REMAIN
Mornings fell on neighborhoods turned white
grids of ash; the odd surviving objects
like antiquities—a dish intact, a child’s toy—
became remarkable. It was a year of fire
in wine country. Another year burning.
The far land veined with bright, raging bands
that worked a century of dust-
to-dust in a single night. One woman
lived by jumping into a swimming pool,
treading water while the red
and smoke-drowned night
passed over her, till daylight
found the house eaten
and the fire moved on.
Her shoes half-melted on the deck
just cool enough to wedge her feet into,
she walked out under the dawn-lit
cinder-flurry. A naked Eve
in this reverse creation,
the newly unmade world.
-Jennifer Polson Peterson
Originally published in The Banyan Review, Issue 15, Summer 2023
Jennifer Polson Peterson is the author of Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe (forthcoming from Belle Point Press) and a poetry chapbook, Must Resemble Leisure, (published by Seven Kitchens Press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Image, The Southern Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and currently serves as the inaugural poet laureate of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Jenny Peterson’s revelatory “Remain” is a compact documentary in poetry, part of the cinema of synesthesia. We are accustomed to scanning disasters from above, like presidents doing flyovers. That is, we try to see the whole and are overwhelmed by it, mistaking the overwhelming for the true impact. “Remain” begins with an establishment shot—the chilling “grids of ash”–that quickly turns particular: “the odd surviving objects // like antiquities—a dish intact, a child’s toy. . . .” We see how destruction instantly confers age: just the first of the poem’s revelations. The camera pans wide, gives us the irony of fire in wine county, of a burning abstraction. Time burns—not through the outmoded trick of a calendar engulfed in flame, but through the steadiness of the poem’s narration. How chillingly lovely, like Elizabeth Bishop’s fire balloons, “the far land veined with bright, raging bands /that worked a century of dust- / to dust in a single night.” “A century of dust- / to dust” has the radical economy of all effective narrative images. The poem sweeps us into understanding of the moment-by-moment world it depicts. With the words “One woman” we are catapulted into the poem’s central story, its archetypal tale of aloneness at world’s end. The woman lives in water by means of simple, repetitive motion, alone while the “red / and smoke-drowned night / passed over her, till daylight / found the house eaten / and the fire moved on.” All the relentlessness of catastrophe, its matter-of-factness, emerges from these lines. The word “eaten” wakes the familiar idea of a fire “consuming” things, makes it direct. The fire, in its terrible objectivity, has “moved on,” leaving us alone with our representative, a “naked Eve” rising from water to resume her life, whose shoes have survived just intact enough to be slipped on, to support her as she enters a “reverse creation,” a revelation that reaches beyond surprise to the drastically counterintuitive. Behind all this is the knowledge that we all throw fuel on the fire in the very process of daily living.
A poem that comes to mind in this context is Mark Strand’s “Always,” in which “the great forgetters” cause parts of the world to disappear, one by one: “The great forgetters wrinkled their brows. / Then Florida went and San Francisco / Where tugs and barges leave / Small gleaming scars across the Bay.” This continues to its logical conclusion:
’Where will it stop?’ one of them said.
’Such difficult work, pursuing the fate
Of everything known,’ said another.
’Down to the last stone’ said a third,
’And only the cold zero of perfection
Left for the imagination.’ And gone
Were North and South America,
And gone as well the moon.
Another yawned, another gazed at the window:
No grass, no trees…
The blaze of promise everywhere.
Both poems invoke gigantic disappearance. Strand’s takes place entirely in the imagination, and wonderfully so. Both endings startle us with unlooked-for rebirth. Strand’s ravishes: “the blaze of promise everywhere.” But Peterson’s emerges with difficulty from ravages of the actual, the documented. This is not to minimize the thrill of “Always,” but to highlight the difference between a parable poem whose material is essentially mythic and one that uncovers—inflicts, really–the mythic in reality, fits us with the nameless woman’s half-melted shoes, still warm (as they might be in Elizabeth Bishop), and delivers us to contradiction: “the newly unmade world.” The impression that outlasts Jennifer Polson Peterson’s splendid poem is triumph: the vulnerable dignity of the lone survivor, arising from destruction like Botticelli’s Venus from the sea. -Angela Ball