Prartho Sereno: Indian Rope Trick

             In the opening poem of Indian Rope Trick, “We Can Stop Asking,” Sereno lays out what’s at stake in this collection. These poems grapple with the pull of time on everything in the flow of existence, inevitably carrying us all toward death and beyond, like the Ganges sweeping along “…miniature boats / from her banks, heaped with marigolds / making the river sob purple and orange.” But, the poet reminds us, our journey is not as straightforward as getting sick and old and dying at river’s end: “…time passes like smoke—a pungent furl / of nearly nothing, more delicate than silk.” Even so, we desire to turn the mystery into something more palpable, more useful:

            We would like to sew a dress from it

            and wear it to the wedding. We would like

            to make a tent of it to carry on our backs.

            Then in the final stanza, Sereno transposes her metaphors into similes, and shifts her nouns to verbs, underscoring our inability to capture time’s essence, and emphasizing its action on us, rather than contemplating its characteristics:

            But time is not a river or smoke.

            It’s more like the billow and sway

            the smoke and river do. More like

            the surge and swell of morning light—

            a sneaker wave aimed for the shore,

            a hunger in the water that wants us,

            every last one of us, back at sea.

            This is an appropriate ending to an apt opening poem. The “hunger in the water” provides a backdrop of longing for the specificity Sereno’s images provide in poems that follow. In “The First Rule” we encounter “the hairs on your head,” “the snow flakes filling the pines,” “a river, riotous with alligators, / a migratory cloud of monarchs,” and a “lone whale lost at sea.” In “My Daughter Falls in Love,” we find “the rustle of wingbeats in the air,” and “ a raindrop on the head of a pin, / …almost too much for us to bear.” This haunting and gorgeous language works toward the climax of section I, the title poem:

            

            Indian Rope Trick

                  Steps have to be followed, but sometimes
                  they can wonder away from you.
                                                --from a student essay

            It’s the mystery’s favorite trick: weaving

the intricate rope of someone’s life, then

lifting it for them to climb and somewhere

near the top…disappear.

Two weeks ago my brother told me

he’d shot nine holes. Pain was lousy, he said,

but went on to try out punchlines he’d been

practicing for his meeting with the Maker.

I’m not afraid to die, he said

with that curious wonder he had

since the diagnosis. But this time

he added he had no regrets.

None worth counting, anyway.

I’d taken my phone on my walk and was talking

to him from the mountain, at the level of ravens

and hawks. He’d had a wonderful life, he said,

which caused the rope of it to rise and grow taut

so we could see it in all its color: There in his yellow

cowboy pajamas with his champion Alaskan yoyo.

There in the glow of his cherry-bomb days.

There at the helm of the stolen tractor on a joyride

over the gold club greens. And look: now he’s doing

figure eights on his forklift in the basement of Kodak.

Now he’s blasting off, bottle-rocket-style, to

international VP. See him there in Paris and Philly?

See him adrift on South Carolina’s inlet seas?

Here come the whole buzzing swarm

of friends drawn in by the honey of his ease.

Ah…we seem to have followed that rope

right up through the clouds.

I couldn’t have asked for more, he said.

And his exhale filled the valley

So the hawks lifted up on the rising air.

And we said goodbye.

            I hate to point out my only quibble with Sereno’s mostly masterful book with an example from the title poem, but I must. As in the actual Indian rope trick, where a stand of rope is suspended in the air without visible support, while a person pulls herself up and out of sight, the trick in making a good poem is in using just enough language for clarity, without sacrificing mystery. For this reader, the final line is not only unnecessary, but actually detracts from that mystery by stating something better left unsaid. If the poem were to end on “so the hawks lifted up on the rising air,” I would have been both satisfied, and left aching for more. Better too little than too much, in my opinion.

            The few places where Sereno’s poems stray, it’s not for lack of gorgeous language, fresh imagery, or interesting narrative, it’s for including just one image, one line or, in the case of “Piano,” one stanza too much. “Piano” is one of my favorite poems in the collection. It has a dark narrative arc about a boy who played the piano next door until he died. The story flows perfectly across its tight stanzas that eventually rip apart in stanza three to enact what must be a sibling practicing scales, showing the same “hesitation” and “plunge” of notes from a beginner by spacing the words seemingly at random on the page. All the while the poet is

…eating [her] lunch in the garden—

soup and lettuce, last night’s fish.

The book whose plot can’t hold me

lies open in my lap, when, after a gap

that seems to signal the recital’s end,

the instrument             somehow

catches its breath and through

its hundred vocal chords sets loose

a winged thing—a music deep and holy,

as if every c-minor, b-flat, g-sharp—

every chord—has been summoned

to sound again.

            A beautiful poem that ends on the high point of emotional intensity, allowing the space below it to echo the disappearing act of the Indian rope trick, and all emptiness and loss. But, no. The poem continues:

            As if the grief-knot has come

            undone and love has been freed

            to pour down again

            over us and our parched gardens

            like summer rain.

            There is nothing wrong with these lines in themselves. It is just, in the opinion of this reviewer, that the stanza is a kind of denouement. It is explaining to us—poetsplaining?—what it is we have just read and experienced in the previous stanza. And I prefer my poetry straight, undiluted, without a net to break my fall. 

I am aware, however, that many readers do like their poems to end in a neatly tied bow, rather than to have loose strings, or in the case of Sereno, loose strands of rope, hanging about. And so I applaud the poet for not ending each poem in Indian Rope Trick in the same manner, managing to subvert readers’ expectations as to what will transpire in its final lines. And there are plenty of poems whose endings sound a note of mystery. “Notes from the Field” is emblematic of such a poem, albeit one whose ending is foreshadowed in the epigraph--necessary I think, in order to make sure that final "wonder" is not mistaken for a typo. In this poem, and in many others in Indian Rope Trick, Sereno achieves the balance that most poets and writers strive to achieve: mystery without opacity, and accessibility without blatant derivation or cliche. Thus, it can be read as an ars poetica, and an apt ending to this review.

Notes from the Field

And so we begin. Well, not exactly we, more like me

all by myself, taking my first step onto the field.

Blindfolded. If you listen to Science Friday, you know

where this is leading. It’s the same for everybody,

the researcher proclaimed this morning, giddy

with a certainty yet unknown to science: Blindfold

any person and aim her into an expanse of grass.

Soon enough she’ll be walking in circles. Yes!

the researcher says with relish: Everyone.

In decades of trials on the vast and motley they’ve yet

to find an exception. He’s dizzy with it: our profound

inability to walk a line. And I’m so there with him

in that dizzy. Well, not exactly there, of course,

but here where we started. And not exactly we

(I remind myself) but me in my little quorum of one.

But I’m procrastinating. Steps have to be followed.

Blindfolded. Without you. One foot at a time, though

I’m pretty sure they’ve already started to wonder away.

Indian Rope Trick by Prartho Sereno, Blue Light Press, 2018, $15.95 paper

Prartho Sereno is author of four poetry collections, including Elephant Raga, Call from Paris, and Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives & Loves of Kitchen Utensils (illustrated by the author). She is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Marin County, California and lives a little north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Indian Rope Trick is the winner of the 2018 Blue Light Book Award.