Personal note: Not my best...but crunched in a day
Postcards from the Mirror: Cecelia Woloch’s Narcissus
“I doubt/ I am aware” is etched into the WC mirror in Café Les Philosophes, and it isn’t hard to imagine the speaker of Cecelia Woloch’s Narcissus edging away from the mirror, wondering who am I? How did I arrive?
Woloch’s elegy to worn-out love echoes with doubt, and eventually hope, and is haunted by desire, “We were husband and wife in that house because that's what we'd been pronounced,” she states in “Postcard to Kim from The Cafe Les Philosophes,” as if by addressing her failing love is the way back to love, a journey fraught with danger, both physical and romantic. While walking with a spouse/lover along the Lethe he “plucked from the grass/ a single flower by its throat/ to shut me up.…” presumably the same lover who in “Postcard to Kim” “was angry and swinging a bat. He was maybe drunk. It was maybe my fault.” The striking image of the small flower, perhaps a Narcissus, choked by the hands of someone you once loved is arresting; the passion is present, the anger of choked flower, the swinging bat, as is the strident ache of self-destruction. She’s choosing this lover, at least for the time. Woloch does not play the blame game, nor offers explanations for despair. This is the speaker’s heart, take it or leave it, “guilty coat” and all.
Throughout Narcissus Woloch mirrors imagery: bird, wing, salt, mirror, silver, kissing mouths. They are like wild flowers at the edge of a meadow, and Woloch, as if standing by a pool, plucks at their reflection, the ripples spreading out like a shudder following a lover’s touch. The images double so that the “sparrow of her heart” returns as the wing-like “white sleeve of a blouse” of two older lovers, and as bones from a meal of birds in “Wish,” where the lovers “have never touched one another enough/…have never completely eaten fill.”
It is the hunger of love the speaker wrestles with, and identity of love, how easy it is to become the loved, something possessed, something held so tight it cannot breathe. “Even my sleep belonged to him./ Even my rising, almost weightless/ — bride of everything — was his.” This possession of spirit is an iron spike in the heart of the first section, whose bitter lover wants a woman who “was salt, a woman weeping,” that he cannot, or chooses not to look upon, and who keeps a “house of shut-up-and-lock-the-doors,” the speaker’s own voice empty as Echo’s voice must have been when Ovid imagined her alone, bodiless, unable to love, to touch anymore, spurned by Narcissus, and by her own desire made silent.
Many of the poems in Narcissus are postcards, and the epistle form serves Woloch well, adding an air of homesickness to the already sorrowful tone. The exotic enhances the longing and haunting, especially in “Postcard with Lisa, to Lisa, From Metro Line 1” where a man falls to his knees, bloodied and speechless, where some of the passengers do nothing, “A young girl clipping her fingernails furiously, clippings falling into her lap.”
What becomes the bloodied stranger is mystery.
But what becomes of the hero of these poems? Is there a happy ending in sight? The speaker who, if not running towards the future with open arms, is at least moving towards healing, “It's the middle of our lives and night and we walk toward everything,” she states in “Postcard with Sarah, To Sarah…,” and then later dreams of a “country… steep as a mirror.”
But Woloch’s speaker is wild as any weed, as any wing from a bird aloft, “How lovely, the way we wreck ourselves on the world; how we shine in it, too,” the speaker pines in “Girl in a Truck…” which begins the second section of Narcissus. The speaker has returned, not only to America, to Georgia, but to where love “made a sparrow of my heart//Whose name is light inside my mouth.” The speaker is reenergized, but even this love aches with danger despite a fresh start in “New Year:” “We might have escaped, then, those other doomed loves. Though maybe those other doomed loves were our fate… we got back in the truck like two fugitives, dark heart, back on that sky of a road.”
The speaker’s desire is matched only by her “own wild emptiness,” and in the end hopes her heart could be freed “might be lifted and cupped, again lifted, let go.” Woloch’s lyric and prose poems are liquid, much like smoke, rivers, or the path of a worn-out sparrow striking across a meadow, Narcissus is damaged beauty, the hope for love echoing through its movement.
Postcards from the Mirror: Cecelia Woloch’s Narcissus
“I doubt/ I am aware” is etched into the WC mirror in Café Les Philosophes, and it isn’t hard to imagine the speaker of Cecelia Woloch’s Narcissus edging away from the mirror, wondering who am I? How did I arrive?
Woloch’s elegy to worn-out love echoes with doubt, and eventually hope, and is haunted by desire, “We were husband and wife in that house because that's what we'd been pronounced,” she states in “Postcard to Kim from The Cafe Les Philosophes,” as if by addressing her failing love is the way back to love, a journey fraught with danger, both physical and romantic. While walking with a spouse/lover along the Lethe he “plucked from the grass/ a single flower by its throat/ to shut me up.…” presumably the same lover who in “Postcard to Kim” “was angry and swinging a bat. He was maybe drunk. It was maybe my fault.” The striking image of the small flower, perhaps a Narcissus, choked by the hands of someone you once loved is arresting; the passion is present, the anger of choked flower, the swinging bat, as is the strident ache of self-destruction. She’s choosing this lover, at least for the time. Woloch does not play the blame game, nor offers explanations for despair. This is the speaker’s heart, take it or leave it, “guilty coat” and all.
Throughout Narcissus Woloch mirrors imagery: bird, wing, salt, mirror, silver, kissing mouths. They are like wild flowers at the edge of a meadow, and Woloch, as if standing by a pool, plucks at their reflection, the ripples spreading out like a shudder following a lover’s touch. The images double so that the “sparrow of her heart” returns as the wing-like “white sleeve of a blouse” of two older lovers, and as bones from a meal of birds in “Wish,” where the lovers “have never touched one another enough/…have never completely eaten
It is the hunger of love the speaker wrestles with, and identity of love, how easy it is to become the loved, something possessed, something held so tight it cannot breathe. “Even my sleep belonged to him./ Even my rising, almost weightless/ — bride of everything — was his.” This possession of spirit is an iron spike in the heart of the first section, whose bitter lover wants a woman who “was salt, a woman weeping,” that he cannot, or chooses not to look upon, and who keeps a “house of shut-up-and-lock-the-doors,” the speaker’s own voice empty as Echo’s voice must have been when Ovid imagined her alone, bodiless, unable to love, to touch anymore, spurned by Narcissus, and by her own desire made silent.
Many of the poems in Narcissus are postcards, and the epistle form serves Woloch well, adding an air of homesickness to the already sorrowful tone. The exotic enhances the longing and haunting, especially in “Postcard with Lisa, to Lisa, From Metro Line 1” where a man falls to his knees, bloodied and speechless, where some of the passengers do nothing, “A young girl clipping her fingernails furiously, clippings falling into her lap.”
What becomes the bloodied stranger is mystery.
But what becomes of the hero of these poems? Is there a happy ending in sight? The speaker who, if not running towards the future with open arms, is at least moving towards healing, “It's the middle of our lives and night and we walk toward everything,” she states in “Postcard with Sarah, To Sarah…,” and then later dreams of a “country… steep as a mirror.”
But Woloch’s speaker is wild as any weed, as any wing from a bird aloft, “How lovely, the way we wreck ourselves on the world; how we shine in it, too,” the speaker pines in “Girl in a Truck…” which begins the second section of Narcissus. The speaker has returned, not only to America, to Georgia, but to where love “made a sparrow of my heart//Whose name is light inside my mouth.” The speaker is reenergized, but even this love aches with danger despite a fresh start in “New Year:” “We might have escaped, then, those other doomed loves. Though maybe those other doomed loves were our fate… we got back in the truck like two fugitives, dark heart, back on that sky of a road.”
The speaker’s desire is matched only by her “own wild emptiness,” and in the end hopes her heart could be freed “might be lifted and cupped, again lifted, let go.” Woloch’s lyric and prose poems are liquid, much like smoke, rivers, or the path of a worn-out sparrow striking across a meadow, Narcissus is damaged beauty, the hope for love echoing through its movement.
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