that we had passed through something and were--as Yeats put it--transformed utterly.