Leave the Light On
“Leave the light on” is what the child, frightened from scary dreams, asks their mother. The lines (in A Book of Ours Calendar, May and November) here allows for the expression of helpless vulnerability: “We were full of mice and / The kids slept on the floor.” Vulnerability as claustrophobia: Not “our house was full of mice” but we were full of mice: no escape, only chaos and invasion. When she wants to indicate the insidious, unstoppable invasion of winter temperatures in a Wisconsin farmhouse, the American poet Lorine Niedecker says that the cold “mouse[s]” in. Mice, the lines imagine, at once run through the minds of parents and over and around and touching sleeping children on the floor. In a life of civility, the children sleep on beds and the parents’ heads are clear of invasive filth. The lines never escape the fact of this reality that, however, does not dominate the speaker’s outlook. There is still room for her to be “thankful for shelter.”
I walked out my own house
I understand why people are homeless
Been there. It was like a storm
Like when you’re in the rain.
The writer, said to me at her end of the worktable, “I don’t know if this is a poem.” I, who had been stunned by these lines, muttered: “Who knows what a poem is,” not knowing why I said this. Lois Blackburn, overhearing, said—perhaps as much to me as to L —“Look, a professor of poetry who can’t define a poem.” Coming from Lois and the worktable, “professor of poetry” was gentle mockery: the purveyor of cultural capital seated at the table of “utopian margins.”
“I understand why people are homeless / Been there.” The declaration opens out to the comparison of homelessness to a rainstorm, presumably a reference to the inescapability of rain when you’re in it. “Out of the hole,” suggests escape from darkness and nightmare into light and also escape from mouse-hood, a mind full of mice with a mouse’s tunnel vision. A tremendous distance is traversed from the pinched space of nightmare, to liberation and understanding, to prayer outward and upward and its reciprocation. The history of a single person, splitting up, slightly changed, into other poetic homes in the Calendar. For example, surrounded by other voices (May):
Old shears and a hand-pushed mower
Out of the hole. Prayers answered
New house, thankful but no furniture
And the kid slept on the floor
The kids slept on the floor
2017. sad smell of death. children cry.
WHO AM I, KING OF EGYPT?
Or from November:
The bloom Winter’s serpents can't harm.
Beetroot baked or pickled. Hotpot.
When we had young kids, homeless
I was thankful for shelter, but
We were full of mice and
The kid slept on the floor.
Oscar the Grouch still happy in bins
HEAR: songs, recitations and chants
A BOOK OF OURS was exhibited at Bury Art Museum May-July 2021, then Manchester Cathedral Oct 2021-March 2022, after which it went permanently into the collection at John Rylands Library, where it can now be viewed. It was the final project by arthur+martha CIC.
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