“Strike Into It Unasked” [by Gjertrud Schnackenberg above and below left; below right, Gerard Manley Hopkins]
Poetry’s “impulse, like electricity, crossing the space, leaves its signature.”
–W.S.Graham
No wonder that a flash of sparks
Spills out from what I touch—the LaserJet,
Brimming with static shock,
Suspends invisible electron-clouds
Across the laser-paper’s Radiant White
To print “The Windhover”
Electrostatically—
Hopkins’ creation-poem, spelled out
In powder-particle black sparks hard-hurled
From underlying fire—
The substrate of his poetry
The veiled fire of Christ,
Suffused, incarnate, metaphysical—
And poetry is where
A bird of prey is teetering
Among wind-angles
Intermittently, a fleck
Amid cloud-rhythms, then
A flickering along the morning’s
Diamond-edged peripheries,
At such a height, it’s there—
Then not—then there again—
Without my realizing it,
Between “The Windhover” and me,
A space is opened, sparking, live,
And I’ve reached through it, unaware
It will flame out, will flare
In a split-second of brute force
To jump a gap that’s imperceptible
Until I touch the page, and instantly
Hopkins crosses the space
Without a step—
The wonder of it, that the briefest touch
Can instigate a shock that’s mutual,
As if sheer being, in and of itself,
Is equally as shocked by my existence
As by its own, and equally as startled
To exist as I am here—
Electrons’ phantom-loads, drawn off,
Reel back, and hurt me
With a strike as unequivocal
As if it’s understood—a law, a truth,
A given—that brute force alone keeps
For itself the power to disclose
The presence of a shining residue
Pent in the fallen world—
Fallen, but even so, The world is charged
With power enough to stop the heart—
Electrons, always in the present tense,
Without locality or mass
Or temperature or light—invisible,
Yet capable of spreading in a flash
Across the surfaces of all that is—
Like consciousness lit
For a moment by the thought
That God is worldling, worldling now
And here—even the blearest things,
Objects we overlook, inanimate,
Inert—the sparking doorknobs,
Shining paper dust, magnetic
Clinging combs, the laser printer’s
Thermoplastic case—
Even the blearest things can stun,
Be stunned, are sites
Of inscape-metaphysics where
Materia has taken hold
Of “whatness,” “suchness,” “isness,”
“Hereness,” laced with fire of stress—
But even so, such objects only pend
As fragments of a universe
Awaiting a beholder—
Consciousness—
The outbreak of a hidden voltage
Stricken from the ore
Of Hopkins’ poetry: titanium,
The paradisal mineral
Whose lightweight metal sheds
The brightest, clearest-selved sparks
And most heartstopping firefalls
Before it lets its shining dust
Sheer off, go dark, fall back into itself—
Like humankind—How fast
His firedint . . . is gone . . .
In an . . . enormous dark—I stand among
My own footfalls, the imprints of my soles
Mysteriously electrified
And vanishing across the carpet
Where I’ve trod and trod, as if my purpose
All along has been to try
To make it visible—the field of force
That hovers over Hopkins’ poetry
And brims at margins, boundaries,
White peripheries
The blinding thresholds where I try
To cross a space as charged and bare
And emptied as the room at 85
St. Stephen’s Green, where Hopkins left
His battered shoes behind, because we’re meant
To come to God barefoot, and left
The treadmire toil there (“there”
Meaning “here”) Footfretted in it—dust—
And left the footfalls of his poetry
Behind, in disarray,
Scattered, and insufficiently “explained”—
(“Novel rhythmic effects,” dismissed
By literary interlocutors
As needless, odd, and disagreeable—
A later critic was “repulsed”)—
But poetry’s selfbeing selves itself
Without self-explanation, selves
Without explanatory power,
The way divine creation does—
The way the starry night
Appears—
And Hopkins, as a Greek professor, knew
The ancient word for the divine
Creation is poiema—poetry—
And, as a poet, he discerned
Poiema’s fire is rapturous and wild
And sudden as a talons-first assault
Out of the blue—Christ’s
Striking-in—and knew
That poetry is where a falcon stalls
Midair, prepares to jettison
The cloudbuilt, white
Wingbeaten falcon-footholds
Where contrary winds have brought
the falcon to its highest pitch
Of being—heights upwind
From which to dive headfirst
And upside-down, hard-hurled,
With wings pressed shut,
Its livid, bright, outriding feet
Drawn back and up,
As if a falcon’s feet are useless, weak,
Superfluous impediments
To raptor-plummeting—
Useless, until
The final instant of a strike
So shocking, so unguessed-at, unforeseen,
No prey on earth is able to prepare
For how a nearly imperceptible
And distant hovering
Transforms itself into a
Fraction-of-a-second mortal blow,
The instrike, talons-first, a heralding
Of chaos in the yellow talon-flames
And blackout-wingbeats mantling
The sight of it—the site
Where He consumes the flesh and blood
Of His annihilated prey,
Whose lacerated innocence
He takes into Himself, the way
The world’s wildfire subsumes
A single flame, to signify
No partial flame exists,
All flames are whole—
As He was first internalized
When He had selved Himself
Into the first and last
Immortal sustenance,
So now His prey is selved
As it becomes a part
Of Him, the Eucharist reversed—
As in a flash, a circuit, broken
Violently, is violently restored,
Its suddenness the signal trait
The Jesus emphasized, a sign
The gap is closed between
The kingdom and creation where
God is upstream, and flows
To Christ our Lord—
“Yet I am idle,” Hopkins wrote,
Burned out, a socket scorched
Through its interior, without
A visible connection
To its source—useless,
Without effect, like poetry unable
To explain itself, or say
What good it does, or what it’s for—
A transcreation of the downstream power
Coursing through what is,
In a creation where all things
Are brimming with a brilliant signature
That will fall, gall, and gash
Itself across the space it opens,
Crossing it—
The way a windhover’s
Headlong freefall crazes
The atmosphere with friction-speed
And turns itself into a shining trace—
A blowing-by
As rapturous as if creation
Were an end unto itself
And it’s enough that poetry
Strike into it unasked,
And leave a spilling out of sparks
Torn from the firedint’s continuum
Before the strike—a glimpse
Of the creation, surging past–
from The Paris Review
from The Paris Review
Go to Source
Author: The Best American Poetry
