ritual instructions
walk the road at night.
let the full moon guide you.
ignore the dogs howling.
stop at the yew tree planted at the crossroads.
make your sacrifice.
sweeten it with honey.
descend.
do not take either of the torches that greet you.
let your eyes adjust.
ignore the dogs barking.
stop at the grotto filled with moonlight.
make another sacrifice as she that drives off watches.
do not sweeten it.
beseech.
choose between the key and the dagger in her outstretched hands.
consider what your choice says about you.
ignore the sudden silence.
stop in the entranceway for reasons you can’t articulate.
make your way home, changed.
wait.
| Danielle Perry |
|
levelheaded: ritual instructions
The definite article “the,” which appears throughout Danielle Perry’s “ritual instructions,” creates a particular scene. The reader is instructed to walk a specific road, to ignore specific dogs, to stop at a specific yew tree. For all this specificity, however, the poem maintains an aura of timelessness, in part because the nouns in play have all been in existence for a long time, but also because those nouns are not limited in their meanings by restrictive adjectives. The road could be any road, the dogs any dogs, and the yew tree any yew tree.
We get the sense that we are somewhere with a rich history, yet the description of the place is simple enough that we can imagine ourselves in it. When we come to the instruction to “make your sacrifice” in line five, the sacrifice can be ours because we’ve colored the scene with our own imagined details.
Because of the ancient feel of the first stanza, we can’t help but think of the “sacrifice” as the slaughtering of a person or animal on behalf of some deity. However, by the time we reach the third stanza and are told to “make another sacrifice,” this one happens “as she that drives off watches.” Interestingly, the italicized phrase here introduces an automobile into an otherwise ancient world, making the poem feel more human and more immediate to a modern day reader. This second “sacrifice” seems to refer not to a lamb on an altar, but to the types of sacrifices one might make for another in the context of human relationships—moving to a new city, leaving a great job, loving one person only, or letting that one person go.
The pronoun “she” in the above phrase also marks a subtle shift. Whereas before we may have thought these instructions were meant exclusively for us as readers, now they appear to also be the speaker’s instructions to him or herself. The command “do not sweeten it,” which appears in reference to the second sacrifice, suggests that there’s only so far one can bend for his or her another. A line later, “beseech” reads as an attempt to get “her” to stay.
From there, the poem’s final two stanzas center on the impact of the ritual upon the speaker/reader. There are choices, and there are consequences to those choices. There are entryways that could mark beginnings or endings. There is being changed and there is waiting for more change to happen.
– The Editors
