Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (5)

A CURIOUS COUNTERPOINT is struck, though, when the next poem, “Suddenly,” begins by suggesting that farming is still going on:

as if beside me

the solitary horse

neighs in the

 

neighbor’s distant

 

field […]     (77)

The furrows, the field, and the horse together recall Edward Thomas’s “As the Team’s Head-Brass,” written in 1916, less than a year before Thomas was killed on the Western Front. The poem’s speaker is having an intermittent conversation with a farmer, who pauses for a minute at the end of each furrow he cuts with his horse-drawn plow. The conversation is about the devastations of the war. Had the war not come, the speaker says, they would be living in “[a]nother world”; “‘Aye, and a better,’” the farmer replies, “‘though / If we could see all all might seem good’” (Thomas CP 29). The farmer has some faith in the future; indeed, the very act of plowing affirms that faith. At the beginning of the poem, two lovers are glimpsed slipping into a nearby wood, slipping out again at poem’s end. Their presence, too, suggests ongoing life amid disaster.

     Graham re-envisioned and expanded Thomas’s poem in “The Hiddenness of the World,” published in Runaway(2020), developing the idea of the disruption and possible renewal of natural cycles. She winked in the direction of Thomas’s poem, I believe, in “In Reality” in To 2040: “The winning ticket is still in my pocket. / The disappearing lovers are still in my satchel. / I have the stories we needed ready” (46). That the two closing poems of Killing Spree make contact with “As the Team’s Head-Brass” floats just a whiff of hope, as does an even more surprising quotation from Pound on the book’s last page: “what thou lovest well / remains” (80)—a line from the Pisan Cantos, a line about what cannot be lost even in defeat.

     And we also have the cicadas. They appeared in “Dawn 2040” in To 2040 and reappear in “Suddenly,” at a crucial juncture:

& the rising & falling silences

of terminal hunger

like the cicadas

revving up again

 

after having ceased long enough

 

for us to have forgotten the story

 

completely, for us to be

 

surprised again

 

by their engine     (78)

The disappearance of the cicadas, even for long periods, does not mean there are no more cicadas. Similarly, perhaps, some hopes can disappear, some principles can disappear, poetry of the farthest-reaching kind can disappear, but all these things may be underground, biding their time, to reappear when we have forgotten all about them. 

Raise yr voice in my voice.

Or raise my voice in yrs.

What remains is

 

always, only, voice—this, here,

this creature in the bony

enclosure, these cicadas in

 

the burning trees.  (79)