To Sheldon Vanauken, National Book Award-winning author of A Severe Mercy, the cross, the primary symbol of Christianity, remains staked in “the place from which all distances are measured.” To the Carthusians, a religious order of the Catholic Church, the cross remains, yes, “while the world turns” around it. So, perhaps, to T.S. Eliot, a member of the Anglican church during his life, the “still point of the turning world” was indeed the cross after all. But to Kimberly Phinney, it seems that, among other metaphors, the cross trellises the roses in her garden. A garden in which more than a few of the poems in her debut collection, Of Wings & Dirt, are set.
In the collection’s opening poem, “A Brutal Love,” the speaker, who “takes the sheers / and cut[s] [the roses] to their knuckles” proclaims:
Oh, it is a Brutal Love
that birthed the universe,
demanded Isaac,
offered Job,
and required the Cross!
It doesn’t demand much effort on behalf of the reader to associate the image, here, of a woman kneeling in her garden, pruning roses, with prayer. But that seems entirely the point of the poems in this collection. Or one of the points. That, like a good prayer, a Phinney poem, as St Teresa of Avila said, is, in part, “an intimate sharing between friends.” In this case, between poet and reader. Of course, these poems are more than “intimate sharing[s].” Most reach the heights of fine art. Phinney turns those confessions normally reserved for the closest of friends, or for one’s god, into what they claim to be: poetry.
Already in “The Sculptor,” the second poem in the collection, we see this sharing once more, but a third friend is present—a statue of the Virgin Mary. The poem’s speaker, again “sitting in [her] garden bed,” converses with the statue, saying, “surely, God is in this place.” The statue, “head bowed / and hands clasped / in eternal prayer,” responds: “You must be in gardens. / You must stay on your knees.”
So. These two women, one flesh and one stone, do stay on their knees for the duration of the poem. The speaker kneels with this “gray-white” Marion “edifice,” who Phinney says was a “fellow mourner / at the cross,” and invites the reader to mourn along with them by having the speaker remind the stone woman, who she calls “Mother,” that she was “flesh once” and carried “divine blood / in [her] womb,” which foreshadows not only Phinney’s most “intimate sharing” in the collection, but, through invoking the Miraculous Conception, also foreshadows the death of the one conceived.
Later, in the poem “We Are Not Quiet,” the poem’s speaker is “crouched over” on the toilet, but this time her actual mother, “too, is crouched / on the floor beside [her].” If the image in “The Sculptor” of two women mourning the crucifixion afar off prefigures the Pietà, it also prefigures another kind of Pietà, a twofold kind—one where a would-be mother watches between her legs “the red tendrils trail / in the water,” while the mother of this would-be mother—before the “little soul” is “flush[ed]”—kneels with her adult child, whose “hot grief escapes / in the yelp of an animal’s pitch.”
Although, the pitch of the writing in the poems that follow calls to mind a more specific animal—Dickinson’s soul-perched, feathered avatar for hope, which sings the wordless tune of itself. Sore indeed is Phinney’s storm throughout the collection. But “in the Gale,” Dickinson asserted, this “little bird” is heard the sweetest.
After the miscarriage, Phinney writes of a “tiny angel” who, perhaps, “took mercy” on her, and said to God: “send me.” About whom the poet muses in the poem “Daughter:” “And it was you / I waited for.”
After most of the poems there seems to occur the Cormackian refrain: “Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.” The world lies in this brute waiting after every poem of illness, of pregnancy loss, and of suicidal ideation. But, although it starts at a low volume, and at about halfway through the collection, another refrain builds till, by the end of the book’s last piece, it’s all this reader could hear—the words of Ted Hughes: “Something has to stay.”
Some things do stay, Phinney convinces. Health, after “the pain was too much,” stayed. A daughter, after wondering if the flushed soul goes “down the pipes or up to Heaven,” stayed. And Phinney herself, after lamenting that she has “been dead / for almost too long,” stayed.
The words almost and too before the word long convinces, also, that the things that stay stay just in time. But two readings are present here. One, and the more frightening reading of the two, is that the waiting between “the wish and the thing” could breadthen till wish and thing are separated by so wide a gap as to be unbridgeable. Which begs the question: is there a threshold for those who wait for better qualities of life? Do thresholds vary person to person, i.e., not only how long one is willing to wait, but how long one can, waiting, sustain the effort? What is someone who reaches one of these hypothetical thresholds to do is a question perhaps better left unasked.
The second and more convincing reading, however, is that wished-for things, as stated above, stay, but not in Phinney’s nor anybody else’s timing. Nor are these things truly the thingfor which one wishes.
This reading, like the other, conjures up those illustrations in stapple-bound tracts Christian missionaries pass out in parks, street corners, and other public spaces to potential convertees. The illustration—and maybe you have seen it—is of two ledges with a bottomless canyon between. On one side is written the word man, and on the other the word God. In the middle the drawing of a cross, whose lateral beam joins ledge to ledge, allows one, if one is honest with their desires, to get over the otherwise impassable gap to the other side. At least that’s how the missionaries might explain desire to someone who receives one of these tracts.
After all, C.S. Lewis said “most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world.” Lewis, no doubt, would call this want God, and to have final residence in that other country over which He rules. And, in the Christian religion, the way to Heaven is narrow, crossbeam-narrow. Which also appears to be, among other points, Kimberly Phinney’s final point.
Phinney, late in the collection writes again of the “fellow mourner / at the cross,” calling her:
...our Mother Mary—
that majestic stone edifice
nestled among the pittosporum,
who prays over us,
day and night,
in her permanent refrain.
At 3:00 a.m., in a fit of wakefulness, all the poem’s speaker “can think of... / is how much I need this to be true.” Heaven, that is. Christian Heaven. Where Kimberly Phinney will “finally see the babies [she] never held,” the things that didn’t stay, but, in some way, stayed all along. Because the moments when Phinney cannot be in her garden on her knees, “that majestic stone edifice / nestled among the pittosporum,” whose inspiration knew also the pain of losing a child, is. Sculpted in such a prayerful attitude, this “fellow mourner / at the cross” can’t help but ceaselessly foreshadow the Pietà. But after the Pietà always comes Christ’s entombment, and after his entombment his resurrection. Till then, she prays. Staying, staying, staying.
Zachary Bartles was raised in the Shenandoah Valley of West Virginia. His work appears or is forthcoming in Appalachian and Northwest Reviews, Ekstasis, Relief, The Way Back to Ourselves, Calf, and Ribbons, among others. He was a finalist for the 2024 Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in East Texas with his wife and daughter.