Andy Young

Abandoning the Land in Ecuador

(1998 Chimborazo, photo by Sebastião Salgado)

—for Marianne Boruch and Roberta Moore

the women carry these sacks on their backs

their men in cities

                                    Quito

Guayaqhil

port cities

flooding to slum

I might have looked at this one with her

            one of those lost days when we filled in years

and emptied bottles

the kids thumping through the house

she stalked bargains to get this book

a book she knew I wanted

take it for a while she said

now there’s no her to return it to

look at the black-haired women

their heads hidden under rounded

hats like dark wool Q-tips fabulous

she said or did she

did we look at this together?

did we talk about those hats?

around each woman’s middle a rope’s fixed to hold the sack

so their hands are free beside the patient gray donkeys

all intent to stay on this path

to Chimbote its market already buzzing off in the distance

she always took me to her farmer’s market

filled our arms with bread and peaches

her fingers perfumed with basil—

the women cross the cloud-shadows

that spill into the mountains’ creases

a shroud is about to drop on the sun

look at that woman

in the middle of the line—she has a perfect flourish

at the sack’s top fabric

or is that just a shape in the grass

hey sister: 

will you see her

when you start your slow descent?

and tell me: what is it tied at your cinch?

a small fruit?

a child shriveled by distance or my faulty sight?                      

Why does the mountain blur

to smoke like the need to live

I sometimes lack?

Let that cloud above your head be a figure,

let it stand for something,

let it be an intervention even—

a rift in the surface 

an arm stretched out

oh Jesus let it at least stay a cloud

not gone

to gray wash

or a drizzle far from here

where siblings pick bones

from their mother’s ashes

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Statement of Homage 

This poem is dedicated to Marianne Boruch and Roberta Moore, though I did not write it with Marianne in mind, but rather with Roberta weighing heavily on it. Roberta was my closest, lifelong friend and died, suddenly and impossibly, leaving behind tidal waves of grief, braided histories, and a borrowed book by Sebastião Salgado, a favorite photographer for both of us.

The connection to Marianne comes from the way into the grief, a way that she showed me. When I look at what I am attempting to do in this and so many of my poems, I see her influence. Her poems teach me about observing as closely, and as deeply, as possible while simultaneously not coming to any conclusion about what is being seen. Observing, she teaches me, does not mean knowing or, worse, the kind of ownership of a tourist’s sensibility who feels she has somehow captured a culture with a selfie and a social media post. Whether looking at the feet of King Tut’s wife or at cadavers in a medical lab, Marianne’s poems show me that observing is not an act of ownership, but an act of love. As she said in an interview in the Writer’s Chronicle: “Poems love the world by close observation, memory, working out fresh, daring ways past given assumptions.”

The “working out” and the “ways past” in that sentence speak to another thing Marianne teaches me that I keep trying in my work: to show the mind attempting to see clearly and without assumptions, to show the mind at work. She does this with techniques such as questions, as in the poem “Rare Old Violins:” “Should they sell their last/violin for bread?” or through self-correction of a speaker’s vision, as here, in “Water at Night:”

Doré waking to a room not

really of wings. I guess

a stirring, something in the black expanse

he hoped to razor into

the copper plate — no, a graver,

not a razor at all.

She actually begins that poem in complete uncertainty with the first line: “Not that I understand things.” The generosity of including the reader in the uncertainty of the observations, a quality I know Marianne admires in Bishop, opens roads. What liberation her poems make me feel! To not even think I have to come close to understanding, to allow myself to puzzle out what I feel, with (or without) an imagined listener…I can’t imagine having the courage to have opened that borrowed book, let alone to allow myself to enter a photo that would bring me closer Roberta’s loss, without that wonder.

I was fortunate enough to work with Marianne while pursuing my MFA at Warren Wilson. She encouraged me, among other things, to think and write about my collection of ruined violins, drowned in Hurricane Katrina and unusable, and how I gathered and cleaned and saw a worth in them that I did not fully understand. They, and she, helped me develop the idea of the “lyric object.” We looked at how objects in poems can, as in life, act as hinges between worlds—present and past, the familiar and the strange, disaster and “normal” life. A talented teacher, she allowed me to arrive at the place she already knew and brought me to poets like Adélia Prado and Weldon Keyes, whose “1926” shocked me in its use of the lyric object of lyric objects, the moon, as a signifier of horror. The work we did together prepared me to be able to see Roberta’s book as a poignant lyric object, to think about not only what it held in its pages, but what it meant as a physical emissary from our shared life.

Marianne’s ekphrastic poems have been especially helpful as guides into the unknown and the potentially devastating, into finding a way into absence. In my ekphrastic poem, I must have unconsciously attempted to follow her lead in seeing both what, and what isn’t, visible in a piece of visual art, attempting to bring the reader along on that journey. I am grateful to Marianne for giving me a way of looking and, thus, a way into feeling that devastating loss.

Marianne Boruch

(Bio from Warren Wilson website)

Marianne Boruch has published ten collections of poems including The Book of Hours (2011), Cadaver, Speak (2014), and Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (2016), and most recently The Anti-Grief (2019) all from Copper Canyon Press. Her prose includes a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011), and three essay collections, Poetry’s Old Air (Michigan’s “Poets on Poetry” series, 1993), In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity, 2005), and The Little Death of Self (again that Michigan series, 2017).  Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry London, American Poetry Review, Narrative, The London Review of Books, Field, Poetry, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere, and she’s been given the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award for The Book of Hours, four Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, as well as stints as artist-in-residence at two national parks, Isle Royale and Denali. She was a Fulbright/visiting professor in the UK at the University of Edinburgh in 2012, and in 2019, a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Canberra in Australia, closely observing the astonishing wildlife there. Having taught for the last 34 years at Purdue University, she has now gone rogue and emeritus.

____