Bright Existence

By Brenda Hillman

A celebrated poet's vision of our dynamic universe.

The poems in Brenda Hillman's new collection, a companion volume to her recent Death Tratates, offer a dynamic vision of a universe founded on the tensions between light and dark , existence and non-existence, male and female, spirit and matter. Informed in part by Gnostic concepts of the separate soul in search of its divine origins ("spirit held by matter"). This dualistic vision is cast in contemporary terms and seeks resolution of these tensions through acceptance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780819572028

Brenda Hillman

Brenda Hillman is the author of 11 books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press. She has co-edited numerous books, including At Your Feet by Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar. A former Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets and a recent recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for innovation in literature, she is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California and lives in the Bay Area with her husband Robert Hass.

Book preview

I. Twelve Dawns

"A veil exists between the world above and the realms

that are below, and the shadow came into being

beneath the veil, and that shadow became matter."

(from a Gnostic codex)

Old Ice

The thought that you could even save the light,

that you could stop it from having to be

everywhere at once.

You stood in the ice cream shop

and from the street, in a group

of silly glass trumpets

light came,

and broke into millions of itself, shattered

from the pressure of being mute who knows how long.

There also, leaning against the counter

the child who saw nothing

but the bins of sweet color

separately rimmed with silver.

Behind you, thoughtfully placed by the owners, a photo

of an avalanche, its violence

locked in blue spears . . . The ice moved cruelly, one way only,

and behind the avalanche, and behind

the posts that held it,

the cars went back and forth like mediators.

You who do not exist:

you stared along the edges of the freezer:

frost glistened and clustered.

Suddenly it looked as if one act could be completed,

mounting over and over, even under terrible pressure.

Perhaps the tiny crystals would last forever.

Once it seemed the function of poetry

was to redeem our lives.

But it was not. It was to become

indistinguishable from them.

Dark Existence

—You lay down in your bed

for ten years, and after ten years

you got up. The room was full of weak color

but there was an interesting little hill of rich life

from which all things streamed;

and you saw between

existence and the fringe of your

quotes non-

being on the wall

an active shadow that could not reconcile itself to earth

and was not ironical, that is, not split;

but nothing could be done without some

cooperation between this

shadow and whatever refused it in this world

so you invited it in—

dark existence that comforts and terrifies—

bright existence that could not stay—

Black Series

—Then in the scalloped leaves of the plane tree

a series of short, sharp who’s:

a little owl had learned to count.

You lay in your bed as usual not existing

because of the bright edges pressing in.

All at once the black thick o’s of the owl

made the very diagram you needed.

Where there had been two

kinds of infinity, now there was one!

The smudged circle around the soul

was the one the gnostics saw around the cosmos,

the mathematical

toy train, the snake eating its tail.

Relieved by the thought that the owl’s o’s

had changed but not you, that something

could change and not be lost in you,

you asked the voice for more

existence and the voice said

yes but you must understand

I loved you not despite your great emptiness

but because of your great emptiness—

The Servant

—So you whispered to the soul Rise up!

but the soul was not ready.

—Get up! It’s our turn! But that part of the soul

stayed still. So you checked the list

of those who existed

but the soul was not on the list, the soul

responded to none of those things.

Very well, you said. He sank back in his furs.

And you started across the plain to one he loved—

December Shadow

—Then how to address the place where the soul was not.

Should you have said, standing next to the trench,

this should have been you?

This darkness was not the terror of what we do to each other,

or the delicious sexual darkness he’d brought you

or the black corridors of the female body—

remember the early diagrams,

what the inside of a woman looks like?

A cow’s skull.

This darkness was the protection of the child,

it included the vast fluttering

as the oak included the moths

with its shadow—

remember in the brilliant day long ago,

the ball coming toward you?

You played with the other children like this—

not as anything—

blocked the sun with your non-

being as it were,

but by that pewter shadow you could be affirmed . . .

One by one they kissed you.

One by one the guests advanced themselves

into the night where you would have been

had they looked for you

though it was not in the dim night

that you’d planned to receive them

but at midday, when the druid oak

blossomed with moths, with being gone—

January Dawn

—Two window shades: the stiff

premonition forcing its way around them,