Spoke the Dark Matter
Poetry
Sundress Publications, 2024
$12.99, 92 pages ISBN: 978-1951979652
The black-billed streamertail is, according to eBird, a “fabulous hummingbird restricted to far eastern Jamaica,” the male of which “sports an iridescent green body and black bill to go along with his characteristic tail streamers.” In a poem partway through her collection Spoke the Dark Matter, Michelle Whittaker apostrophizes “My Dearest Black-Billed Streamertail,” finding in it an animated locus at which — in which — humans may meet one another, and meet themselves.
The poem’s mode of address makes the bird a point of convergence at which speaker and reader meet. By speaking directly to the streamertail — “Apparently, we have chosen / to spend our lives in semi-solitude, / studying the intimacies / of caverns and coastlines” — the poem creates itself a space into which all are invited. The “we” can be the speaker and the bird, with the bird as the speaker’s alter ego, through which she gains self-knowledge; or the “we” can be the speaker and her beloved, with the bird as the stand-in for the beloved, so that the bird elucidates the love relationship; the “we” can even be the speaker and the reader, so that the bird represents what speaker and reader share. Each of these readings inflects the poem differently, but each is “live” in the poem.
That complexity, a comity created by the inclusivity of the “we,” is matched by another complexity, the multiplicity of emotion. The dramatic tensions within emotion that many studies have described (Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, Lynne McFall’s Happiness, and others), “My Dearest Black-Billed Streamertail” depicts. So the question, posed midway through the poem, “Don’t we crave conversation / as much as we desire attraction?” is matched, a few lines later, by a parallel question, “Don’t we crave staring at the horizon / as much as we long to hover?” Crave, desire, long — all are at work in the poem’s “we,” and all are party to another dramatic tension in us: “Sometimes we follow our instincts / as much as we desire facts.”
Such tensions inform the whole book, not only that one poem, and they do so nowhere more intensely than in the series of prose poems, each with the title “A Quiet Surge of Dystopia,” that, by their appearing periodically throughout, give the collection one element of its structure. In them, not a “we” but a “you” is featured.
In the first of these poems, for example, the “quiet surge” begins. “You were surrounded by resplendent pitch pine barrens, a string of mom & pop shops, a movie theater, a Handy Pantry, local farms, rocky northern beaches.” But this “was 1980, Long Island, when your neighborhood was somewhat racially and culturally diverse.” By the 90s, the dystopia, for all its quietness, was surging: “you watched vacant front lawns turn brown while families you grew to love were displaced by homogenous homeownerships who floated white boats and monster-tire trucks as the new garden view.”
The dystopia is not only a general condition, a shadow looming over a broad context; it is also very particular to the lived circumstances of the “you”:
Your various rental situations ranged from wolf-spider infested rooms, waterlogged
converted garages, and brick-layered studios piping in rust-brown water. The worst
apartments had broken heat during the winter months. Cold was as cold as a stiff neck
with a cold virus that would take you months to recover when it should have taken weeks.
The “Quiet Surge of Dystopia” poems culminate in an even quieter countersurge of resistance and hope.
For the first time, you wondered if the problems could be the solutions. Could industrial
waste be a resource or greenhouse gasses be fuel? Could money be put aside because
food grows on trees? Could the encroaching waters rotate turbines to create electricity?
As in any great musical composition, or formal poem, or pattern of any storm or system
in nature, could the slowly building tension inside you be leading to release? Could the
festering sensation that something was terribly wrong finally become a realization that
there could be a better way of life? That you could have it and deserve it?
It is not only the dystopia subset of poems, though, that end with a question: the whole collection does. The last poem in the book includes as a refrain a question the last instance of which is the poem’s, and the book’s, last line: “So, how long must we wait for help? /” In this, the last line epitomizes the whole book: the dark matter that speaks in Whittaker’s poems states hard facts, certainly, but, just as importantly, it poses hard questions. Among those questions, at least one — “Have we adjusted / the ownership of the word dark?” — identifies one of the book’s achievements: it advances that adjustment of ownership.