By
Abriana Jetté
Sayreville,
NJ, USA
This
summer, I had the honor to serve on a committee created to select the historic appointment
of Staten Island’s first Poet Laureate. At the celebration ceremony, Dr. Marguerite
Maria Rivas, who now adds the title of Staten Island’s Poet Laureate to her achievements,
read selections from her work, many chosen to remind the audience that the
suffering and strength caused by 9/11 is still ever-present, especially on the
island where 263 residents died that day.
I was in a high school, a Brooklyn public school. It was either first or second period. That afternoon, if your name was called on the loudspeaker, you knew.
It seemed I went to a funeral every weekend, paying respect to a helmet or a glove. Finally, November came around. Cooler air. A settling down. Two months and one day passed. It’s possible we believed things were getting better.
The morning of November 12, 2001, exactly two months and one day after 9/11, American Airlines flight 587 fell from the sky, crash landing on top of multiple homes in Rockaway, Queens. Again, the funerals. Again, closed caskets.
Most New Yorkers find it is impossible to escape the horror of those days. Anything was possible. Planes were falling from the sky during picture perfect mornings. What could we expect next?
The night of Dr. Rivas’s ceremony, I opened up Amy Lemmon’s fifth collection of poetry, The Miracles. It was not a purposefully planned move. I knew nothing of the book’s content, but that evening its title, promising something extraordinary, beckoned me.
The Miracles is not about 9/11. It is about suffering. And overcoming. It is about intimacy and failure and loss. And because the speaker is a New Yorker, because the speaker was alive and present and witness to all that transpired in 2001 (and since), 9/11 weaves itself into it all.
I was in a high school, a Brooklyn public school. It was either first or second period. That afternoon, if your name was called on the loudspeaker, you knew.
It seemed I went to a funeral every weekend, paying respect to a helmet or a glove. Finally, November came around. Cooler air. A settling down. Two months and one day passed. It’s possible we believed things were getting better.
The morning of November 12, 2001, exactly two months and one day after 9/11, American Airlines flight 587 fell from the sky, crash landing on top of multiple homes in Rockaway, Queens. Again, the funerals. Again, closed caskets.
Most New Yorkers find it is impossible to escape the horror of those days. Anything was possible. Planes were falling from the sky during picture perfect mornings. What could we expect next?
The night of Dr. Rivas’s ceremony, I opened up Amy Lemmon’s fifth collection of poetry, The Miracles. It was not a purposefully planned move. I knew nothing of the book’s content, but that evening its title, promising something extraordinary, beckoned me.
The Miracles is not about 9/11. It is about suffering. And overcoming. It is about intimacy and failure and loss. And because the speaker is a New Yorker, because the speaker was alive and present and witness to all that transpired in 2001 (and since), 9/11 weaves itself into it all.
Along
with thousands of other New Yorkers, on the morning of September 11, the speaker
in The Miracles waited for the bus. “M23” sets the scene of being “bound
for the East Side, the Stuyvesant Town deli”, though never making it to the
store. Instead, at a “friend’s apartment / the TV gave the grainy story over
and over.”
The
poem does not tell the story. It does not need to. The presumption is that
readers already know the story, or some version of the story. What readers don’t
know, however, is the speaker’s story, so, in “M23”, readers discover that she will
give birth to a daughter in four weeks, and that this daughter will
…slither wet on my belly
turn blue until the nurse turned her pink and laid her
on my breast, warm, irretrievable.”
Lemmon’s
reflections on motherhood are particularly universal. In the titular poem, The
Miracles, readers are told that the daughter, Stella, underwent major
surgery when she was nine months old so doctors could “fix her heart with
Gore-Tex™, a miracle fiber / that would live in her body the rest of her life.”
But the poem doesn’t meditate on the surgery or diagnosis. Instead, the speaker
is focused on feeding her child. “Stella was hungry, didn’t // get why she
couldn’t nurse. She was hungry, dammit, could smell / the milk.” Confused,
scared, helpless, the mother craves to take care.
 |
| Amy Lemmon |
But
not always. “After Bathing I Smell Smoke” sings the song of a mother in need of
a moment, or five, without having to take care of anyone or anything. The first
stanza, which spreads sixteen lines, is composed of but one single sentence. The
sentence begins with the lament of how the speaker “can rattle the pans while
cooking / drop a dish or run the vacuum in the hallway” or do other such chores
around the house, and through all of this Stella will play quietly, behave, but
the moment the speaker runs “the water and swirls in Epsom salts / and lavender
oil”, slides “in with a book and coffee / or just recline[s]”, the daughter
starts puttering about, “pilfering” her most “secret journal” or “removing
every knife and pair of scissors from their secure places.”
After
being reprimanded for playing with matches, the final image of “After Bathing I
Smell Smoke” describes the daughter bowing her head into her mother’s kiss. Though
fueled by exhaustion, the poem implies that the recluse the speaker yearns for
may not ever really happen when she is alone. The final image is one not of
taking time away from the world to unwind, but of joining together, fully
immersed, in order to love. It is an image not of seclusion, but of
forgiveness.
On
top of identifying as a mother, the speaker is also a widow. A soulful melancholy
permeates descriptions of the husband, who is described as ravenously desirous
of the speaker’s body and also a vegetarian. “Pursuit” chronicles the speaker’s
fight against succumbing to suffering. In the poem, the speaker confesses: “Grief
chases me around the house.”
A lover lost. A mother alone. A city attacked. How do we find the words? The Miracles teaches readers how to grieve through verse. Lemmon turns to form and swift melodic twists, testing the line and its rhyme to full speed. Consider Father’s Day, a sonnet, which begins:
The blue pen flows, the gospel radio brays.
This day is different from all other days.
No mass, no kaddish, everything’s been said.
We’ll plant a tree with the kids instead,
right near the playground. Now we say Amen.
A lover lost. A mother alone. A city attacked. How do we find the words? The Miracles teaches readers how to grieve through verse. Lemmon turns to form and swift melodic twists, testing the line and its rhyme to full speed. Consider Father’s Day, a sonnet, which begins:
The blue pen flows, the gospel radio brays.
This day is different from all other days.
No mass, no kaddish, everything’s been said.
We’ll plant a tree with the kids instead,
right near the playground. Now we say Amen.
The
moment readers begin to get used to the rhythm of the couplets, Lemmon enjambs
the line, and in doing so ends on the lower vowel sound of the dipthong in “playground.”
The switch in syntactical melody from high to low signals a turn or an ending
to the scene. These tonal expectations are satisfied by the following sentence,
“Now we say Amen”, a phrase typically muttered after a completed prayer.
So
9/11 starts off The Miracles, yes, but that is exactly it: just the
start. What follows is a passionate, jazz-infused romance, a first born, a trip
to the Cloisters, a second born, complications, the death of a father, the
doubts of a mother. All the while, Lemmon is a maestro of rhythm, gliding over sounds,
establishing relationships and scenes with such accuracy and precision we feel
we’ve known this family the entirety of their lives.
"Errant Pastoral" - Read by Amy Lemmon
In “Audacious: An Acrostic”, worn out, the speaker wonders if “mothering...will
always be a series of / handings-over, letting others more qualified tend,
evaluate, / and teach?” Like the echo of 9/11 in the alleys of downtown
Manhattan, the daughter’s medical needs weigh heavy on the mother; even when
she is not thinking about them, she is thinking about them. Satisfying its acrostic
form, the first letter of every line spells out a message for the reader. What’s
the message? “HOPING FOR CHANGE.”
The
poem “Discontinued” teaches readers that “music…enhances the taste of food.” I
would add that music enhances the line, advancing language from one electrical charge
to the next. Lemmon knows this well; The Miracles contains 44 poems and
is divided into five sections: Prelude, Fugue, Riff A, Riff B, Coda. Because
the father was a musician, fusions of language and rhythm exist on every page. Descriptions
of their relationship are met with lyrical beauty, each riff, or memory, a flame.
Then a burn.
When Lemmon describes dancing with her two children she writes:
…I lose myself
in anamnesis, kinesis, pure pleasure of musculature,
three bodies moving, mine plus two my body
once contained, And this cruddy Queens kitchen
When Lemmon describes dancing with her two children she writes:
…I lose myself
in anamnesis, kinesis, pure pleasure of musculature,
three bodies moving, mine plus two my body
once contained, And this cruddy Queens kitchen
It
is easy to get lost in the polysyllabic soundplay of Lemmon’s work, as easy as
it is for the speaker to become caught up in the memory of what once was
compared to what now is. With her exactitude and command, Lemmon makes language
dance. And in those movements, it lifts us, bends us, and stops us in our tracks.
The
Miracles tells the story of how one woman gave all the love she
had, and how, somehow, perhaps miraculously, within her there is still more, so
much more it seems endless. Lemmon opens up the collection with a quote from Psalm
31:21. It reads “Blessed be the Lord; who worked a miracle of unfailing love
for me when I was in sore straits (like a city besieged).”
How
similar is a mother unable to help her child to a city under attack?
Devastatingly similar. Not similar at all. The Miracles lives in this
tension.
Lemmon
is a skilled formalist who makes difficult metrics seem effortless. Whether she
choose form or free-verse, her use of rhyme and meter add an extra layer of tension
to narratives that are already riddled with pain.
_______________________________
Amy Lemmon is the
author of five poetry collections, most recently The Miracles (C&R
Press, 2019). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Best
American Poetry, Rolling Stone, New Letters, Prairie
Schooner, Verse, Court Green, The Journal, Marginalia, and many other
magazines and anthologies. She is Professor and Chairperson of English and
Communication Studies at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, where
she teaches Poetry Writing, creative writing, and creativity studies classes, and co-editor (with Sarah
Freligh) of The CDC Poetry Project.
Links:
Abriana Jetté
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Abriana Jetté is the author of the Amazon #1 bestselling women's poetry anthology 50 Whispers. Her newest poetry anthology, Stay Thirsty Poets - Vol. I, was released in February 2019.