Source of book: I own this
My wife occasionally finds interesting collections of poetry by modern authors. This book is one of those.
I wasn’t really familiar with Forrest Gander before reading this book, which is one of his more recent ones. Gander is a native Californian, born in the Mojave Desert (of the title) - specifically Barstow. Which, if you know, you know.
He has written not just poetry, but fiction, nonfiction, and translations. His Pulitzer Prize came from one of his poetry collections, but he has won other awards for his translations from both Spanish and Japanese.
Gander originally got his degree in geology, and had been planning to further study paleontology. However, a cancer diagnosis made him reconsider everything, and he switched to writing.
He has taught, traveled, collaborated with artists in other media, and generally followed his own path.
Mojave Ghost is an interesting book. It consists of a single rambling account of his journey along the 800 miles of the San Andreas Fault, primarily the part in the desert. But it isn’t exactly narrative. It is mood, observations, aphorisms, philosophy, and a bit of anything you might write a poem about. Throughout, it is haunted by his ongoing grief over the death of his first wife, but also twined with his awakening love for his current partner.
It is one of those books that you don’t so much read as let it wash over you. And yes, it needs to be read aloud. The words are delicious, and the sounds are part of the meaning. There are a lot of unusual words, unusual choices of words, and some that seem almost made up. The meaning is in the sound, in the implication.
Rather than try to further describe it, I figure I will just quote a few of my favorite passages. Understanding, however, that they are better in context, and that I could have picked many times as many.
Back here, he imagines her
everywhere he looks. As the spring hills boing green.
All awake are the crows.
Flayed by the paper cut of her scent in his memory.
For her, it was home. This town
where various stirps of Christian
fundamentalism intersect
with unchecked retail sprawl.
Now the train just pass on through.
I’m not sure if this is referring to Barstow or not, but it could fit any number of desert railroad towns that are now just where the trains pass through on their way to somewhere else.
Back at Lana’s Diner, watching the woman
at the far table sweep her hair to her other shoulder
and flash her teeth at her companion.
Red sauce, says the woman when her eggs come,
and the waitress returns with ketchup.
As I’m picking up my check
from the table where I’ve eaten alone,
the waitress calls Come again, and
instinctively I answer, We will.
Handwritten note near the cash register:
Do Not Lean Arm on Pecan Roll.
So I pay up and step into humid
rock-flavored afternoon heat.
Dark pompadour clouds casting giant shadows.
There is so much in that passage. We all know the sort of diner, of course. The devastating realization that the speaker still thinks in terms of “we” even though she is no more. And that line about leaning on the pecan roll. That is hilarious.
As latent with futurity as a closed stopcock,
the dawn redwood before it leafs out.
While in a brief sideshow, our lives take place nearby.
It’s so contagious: your quick, rubato, navel laugh.
Walking side by side
through Armstrong Woods,
its terminated air strong as snuff,
We feel the kick-in of elation.
Only in your company do I
concentrate and hold together
like the tightening vortex of a tornado.
I’ve wandered in Armstrong Woods several times, most recently with my wife, who adores the redwood forest. But how about that last stanza? There are these emotional punches throughout the poem, seriously excellent writing about feelings that can’t be entirely captured with words.
Snorting at the uselessness of poetry, the proctologist
we meet at the New Year’s party is armed
with a restricted vocabulary of catch phrases and
pomposities. A mind, you whisper to me
as we turn away, can rivel up like an old apple.
The words become so small, they cannot stand.
Oh god. Yeah, we all know that type.
Not, you say, to fall back
endlessly into the routine of ourselves.
Nor to compose ourselves always
from the same syllables.
I love that one.
You tell me a heartache is not an object of perception.
I wonder. But what do I know of your heart?
Experience is first a matter of feeling.
Even the feeling of not having a feeling.
The tokens of love we exchange
don’t express love’s meaning so much
as its ineffability.
So my experience of you is infinite. Never
contained within your dimensions.
So many of the parts I loved are like this, trying to grab onto words that give a vision into inner life. This, in my view, is why the loss of poetry in our culture is one of the reasons for the rise of toxic masculinity and men who channel everything into anger. We need poetry.
When they tell me it’s narcissistic
to speak of regrets, to let myself circle
in this whirlpool and to go on
about it, when they tell me I need
to move forward, to focus outward,
to offer my attention to others,
aren’t they themselves prompted
by an overbearing concern for control
which is another form of narcissism? Isn’t
this very mourning a constancy
to something beyond myself? Don’t
I have the right to my own experience
of heartache and anguish and failure?
You do, child. But not for so long.
At peace means despair
has settled in its place.
There is a profound truth there: that a concern for control, and particularly that form of control that demands that the sufferer avoid making others uncomfortable, is itself an expression of narcissism. I know it was (and still is) used as a weapon against me. Why do I bring up the past? Why can’t I just say only nice things? Why can’t I move on?
Maybe I can’t because I am still in mourning for the loss of my family, of my autonomy regarding college, of the love and acceptance I needed.
I also find that enjambment does some good work in the second stanza. Reading aloud brings out “Isn’t” and “Don’t,” the speaker’s rebuke to the false comforters.
Again, throughout the book, grief is mixed with the thrill of a new love. One does not displace the other. Both are true at the same time.
I recall the human event
of you turning your face
toward me for the first time. How
many lives before I fail to see it so clearly?
There are times when, in our mind at least,
we must swim back upstream
to where the love originated.
That it might be what it was and is again.
In bed and out.
Because all that is in me is in your eyes.
You, who are the discharge of my singularity.
So very good.
She wasn’t fixed, necessarily, on happiness
which she couldn’t, in any case, distinguish
from luck. What she wanted was to flourish.
Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs.
The one exception to the poem as a running stream of thoughts and events is a section near the end where Gander sets a single stanza on each page, each with a Haiku-like image of a person or place. I picked this one, because I kind of resemble it.
In long-sleeved shirts and hats with neck flaps,
they hike a thaumaturgic canyon path
limned with tall mustard flowers.
The final section is entitled simply “Coda,” and is a single stream of consciousness. The writer is at a place where the effects of the fault are visible, the rupture of the rocks, the displacement. It is in that desert place somewhere, but identifying details are sparse. The ending of the poem is so good that I will end this post with it.
Heat and silence. Still, the ground insists
its openings will be filled. Why
not apply? Apply myself. Over and over. This argument
goes beyond me. I who have never been
homeless. Groundless. Am I just going to stand gobsmacked
at the mirror while my years run out? What
is left of experience that hasn’t
been measured? Is there
an app for that? As I bend, I feel
the weight of the specimen stones
I carry in my jacket pocket slide forward.
As I continue my solo descent
along the canyon’s seam. As I sip
and hold a quick breath. As I slip from sight
into a chimney of rock.
I definitely enjoyed this book, and will probably have to add some more of his writings to my library.
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