Aerolite Aerolite
…to have been one with the earth seems beyond undoing.
Rilke
Beyond monadic quiet blizzard blacking river’s swans
insouciant éclat and sideral under knolling trees,
the glacial lees, eleatic exemplars of extensity’s
myth placed so as if opposite a cataract’s rote clots:
they are the holes prayed to between the wheeling snagging spokes,
the knelling holes between satanic gravity that give
never receive.
A mailbox within the woods much like a potter’s grave,
its equine head above the snow but soon to be inhumed:
so slow and sentient opening mouth (escaping mouse), its call
–To give or sate…To give or sate…—a repetend when wind
takes jaw. What’s seen can never be unseen (so sad so sad):
a gelant light like night hind all, detritus of the past
extant yet gone.
A comet moving backwards towards its tail impossibly,
the socalled Now the evergrowing rocky mass. Or this:
a spiral everrolling toward its feed, the socalled Now
ineffable, a thought between the spiral and the feed…
Look there, said Let to the initiates. We must forget
this saddest fact, that pure space into which flowers endlessly
open, and praise the Thing, the swans the flakes, more than
this dream permits.
| Joseph Harms |
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Aerolite Aerolite: levelheaded
Confession: From the jump, Joseph Harms’ “Aerolite Aerolite” had us reaching for our dictionaries. There are a lot of big words in here! Thankfully, their purpose is not merely to highlight the author’s rich vocabulary, but to bring pleasure with their sounds, to impart meaning other words can’t, and perhaps most importantly, to complement the poem’s central theme.
An aerolite, we learned, is a stony meteorite. As a proper noun, Aerolite is an adhesive used to keep aircrafts together. It’s also a lightweight travel trailer, or a lightweight plane, or any number of other things. More on all this later. First, let’s try to figure out what the hell is going on in the first sentence.
A series of white swans on a dark river, trees, and icy shelters (piles of snow? the trees themselves?) to protect against the weather. These shelters are “eleatic exemplars of extensity’s myth.” The word “eleatic,” meaning “marked by the belief in the unity of being and the unreality of motion or change” is of particular interest here. In essence, the snow banks or icy trees or whatever the “glacial lees” are serve as evidence that things are connected and that change is a myth. This idea fits nicely with the image of a trail of identical swans or, later, the idea of a repeating decimal. From the speaker’s perspective, this concept of unity and lack of change is a truth, a way of seeing clearly “as if opposite a cataract’s rote clots.”
The second stanza continues the idea of unity through offsetting images. The trench of “a potter’s grave” contrasts the mound of snow building up around a mailbox. At the same time, the horse head mailbox “soon to be inhumed” is akin to the potter’s buried body. The repetition in “To give or sate…To give or sate…” and “so sad so sad” serves as further evidence of constancy in the world. To satisfy or be satisfied is a continuous call. Over and over again, we are witnesses to sadness.
While this all might sound pretty grim, Harms’ poem ends with a method to combat the sadness: “praise the Thing.” The speaker wants us to stand in awe of the swans and snowflakes. This challenge to appreciate beauty is presented in a poem laced with beautiful images and beautiful sounds. And though we know that words change (an Aerolite isn’t an Aerolite isn’t an aerolite), though we understand Now is ever extending into Now into Now into Now, the archaic diction Harms employs suggests that beauty has always been present, and it is not going away anytime soon.
– The Editors
