Prelude to Bi / sym / me / try
By Denise Low
(August 2020)
Size: 1-7/8” x 2.2.5”
I would rather be an artist, but my jerky hands cause poor handwriting and drawing ability. Words must suffice, most often. But still I desire to replicate my surroundings, and so from my teens I have kept journals with inelegant calligraphy, glyphs, watercolor washes, and rough sketches. They map the slippage between ideas and embodiment. The mistakes are my honesty. This tiny book for Eileen R. Tabios sits in a timeline among my other journals. All archive sediments of thought. Robert Smithson writes, “One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion” (82). This is detritus. Inscribing paper is a process that follows principles of physics and geology.
Twin pages of books parallel the mind’s cataloguing system of perception and memory, a continuous interaction. Louise Gluck has the brilliant lines ““We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.” The second and subsequent encounters with any experience are metaphorical. A word approximates a category, with adjectives adding nuance. Each time I taste cinnamon, I recall all previous sticks of rolled bark, powders, granules, mixtures with sugar crystals, and the spice tins and bottles used as cinnamon containers. Poems are uneven reflections of reality, aligned somewhat like the bisymmetry of left hand and right (write?) hand. Mittens are bisymmetrical also. For the last 20 years I have worked with 19th century Northern Cheyenne texts formed with narrative, connotative glyphs. These influence this small book.
Layers of paper accumulate in a yellow folder by my desk. They often reference bisymmetry in all its guises—mirrors, Leonardo da Vinci’s coded handwriting, mementoes, hands, lovers, photographs, paintings. Mixed heritages in our family bloodlines is another reference—with use of some Tsalagi / Cherokee syllabary and much of the Roman alphabet. Excerpts from this collection appear here, altered by the requirements of physicality, in this case miniaturization and a Pilot pen. Bi / sym / me / try is an organic and inorganic project with false starts, approximations, antecedents, consequences, hopes. My mind is on this white page. Your mind is making some version of a duplicate as you read this. Greetings.
Bi
sym
me
try
By Denise Dotson Low
Fitch Mountain, 2020
for Eileen R. Tabios
Excerpts [from]:
Reflections on Bisymmetry
A shining
a mirror’s
spinning face—
imparts
difference,
inexact
symmetry.
A movie is a seamless
mirror and false.
Reality has no beginning
and multiple endings
all hidden
but one.
“I have always preferred
the reflection of life
to life itself.”
Francis Truffaut
These inked
letters
have
hinges.
Leonardo da Vinci wore
backwards script with
his left hand. In a mirror
the letters reverse to
normal order.
D.L. L. D.
Which of my
hands is
Lenape / Munsee?
Which of
my hands
is British /
German?
My heart on the left side
has a parallel heart
on the right side
too fragile to detect.
“We look at the world
once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.”
Louise Gluck
At night I hear
lullabies from a
second mother
(Eve) (Lilith)
Memento
Mother disappears past walls
of cut-up puzzles folded
among jumbled heights—
no lullabies but instead, pauses.
In the upstairs room under elms
stars pelt the glass.
Hunger returns. Under my chin
white ruffles loop endlessly.
The curved bassinet I remember
to this day, its dusty pink,
how I breathed
within its woven wicker.
Later on the back porch
I saw where she stored it
where generations later
I return.
69
Not a bisymmetrical sex act
only simple whole numbers
numeric anagram flipped
divisible by three not a three-way
not equals not touching.
not spooning but nearly so
mathematics’ double entendre
shorthand proposition
mated nude stick figures
squiggle lines curlicued
yoked figures unconsummated
integers always / never lovers
Left Brain / Right Brain
The right hand connects to the left hemisphere. Shazam!
left hand to the right with stained-glass tangerines
assembled by the wizard cranking my Oz brain.
The top of the heart connects to lower chambers,
a folded paperdoll with names of all my lovers
tattooed in cursive spider veins no one can read.
The body rises like a skyline tower, torso and left leg,
right leg. A chancy profile like cards: “The right-hand
self / devoted to architecture / the left-hand self not.”
The left hand cuts playing cards thick, beat ‘em quick.
Cut them thin, bound to win. A left-handed cut for Tarot
Arcana shows fate. A right-handed cut decodes the stars.
Tell the daydreams. Forget the nightmares. Travel and return
at a secret ratio hidden in all algebra problems. Tell me,
how fast does a three-pound brain speed into the next train?
[Excerpts from “Lost”]
Lost 1
Lover’s absence
2 nights gone:
streetlight as sun,
moon, & friend.
Lost 2
Lover’s presence:
2 nights returned
sun lights streets,
diamonds, & moon.
[Excerpts from] First Contact
Vineland Markland Forestland
Anno / Domin / i Domin / ion Domin / ate
(My Lenape / Munsee blood runs blends.)
Start with first blow first bellow.
Irish traveler not even the first.
Saint Brendan 512-520 A.D.
Vines suitable for wine,” he wrote.
milch / milk traded for furs before they would leave.
“Skraelings,” those who wear skins.
New Found Land.
Two worlds [oceans between] my grandfather spanned.
“They encountered one another and fought,” Erik the Red.
[Excerpts from “Hands”]
Hands 1
Chaco Canyon:
The hand’s thumb protrudes left of a line
bisecting vertically the palm.
Hands 2
Remember Sequoyah So-whi-li George Gist [Cherokee]
He assembled the Tsalagi [Cherokee] syllabary
and was prosecuted as a witch. As punishment
they cut off his fingertips but left his thumbs.
Hands 3
My wand releases spells of letters.
Hands 4
I hold a hand mirror to reflect the past
exactly halfway.
Hands 5
My stubby thumb is a 2nd tongue.
How are you? Do-i-ju? [Cherokee]
Comment allez vous? ¿Como esta?
My clumsy plume says hello.
Hands 6
Its pale knuckle wrinkles smooth
when my thumb reaches around
the pen to a cradle of fingers—
automatic stab-glide-loop
of cursive and dots. . . .
[Excerpts from] “Kaw Valley Wings”
Kaw River Wings 1
My armspan is a forgotten measure
line a cubit— half-length of a hand.
Kaw Valley Wings 2
Below live the mussels Ouichita Pink Paper
with wings of thin shell.
Kaw Valley Wings 3
Buzzard shadows stencil fog
overlapping an eagle’s black wings.
Kaw Valley Wings 4
My shoulderblades are scaffolds
for matched wings.
*
My grandmother’s grandfather
Big Miller fought Lenape /
Munsees and killed.
My Lenape /Munsee great-
grandfathers / uncles killed
Big John Miller.
*
I mourn
my [Lenape] relations
killed at Gnadenhutten, Ohio,
March, 1782.
*
I mourn
Big Miller
killed in Ohio, 1784.
Ambidextrous
Let my left eye solve quadratic equations
and my right eye parse Picasso.
Let me sign the check upside down with my right hand
rightside up with my left.
Let me read traffic signs blindfolded.
No, just kidding. Let me brake left-footed or right.
Let me track two rabbits to the compost pile
Let me aim left-eyed and shoot right-handed.
Let me watch sunrise and offer tobacco smoke.
Let me offer tobacco smoke at moonrise.
[Variations on] What Line
Within my child’s palm
cross: life line
love line =
croix mystique
X
What moment did you grip
my hand and not let go?
These I hold onto”
gray Sonoma rocks
with porcelain threads
shot through
Earthquakes gently rock
The Geysers’ crazed
fractures in land from
the San Andreas strike-slip
fault line throughway
North ← South →
What line changes
our side to theirs?
[Untitled]
Electrical current pulses—
my heartbeats.
Variations on Keening
"We would watch him look up and his face go keen.”
William Stafford
My father’s face went keen. Cicadas droned as
darkness walled us in. His eyes were echoes
on fire. He spoke kennings, his wise irises
cobalt blue. Second-sight prophet’s eyes
proved his cutting tools. Dark fathoms
lay buried in river mud. His eyes pierced.
Father was a fisher of meat. We ate animal kin
darkening love with tang. Beauty snares eyes.
A sunfish reddens under a keen-bladed knife.
Sequin scales flake. Its eyes darken into a stare
beyond ken. I keen. My father’s twin-star eyes
gaze equally into and out of the dark.
[Excerpts from] Portal
after Louise Gluck
Enter Solstice
“What follows the light
is what precedes.”
Cross the threshold
of ghosts incarnate.
Lost
Lost? Yes, again the stars fall
on 13th Street where a house, now demolished,
was my home. I was young.
on 13th Street where a house, now demolished,
was my home. I was young.
Funeral dirges sound from the building
and hearses ferry the dead. I was young
and hearses ferry the dead. I was young
and swung on the backyard tire swing
one late October afternoon under red leaves
drifting like red stars to my feet.
I was young and then was gone like the house.
An old woman remains in my place.
[Variations on] Buffalo Jump
The cedar-lined hill is a kill
site where giants died.
At the buffalo jump past Topeka
we are almost home.
below lie scattered bones
cross-hatched by flint
knives and scrapers.
A Northern Cheyenne elder
told us the land changes—
just more slowly.
In recent years more cedars
grow here & unbroken
stands of bluestem.
At nightfall the Milky Way spiral
releases all the ghosts.
Afternoon sun hunkers
on a single line
of fallen sky. Forever.
Geographic Cure
Take me to bed where we no longer repose.
I left to go hiking the beach’s
intricate crisps.
Pinking-shears cut hippy Brazil
to fit Africa’s curved Atlantic harbor
one smooth coast.
The Arctic and Antarctica
shadow each other. Winter is summer,
summer winter.
I touch your everyday skin of netted pores
A quick flip I touch wet plum:
your inside mouth
Fractals of mollusks litter a shoreline.
Trace the sanded ledge where
we once settled in salt.
[Excerpts from] Bisymmetry
*
I open a map scaled one-to-one,
read it as fast as I can but cannot
catch up with Jorge Luis Borges
*
Press my torso into garden mud
for a full imprint. Voilà.
*
Scatter Pompeii ashes over a vase.
Wait 2000 years. Voilà.
*************
Notes:
*Excerpts from “Reflections on Bisymmetry”: Lenape and Munsee are bands of Indigenous people also known as Delawares. Three federally recognized Delaware nations exist, a number of state-recognized, and many unaffiliated in the diaspora of this great people originally located in places now known as New York and New Jersey. My memoir The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) describes my heritages. The quotation from Louise Gluck is from the poem Nostos, from her book Meadowlands (Harper Collins).
*”Left Brain / Right Brain” incorporates a quotation from Karla Kelsey from her book Of Sphere Essay Press), p. 13.
*Excerpts from “First Contact”: The Saga of Erik the Red quotations are from the 1880 translation by J. Sephton from the original Icelandic ’Eiríks saga rauða’.https://sagadb.org/eiriks_saga_rauda.en . It was published as “First Contact: Interglacial Sagas” on Joe Harrington’s blog Writing Out of Time: Creative Writing & Climate Chaos (Dec. 16, 2019).
*Excerpts from “Hands”: The history of Sequoyah / So-whi-li being punished for creating a written form of Cherokee / Tsalagi first came to me in an oral story by an elder., I have read of this mutilation in Traveller Bird’s Tell Them They Lie: The Sequoyah Myth (Los Angeles: Westernlore Publishers, 1971, p. 11) and further discussion in “America’s Histories Revisited: The Case of ‘Tell Them They Lie,’” by Susan Kalter, American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 25, no. 3 (Summer 2001): pp. 329-351. A previous written form had been misused by a group of Cherokees, which made this new form a possible danger.
*Gnadenhutten is one of many massacres of Delaware peoples during their four-hundred-plus years of contact with Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, French, British, and U.S. settlers. My fifth-great grandfather John Cornelius Miller and his wife Hannah (Nancy) Ross’s relatives had ties to the Washington County, Pennsylvania militia who enacted the outrage at Gnadenhutten against pacifist, Christianized Delawares, some of whom may have been my relatives. Two years later, Delawares killed John C. Miller, whom they called “Big Miller.”
*”Variations on Keening”: The quotation from William Stafford is from “Listening,” The What It Is: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf, 1998), 63.
*Excerpts from “Portal” respond to Louise Gluck’s poem “Solstice,” The Seven Ages (ECCO, 2001), p. 10.
*Excerpts from “Bisymmetry” references an idea expressed by Jorge Luis Borges in "On Exactitude in Science," a short story published in A Universal History of Infamy (translated by Norman Thomas de Giovanni), Penguin Books, London, 1975. Wikipedia has a useful discussion of its antecedents in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concludedand other publication history.
*****
Denise Low, former Kansas Poet Laureate, has won recognition for her poetry from Red Mountain Press, Kansas Notable Books (3 awards), 6 Pushcart Prize nominations, Best of the Net nomination, Poetry Society of America, and others. She has recent verse in The Sun, New Letters, Chariton Review, Numéro Cinq, Virginia Quarterly, Yellow Medicine Review, Apogee, and numerous anthologies. Recent books are from the University of Nebraska Press, Red Mountain Press, and Spartan Press. She is featured on websites of the Poetry Foundation, Poetry Out Loud (NEA selection for 2018-19), and Academy of American Poets. Low teaches in Baker University’s School of Professional and Graduate Studies. From 2008-2012 She served on the executive board of trustees, including one year as president, for the Associated Writers and Writing Programs. www.deniselow.net
Wow, Denise,what innovative ideas.The way you blend your Lenape/Munsee and British/German heritages into bicameral mind theory impressed me. Wish I would've written this. :)
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