Somebody asked me,
but I’m not going
to argue about
the topic of the soul,
deduce or repeat
inductive facts
for its evidence.
For me it’s what
the Alsatian poet meant
when he wrote of
the “precision of
the indefinable.”
And I’ve risen
in the plain rinse
of that precision
a couple times before,
and before that.
But I don’t have any
depth for angels,
not Lawrence’s angel
which he thought was
made when a man’s soul
blended into
a woman’s soul. And not
Rilke’s angels—their beauty—
which he believed
was nothing but
the beginning
of a terror
he could just
barely endure.
I think there is
something somewhat
neurotic about
the prestige
and rarity
of angels—so,
I’ll stay plain,
even crude,
a turkey buzzard
among herons
and ruby-crowned kinglets.
And I would be cautious
of angels—Constantine the Great,
for instance, contracted leprosy
after dreaming of an angel
pouring water on him.
—From My Piece of the Puzzle,
Eastern Washington University Press (2008)
First thing: “the Alsatian poet,” in line 9, alludes to the artist
and poet Jean (Hans) Arp. Arp’s sculpture is a blend of organic shapes, corporeal,
floral, geologic, spherical, often evoking the human body in feminine forms. The
style is referred to as biomorphism, and it is deeply appealing to my eye. His best
sculptures have the presence of something erotic and yet indefinable. My nature
and my poems are grounded in both realism and fantasy, so I feel a strong connection
with those simultaneous hints of actual but nonspecific realities that Arp conveys
in his visual work. I find it attractive to trust the “precision” of
unknowable creative forces; it is a condition, not a belief system. The poem is
argumentative: I’m defining my inner inclinations toward the “precision
of the indefinable.” The speaker is impatient with both D.H. Lawrence and
Rainer Maria Rilke for maintaining the myth of “angels” as stand-ins
for a type of spiritual or ecstatic condition, solitary for Rilke, at once sacramental
and erotic for Lawrence. The closing lines about the emperor Constantine point to
the danger of believing in, or even being associated with, abstractions of ideal
purity (exemplified by the angel). By “I’ll stay plain,/ even crude,/
a turkey buzzard/ among herons/ and ruby-crowned kinglets,” the speaker of
the poem is declaring himself a type of personality, one symbolized not by a metaphorically
elite creature (like either Rilke’s or Lawrence’s angels) but by a bird
that could survive by its wits, with a heightened sense of smell and sight, a bird
that is not “pretty” and does not sing but instead makes grunting and
hissing sounds. The symbol works for the speaker of the poems throughout the book
My Piece of the Puzzle—a speaker grounded in realism and fantasy,
prepared to speak whether the words are “pretty” or not.
has published nine collections of poetry, most recently, Amnesty Muse (2011),
My Piece of the Puzzle (2008), and Parking Lot Mood Swing:
Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry (2004). After twenty years traveling,
moving around, and working mostly as a broiler chef and a carpenter, he became a teacher
of English and Creative Writing. He has taught at Foothill College since 2001.
www.dorenrobbins.com