Solfrain’s Temporary Beast is haunted by the spirits of dead family members, spirits of miscarriages, and all the loss and woundedness of the human condition. The first poem “Don’t Go to the River” is like a Koan that takes up a tangible moment examining its various facets and perspectives:
“Don’t go to the river to see stones.
Friend, that is a waste of a morning,
Inside your body there is a river
And stones smooth and brown. You
Will have a good place to sit while
You watch yourself flow by. Maybe
A leaf will drop on your river...”
And thus framed and prepared, an inward path and personal journey commences, one in which she saves a place for the reader to join her and experience with her the joys and pain of “My Human Condition”, the first poem in section 2. In this poem she makes the startling observation: “Each morning my child releases the doves that sleep in her/hair./She wakes early, consults the cat on his evening.” After this sweet and inviting image she proclaims: “The first spirit got a bum egg and my tube exploded./For fourteen hours/I bled internally, then blacked out to a hand opening the/moon.” This description of an ectopic pregnancy and its life-threatening consequences is jolting, a slap of cold water in the face. What happened to the peaceful, introspective river? The river, a blood system, of turbulence and disruption and when the disturbance is an exploding Fallopian tube, the resulting bleeding can be a life-threatening event. Is this why in the next stanza she says: “When I walk to work, I carry the schoolyard’s bright/cries in my chest”? She knows firsthand the thin walls of the vessel that can so easily be disrupted and cause a near death experience.
Rivers, water, geology, and quantum physics are recurring themes throughout the book and the internal river in the first poem initiates this imagery.
In the poem “Grownup” Solfrain, scooping handfuls of her mother’s ashes: “...one Easter Sunday/You stood on a cold beach and tossed. The wind blew her/back onto your body, into the seams of your shoes (igniting,/...a decade-long crisis re: what to/do with them.)” Almost two decades later she has a different approach to scattering her father’s ashes and “chartered a lobster boat”. Despite the practical turn, it is no less haunting. A friend claims, when attending the writer’s reading, that she can hear the long-lost mother approving of the reading. The writer then makes this astonishing observation: “Love for them has made your heart permanent. It dashes itself/against the cliffs, gray and vertically veined with mica.” The pain of remembrance sparkles in a “vein”. Then another startling observation: “Lobsters can swim up/to thirty miles per hour, which is fast, but you would like to/point out not as fast as the suits who sip up the dead.” Then another watching-the-river-flow-by moment: “Later, you return home to the city and watch the glue fall off/the stars. There’s a man on the subway whose face you want/to touch.”
The result of these stunning lines is a reluctant realization that being a “grownup” is possibly unbearable and certainly not for the faint of heart. Being grownup is learning to live with loss, even the searing loss of parents and to be so bereft the “glue” falls off the stars leaving them vulnerable to dislodgement.
And so, where to from here? This is only a few pages into the collection. Running throughout the book are a series of “Rorschach Lorca” poems that provide a sort of spine and structure and whose themes tend to invoke “infinity”, the night sky, stars and eyes. The first, “Rorschach Lorca: Poem of a Tiny Infinity”, tells of the road to the cemetery: “though with your own eyes/you saw morphine separate her//from her container. The rain/has also turned liar – //yes of course I will drop gems on her home and//coax herbs by her lintel.”
Another is “Rorschach Lorca: The Insomniac Moon”:
“When the moon sets sail through the bivouacs of stars
The nightingale closes its throat.
When the moon sets sail the heart cuts itself on a branch and
Earth becomes a little infinite island.
No one eats apples or oranges when they look at the moon.
The moon is its own precise fruit.
When the moon sets sail through the rosters of the clock
The dead sob through their pearls.”
The language in these poems is lush, every word poised with meanings and intentions that blow open perception. The overwhelming nature of the “human condition” and being “grownup” are held at bey by wonder and awe. The beauty of a scene and the musical language used to convey the scene, provide an escape valve, a refuge.
Lighter moments are also provided by humor and other people such as in “Ode to My Lover’s Armpit”: “Triumphant! I have/found the secret/cave longed for by/explorers the cave/with paintings of/nowextinct trees/with dark, frenzied/branches reaching...” Again, a sort of internal journey is experienced but in connection with another and conveyed with a breathless exhilaration: “Lover! The odorous musk of your valley causes my own/verdure to grow I rest my cheek in your forest and breathe the/mad scent of suspended...to/drown/of salt on my tongue/from the sea//which is everyone’s lover”.
“Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” with a subtitle: “after reading the news about Meat Loaf”, recalls her mother’s death when she was young, probably a teenager. It illuminates her motivations for writing: “The morning after my mother died in the our living room I drove/her car to the town drugstrore to buy a notebook. I wanted to/sit somewhere and write.” She tells about overhearing the owner and a customer talking about the sad news of her mother’s death and how they quieted as she walked to the register to pay for the notebook. Later that day she and some friends drove her mother’s Camry, drank a bottle of wine, and sang at the top of their lungs. She wonders 28 years later, where they drove and where the notebook ended up.
Rivers re-surface throughout including the bloody internal ones. In “Perimenopause” she talks of “clots on tampons...this is the clot that came from the cramp that nearly/brought me to my knees in the Brooklyn Museum...” Later on she talks of drying a tamarind seed in the pandemic and desiring to see it to grow into a tree: “I keep watering the seed, but/nothing has happened yet. Who knows if it will. It’s really OK either way.” In earlier poems she talks of her difficulty conceiving and of an ectopic pregnancy and so this passage seems like a reference to her own fertility.
In “Van Vorhees Park” she talks of her father’s death and of the “I-thou” in the relationship between parent and child. “Today was a difficult day to be human.../the best days are the days I lose my reason/Courting the lunatic, I pour another glass./I woke this morning, yanked from a dream...” and concludes: “Every child understands the omnipresence of love./When my child was one, ‘I love you’ was just ‘I you’.”
She speaks of a vision of her mother in “Visitation”: “One night while I am sleeping, I call for my mother and she/comes. She doesn’t look much different – silver rootlets run/through her hair, her eyes are still a varnished chestnut...I am in the presence of/original love. A sweet air blows through the room...” In “Phases” she opens with: “Some nights I ask the moon when my mother will return/and the moon opens her mouth/and cries with me.” She concludes the poem: “Then there are nights I sob will you answer me please? But/the moon is long gone and I am twice-lost.”
Solfrain works through the grief and loss or parents and miscarriages, loss of public figures (Meat Loaf and Thich Nhat Hanh) and arrives at the final poem in the collection, “Invitation”: “Come along the moon-road. The crowd of stars is silent, the cold/places vast... On the moon-road we weave through beams.” A cosmic coalescence emerges: we are the stuff of stars and we share the universe with our ghosts, with departed spirits, with the trees, with birds. The last few lines of the last poem: “we are our/own moons, and our children, long after we are dead, will look/up to find us.”
The themes are poignant and searing; the language elegant and soaring. Welcome to being a “grownup”; welcome to our own share of the “human condition”.