A Slant of Certain Light
illuminates the daunting acme of heaven’s gilded vaults,
as winnowing through great blank spaces,
dappled shafts of a soot-grimed sky, unmarred by nostalgia or regret
plunges the peregrine falcon.
She is cerulean agency on the wing, ubiquitous death
tumbling toward an anxious and unsettled world.
In her focused lens shines sentience—a restive promise,
steeled tension of things about to chance.
Some hold her alar flight, embellished by invocation’s
piercing scream,
is a sextant guiding more laborious patterns we hold
against the jealous pull of gravity;
that she carries on her pinioned descent primordial,
nebular stardust;
that she is Divinity ascending each spring on earnest columns
of mounting air that abide no sin;
that the stunning panoply of shadow-light from windswept billows
presages the encroachment of deeper, more lasting dusks.
But our paralytic stasis, the absence of any precise measure, blinds us
to the truth she exacts
from her imposing summits: A swift congruence of talon-sharp veracity
with a pigeon’s nadir—unspoken accord
decided in convolutions of spiraling velocity, blood-stippled down
drifting earthbound in silent reverence.
Her exploits thus appeal most forcibly to her own keen eye, her dim form
yet receding with the light.
| Gina Marie Bernard |
|
levelheaded: A Slant of Certain Light
If the title of this poem seems familiar, you’re probably at least vaguely aware of Emily Dickinson’s poem 320. That poem, which starts out “There’s a certain Slant of light,” looks to nature and sees despair, indifference, and death. The poem we’ve published here sees many of the same things. There is despair, indifference, and death, but there’s also a sense of awe and beauty that’s missing in the Dickinson poem. This poem’s dread is stylized. It’s as if the speaker is saying, “Yes Emily, you’re right, it’s terrible. But look how amazing it is.”
Let’s summarize: the poem is a description of a bird – a falcon. We see it mid-swoop. It kills a pigeon. That’s it really. But of course, this poem is about a bird in the same way William Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” is about daffodils, which is to say it’s only superficially about a bird. Like the best nature poetry, this poem uses the natural world as a mirror for its human observer. When we read a phrase like “the daunting acme of heaven’s gilded vaults,” we read the history of the heavens into the sky. We remember our smallness under that great, shining expanse as it hangs over us every day. When we read “In her focused lens shines sentience,” we read a projection of humanity onto an animal. The speaker turns her outward eye inward. We recognize that the word “her” reaches out to include the speaker and by extension the reader. The poem exposes its potential for metaphor, so final lines like “Her exploits thus appeal most forcibly to her own keen eye, her dim form / yet receding with the light” no longer seem to even remotely apply to the falcon.
If it isn’t clear already, the poem’s sense of awe owes a lot to the poem’s glistening language. If the poem calls out to Emily Dickinson for its title and theme, it calls out to Marianne Moore for its precise, adjectival tone. Many of Moore’s poems paradoxically open themselves to broad possibilities by being as precise as possible. This poem functions that way, too. To describe a bird as “cerulean agency on the wing” is to marvel at the both bird and language. In this world, things don’t just have wings, they are “alar” or “pinioned.” Things aren’t bloody, they are “blood-stippled.” All this language makes for a dense poem. It takes a few reads to get the swing of things. But the poem is deeply layered, and it sounds incredible read aloud. It’s worth slowing down for the ride.
-The Editors
