STRANGERS & PILGRIMS, Fred LaMotte. Saint Julian
Press, 2053 Cortlandt, Suite 200, Houston, Texas 77008, 2023, 75 pages, $18
paperback, http://www.saintjulianpress.com
My
college poetry professor, Keith Wilson, attempted to jar us sophomores and
juniors—most of us enrolled in his World Poetry class in order to fulfill our
English requirements for graduation—by announcing to us during our first
meeting, “Poetry is more dangerous than a loaded Colt .45.” I doubt that any of
us knew what Keith, a Korean War veteran who did three tours of duty aboard
battleships and kept a loaded pistol in his hand under the covers as he sweated
out PTSD in his dreams years later, fully meant. But, reading LaMotte’s first
poem in Strangers & Pilgrims—“Scary” (“The world is in chaos / and I
refuse to pretend / that I know what to do.”), and even more so in the
remainder of this collection, knowing how these poems can change the intention,
the direction, and vocation of a life, with all attendant criticisms,
isolations, and abandonments from bosses, colleagues, friends, and even
family—I believe that LaMotte has understood for a long time, the power of
poetry. It is a courageous thing to write poetry. Ultimately, we poets believe
it is a good thing, but “[tell[ing] / the Truth, a sacred / white buffalo /
wander[ing] into [one’s] heart / and feel[ing] a peace / the world cannot give
/ or take away” does not always mean that poetry brings that peace to its
readers—particularly if change is not something one is seeking. Strangers
& Pilgrims should come with a warning: “Beware, reader! Do not proceed
unless you are ready for a change of perspective.” Emily Dickinson said, “I
know it's poetry if it takes my head off.” LaMotte’s latest collection will not
only take off your head, but it will pierce your entire body, because “The
portals to heaven are in the body.”
LaMotte’s
poems use imagery that is convincing on a concrete, sensory level, instantly
appealing to the five senses, and at the same time (and often in the same poem,
the same line) uses necessary abstraction with strong intention—necessary
abstraction because it approaches the unsayable as closely as poetry can, and
strong intention because this poet is not writing for the purpose of linguistic
gymnastics, but as a form of deep spiritual practice, seeking truth and
reveling when he is as surprised at catching a glimpse of it as is the reader.
The following passage is from the second poem in the collection, “On Certain
Afternoons.”
Most of my
DNA
I share with a mouse,
infinitude with a gnat.
Endangered
herds stampede
through the wounded valleys
of my marrow,
I protect
vast swaths
of rain forest
with a single exhalation.
I’m certain
that the merest weed
in its stillness is awake,
a blossoming black-eyed-Susan.
Rooted in listening, I also flower
with no seed of thought.
The soil is my Being.
Wonder is
the musk of my heart.
May my fragrance expand
beyond all gardens.
Come, you
lovers of late Spring,
the gates are never closed.
The
rain-disheveled azalea
will not begrudge your insouciance,
nor the rose your burning fingers.
Let each
dare to whisper
in your own tongue,
“Smell me, I am wild!”
Sprinkled throughout this
collection are poems of Mary Magdalene, LaMotte’s inspiration for these poems.
The first such poem appears as “How Will You Know Her?”—a reverse
personification, where Mary Magdalene is transformed into an abstraction for
which she is the personification of spirit. The first three stanzas employ
anaphora, setting an incantatory tone:
Between
your heartbeats is a garden,
the place
where Magdalene and Jesus touch.
She thinks
he is the gardener. He thinks she is
God’s
breath, caressing his chest. She is.
Between
your heartbeats is a garden,
the
wilderness where Israel meets Wisdom,
the Sabbath
Queen who sings of loss.
How could
they make love in the desert?
They pitch
a tent of animal skins, and it becomes
a holy
pavilion of gathered silences.
Between
your heartbeats is a garden
where
village girls dance with the Prince of Herdsmen.
Each maiden
is his flute, but only one can be his Song.
She who
wears your inhalation as we wedding gown
has come to
wound you in the pulse of your throat.
How will
you know her? By what signs
will you
prove that she is your Betrothed?
Although
LaMotte is interested in uniting with the ineffable, his path to that union is
in the body—both the human one and the granular, concrete body of the Earth and
all that is within it. That truth is shown, not merely told (as in “Never
Again”—“never again let it be said, ‘I am not / this body’”), in several poems,
e.g. “Wings” (“Thou shalt notice the toadstool, / the forget-me-not, a web / of
dew, a pebble”); (“The arc of healing does not shower / down from the sky, it
gushes / upward from the dust”); “Hum” (“…Hum stars / through your belly. So
Hum sap through your cervix”); “Mollusk” (“In a mollusk of prayer, yearning
chafes the sandy grit of “I” into a pearl”); “The Choice” (“The portal to the
kingdom / of contentment has never been closed. / Find it in your body…”); “Latte”
(“Even the pilgrim snail / on a hosta leaf feels starlight / that hasn’t yet
arrived”); “Swan” (“Surely, you’ve been told / a Goddess flows / through your
darkness,…Her wings are your inbreath / and exhalation. / That is why you have
a body”); “Vocation” (When I discovered / the emerald in my chest / I gave up
every calling…just to follow this menial/ vocation: I became / a Jewel Polisher”
and “Let me be ever quenched / by my own thirst”); “Secret” (“Everything is
spiritual. / A toadstool made of God. / If you look close up, / the wing of a
fly is scripture”); “Smudge” (“In the birth canal / you were anointed / with
the mighty host / of earth’s bacteria, / smeared and smudged / with the
microbiome”); and a poem that is emblematic of this “messy” book of poems,
“Solstice”:
Today is
slightly longer
than
yesterday or tomorrow.
So what?
The earth
is wobbly.
Somewhere a
stray kitten
is
shivering in summer rain.
Somewhere a
neglected boy is
loading his
father’s gun.
And a
mother flees across the river
ever
Northward in search
of a home
for her child.
This
inhalation could be a summer solstice,
this
exhalation a winter one.
So what if
Mercury’s in retrograde?
You are not
your horoscope,
you are the
sky.
So what if
the Lion and Bull,
the Ram and
Scorpion cross horns,
their fangs
and stingers
in outrageous
combat?
They’ll
come down at dawn to drink
from the
silent oasis
of your
waking.
You are not
that riot
of ancient
fires and distant sparks.
You are the
largesse of immemorial darkness
through
which they glitter, rear, and clash,
stagger
back, and wander on.
If there is
a God, she doesn’t care
so much
about your stars
as she
cares about the smile you could have
shared with
a friend last night,
The grace
you might say to a stranger
this
evening, the breath you could savor
this very
moment,
like a
sunrise in your chest.
Miles Davis, the legendary jazz
trumpet player, was once asked about playing the wrong note or making a
mistake. His answer was “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note—it’s
the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.” I’m betting that
Davis would like Strangers & Pilgrims. I know that he’d like “Broken,”
which echoes his own musical and personal philosophy, seeming to this reader a
poem that “all the law and the prophets” can hang on.
Broken
A broken commandment
is the open gate
to a wilder meadow.
It may be your sacred duty
to violate the rules.
I smoked an Arturo Fuentes Robusto
with the Bodhisattva.
Asked him if he had any precepts.
He said, just one: be healed by
your tears.
Then he opened up to me about
his sadness, admitted
he had to come back
because he was lonely.
I said maybe Anthony Bourdain
or Sylvia Plath. He said,
maybe Jack Kerouac. I said,
all of them wounded one-eyed
Buddhas.
My belly was thirsty for repentance
so, I made a bourbon smoothie
and shared it with Jesus.
Asked him if he had any rules.
He said, just one: call me brother,
not Lord.
Cucumber, mint, and kale
with a shot of Wild Turkey.
Forgive me, it was delicious.
A broken commandment is the open
gate
to a deeper rule, unwritten,
harder to disobey.
The laws of the body lead
to the precepts of the soul.
Like the one that says, love
anyway.
The one that says, make friends
with the brokenhearted.
The one that says, forgive yourself
again and again…. So I discover
the rules I cannot break
by breaking the ones
I can.
ALFRED
LaMOTTE has authored four volumes of poetry with Saint Julian Press, including Strangers
& Pilgrims, and co-authored three coffee-table art books with artist
and earth-centered activist, Rashani Réa. With degrees from Yale University and
Princeton Theological Seminary, Fred has been an interfaith college chaplain,
instructor in World Religion, and a meditation guide who loves to explore the
liminal space between word and silence, poetry and meditation. He lives on the
shore of the Salish Sea near Seattle WA with his wife Anna.
His
web page is: http://yourradiance.blogspot.com
