Time in the 2020s has had an odd quality. The decade started with a pandemic that stopped the clocks, holding us in suspension for weeks and months as we awaited the return of something like normalcy. But as time slowed, events sped up at a breathtaking pace: official murder and public protest, norms overturned (like Roe v Wade), a legitimate election declared stolen, the Capitol attacked, horrific wars overseas, and so many natural disasters–which for those of us on the West Coast, meant fire. Time has become disorienting. We are only five years in, and everything feels warped and upturned.
Heidi Seaborn’s new collection, tic tic tic, published by Cornerstone Press, wrestles with the fairground-ride feel of time over the last five years in a way that feels fresh, important, and never didactic. Seaborn is the author of the PANK Poetry Prize-winning An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, serves as an Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal, and lives on the edge of Puget Sound. The cover of the collection features a large black-and-white photo of a silhouetted woman walking in front of the giant clock at the Musée d’Orsay, with the title tic tic tic moving across the clock face in yellow. Interspersed throughout the collection are more gorgeous black-and-white photos that illuminate the text. It is a pleasure to hold.
2022 marked the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, written during another disorienting decade of rapid-fire change in the years following WWI. The poems in the first section of tic tic tic, titled “Winter,” appear to be in conversation with The Waste Land, echoing its polyphony of voices and perspectives–even quoting it: “a barbarous king, /a burnished throne,” with devastating effectiveness. The section starts with the poem “Accidie,” a word that, according to Seaborn, conveys spiritual sloth, or listlessness. It opens with the lines “I have lived a thousand days/like today the sluggish sky/dragging a finger through the sky,” and includes the surprising lines, “I am no longer hungry./Am overfed. Have fed the orchids/ice.” I’m put in mind of the desiccation I feel when reading The Waste Land– societal, relational, spiritual–and the desire for something regenerative, for water.
The section then moves into a masterful series of poems titled “Continuum.” Each poem addresses, in chronological order, events from the poet’s life over the past five years–personal and national–including a son’s wedding and the storming of the Capitol. Seaborn is often unsparing in describing her reactions. “Winter/Spring 2020” is one of the most effective poems I’ve read about the early months of COVID. It almost dances with Eliot’s poem, including German, skiing, lilacs, fortune tellers, hyacinths, and the lines, “On a walk–/the parade I join twice daily, faces cloistered–/bright eyes, bright eyes. Following the river of death downstream.” The series ends with a short poem titled “On the Continuum,” which sees the speaker “on the hottest day ever,” “sweating through the seasons,” in the nave of Sainte-Chapelle, and “ends with the lines, “Doesn’t it seem like every day the world burns to the ground–/as we silence the alarm–/So certain: somehow/tomorrow–/persistent as fireweed–”
The collection’s subsequent sections—“Spring,” “Summer,” and “Autumn,” with a big nod to Vivaldi– continue to play with time, differently. While the first section was focused on the last five years, “Spring” includes a long sequence titled “Time Capsule,” a series of brief descriptive poems that capture ephemera (spanning 1958 to the present), one might find while emptying out a basement. With titles such as “Tax Return, 1958,” “Used Lube Tube – 2009,” the poet evokes so much life in just five lines.
The poems in “Summer” are more expansive, at times elegiac, as in the gorgeous, “Missive to My Father From the Now.” While there are still fires, and war, and impending elections, something shifts in the poet as she moves from a kind of lassitude–“my meditations become laments–/then petitions. My piety, my hypocrisy”–to someone, in “Perhaps This Is A Prayer,” the penultimate poem in the collection, who can hear “god in the syncopation of birdsong.” I adore the last two stanzas of that poem:
Faith found this follower at my most tedious self–
cornered in a cul-de-sac, the summer’s heat beating
like an old heart. Me, kneed by the burden
of body. A body now tilting
into a breeze gathering upward.
Shantih Shantih Shantih