levelheaded: Feast Of Healing

What makes a feast? Abundance, sumptuousness, entertainment. Indulgence heaped on indulgence. “Feast Of Healing” refrains from indulgence (with a useful exception, discussed below). Instead, it’s a poem of restraint, of confident and mysterious aphorism, bordering on the spiritual.

You could pull lots of lines from Whit Griffin’s poems and repeat them, casting sage calm: “You cannot solve / a problem with the same mind that / created it,” “A dolphin is more than / a fish which changes its colors when dying,” etc. These sound like things the wisest person in the room might say, things that would pop into your head later in the second before you fall asleep.

Indeed the poem addresses literal appetite—the first lines see “the osprey tear[ing] [the fish] / from the water.” Presumably in Brigid’s presence they’d “only / have to kill one chicken” for the purpose of food, although we guess it could be for the sake of killing alone. There are birds in the poem we generally do consider normal food (chicken), juxtaposed with birds we generally don’t (osprey, heron). There are fishermen—even if the speaker is “not a fisherman”—who might make a meal of their bounty. But feasts these aren’t. They’re more practical instances of natural order, of the food chain’s hierarchy.

Going against the general nonindulgence of the poem, something’s up with the word “it.” In his concise piece, Griffin uses the word four times (five if you count “its”). Not sure if it’s because the writer’s own name contains the word, but these readers noticed the its, and felt their two-letter power pushing outward and outward. The first definition (though the definition goes on and on) of “it,” according to Dictionary.com, is: “used to represent an inanimate thing understood, previously mentioned, about to be mentioned, or present in the immediate context.”

“It” is so often skimmed over, fast filler, but when we consider the word’s multivalence, we see that “it” itself is indulgent (!), behaving liberally in relationship to the rest of the English language, opening up its arms in an inclusive gesture. The effect of the indulgence of “it” here is oneness, this gigantic embrace in definition. We’ll come across oneness again later (see next paragraph). Since “it” is such a benign, broad word, its power doesn’t overwhelm the poem.

The people in the poem change from “You,” who cannot solve his own problem, to the man of the sea “I,” to a “We” that can’t fly, to specific Brigid, before settling on a final “We.” This “We” is (quite beautifully, and redolent of a primary, primal act of creation) “all cut from the same bolt of light,” an equalizing measure, a measure decidedly not lavish (as compared to the birds, who have the privilege of “get[ting] to wear feathers because they figured / out how to fly”).

So we’re left illuminated, on the path to enlightenment (the fish of line two, in the moment preceding its death, has an expanded knowledge of the non-liquid dimension; the advice later is to “Carve an idol”), and dressed in uniform together, a little hungry. And it’s good for us, makes us stronger, renders things more poignant, this ascetism.

– The Editors