Dark Feelings That Grow Like Frost From The Body

Faye Kicknosway

A scary book, CRIB DEATH, by Frank Stanford. Very clean and precise, each poem intelligent, all whittled and rubbed. The stanzas read like chunks of meat yet there is a sense of diffusion into the page -what is contained in the poems can not be held inside them no matter how edged they are: the dark seeps out.

It is not a union between visual 'things' that Stanford works from, he works from what is buried and surfacing inside things, around things. There is always the sense of 'a larger breathing.' Things are 'eyes', the reader peers through them and recognizes what is beneath. The poems are like jars -things are put into them carefullv to isolate, contain, illuminate. There is the feeling that each specific ordering of images and lines will wrest something felt but unseen from the dark, that each object/event/ gesture is a lighted outcropping. Simple, homely, visual, there is a rapture in Stanford, a fascination that is intensely focused on the wholeness beneath things.

BLUE YODEL FOR THE LOST CHILD seems direct, conversational, the first 3 lines could be spoken to someone present:

"You're so dusty
Like a nightgown
Thrown down from an attic."

It's almost as though the 'eye' regards and the 'I' speaks. The next 4 lines float:

"Always late
And used to dark places
Like the beautiful white spider,
The moon."

There is no pronoun as an anchor, no building of an actual, physical presence. The tone of the first 3 lines could be conversational, these 4 lines are ruminative. The 'I' is not addressing someone present, but someone absent. The use of the 'nightgown' intensifies the absence: it is an intimate, feminine object, but here it is cold, 'thrown down'. The 'you' becomes more distant/absent; the conjoinment of the moon transforms her again: she is not only what comes to light from the dark -a nightgown from an attic- but she is also the light that hides in the dark -the moon.

Spiders are blind, fans have ribs and are webbed with cloth.

"What would I do with you,
Give you a fan
To spread in the theatre
When you're blind,"

The conditional tense and ironic tone -the attic becomes a theatre, the dark places, where "the wind/Makes its legend at your back." The presence of the 'you' is not historical, it is legendary, and the legend shifts as the wind blows.

It is the 'I' who can't see, rummaging about, trying to construct presence from absence, using homely objects -nightgown, fan, forked stick, twig, bread- that are meant to limit, define. The 'I' would give the 'you' a forked stick to dowse for her death.

"But I keep waking up wet
With a twig of blood
In my lips."

There is the sense of being awakened into life, of lineage -the twig coming from the forked stick. But the 'I' awakens to absence: "I can't find you." The poem employs specific female emblems that might attach to a mother -nightgown, fan, bread, breast milk, but neither the word 'Mother' nor that particular presence appear in the poem. It is her absence, loss that Stanford wants to name so precisely; her absence makes him bleed. Even the warm, homely image,

"Now you're quiet,
Like a loaf of rising bread."

is ominous, ghostly; rising bread is usually covered; it is shapeless, does not have a solid, final form.
"A letter to the condemned,
You came too late
Like the snow
Who calls you his wife now,"

There is no human presence here, only another emblem for distance. The snow covers and hides the earth, how white, but dark it is, like the spider/moon.

"And your breasts will never be
Heavy with milk,"

The snow's whiteness, barrenness transforms; there is no warmth, no Mother contact possible.

"And your voice like an owl
On every fence post."

The disembodied voice of a predatory animal -the Moon's animal, perched on a fence post and not in a tree, almost as if the fence post is the dowsing rod, transfigured, and what is under it, buried, is the speaker of the poem.

from Ironwood 17
reprinted with permission.