The Clearing

Poems

Allison Adair

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781571315144
• eBook ISBN: 9781571317407
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

A poetry debut that's "a lush, lyrical book about a world where women are meant to carry things to safety and men leave decisively" (Henri Cole). Luminous and electric from the first line to the last, Allison Adair's debut collection navigates the ever-shifting poles of violence and vulnerability with a singular incisiveness and a rich imagination. The women in these poems live in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores, and they understand the nature of being hollowed out. From the midst of the Civil War to our current era, Adair charts fairy tales that are painfully familiar, never forgetting that violence is often accompanied by tenderness. Here we wonder, "What if this time instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have"? The Clearing knows the dirt beneath our nails, both alone and as a country, and pries it gently loose until we remember something of who we are, "from before... from a similar injury or kiss." There is a dark beauty in this work, and Adair is a skilled stenographer of the silences around which we orbit. Described by Henri Cole as "haunting and dirt caked, " her unromantic poems of girlhood, nature, and family linger with an uncommon, unsettling resonance. Winner of the 2019 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize Praise for The Clearing "A dark and bodily nod to folk- and fairy-tale energy." — Boston Globe "The poems in Adair's debut draw on folklore and the animal world to assert feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines, as when "A fat speckled spider sharpens / in the shoe of someone you need." — New York Times Book Review, "New & Noteworthy Poetry" "Like Grimms' fairy tales, Adair's poems are dark without being bleak, hopeless, or disturbing. Readers will find the collections lush language and provocative imagery powerfully resonant." — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review )

III

WESTERN SLOPE

The women who come here partly give up

being women. No last names, no locks.

A spike, instead, concealed in every hairbrush.

A man’s a bear, a cub embeds his claw

in the hollow door. You wear it on a string.

Your own first snow melts gradually, old firn

riding the continental divide back to a distant

ocean. We swam there once, that water, alien blue

algae pulsing like a showgirl in the wings, it was

when you shot the worn dog that I knew you

had gone for good. Even cakes struggle to rise

at 10,000 ft. Hard angles to the atmosphere, you

say. A newborn fits a thick palm. Blood stretches

too, gasping, for its sliver of air. You won’t come

down, everything now’s an open mouth to the wide sky and the sky unspooling cloudless

and cloudless and cloudless.

(But—before I go—wasn’t it us for a while? Weren’t we the neon

kicking in the light? Tell me you remember the waves

bathing our necks, our small ears?)

WHALE FALL

During sleep, a whale shuts down

only half her brain, and these days

I know how she feels. The term

is conscious breathing, if she forgets

everything’s done for. Down into the depths

like defunct electronics, massive and gray

as a tanker full of jammed mimeographs.

Better to keep one mild eye open, stoned

as a dusk-fed cow, than to risk slow-sinking

into the pulp of the sea floor. How do we ignore

the stealth of the anglerfish? The soft force

of lungs crushed past equilibrium?

Anyone who finds the sea placid

hasn’t been paying attention. A dying

whale descends, enormously,

toward special humiliation: to be jungle

gym for twitchy neon fish. Fondled

by scurvy eels, then gnawed into plankton.

Nothing left of the effortless menace,

the casual hunger of baleen swishing krill—

all of it, gone. Instead of the sea opening

like a purse, pouty mouths peck,

gumming at our lead pleats, only to spit

and suck and spit again. The nerve. All they want

is our algae. This, for decades. Until our long

bones are finally exposed, raw, the pale frame

of a once ambitious ship, now aimless

as sugarcane wrapped by shrimp. Tonight, we pull

our sail from a dryer, flail. Where would we go

if we went? We can’t recall what sleep

ever meant. Whale fall, scientists call it.

For a mammal the size of a metro bus

route, the whale does lack some imagination.

All these years, not a single fin reaching out

for beach plums. (Do you know what’s still said

about L’s mother, who left her kids in a mustard-

colored playpen and drove toward sunset?)

On the other hand, the whale’s skeleton, once

picked clean, still pinches into two tiny

leg bones, just below the tail. Think of it:

what they might have become, had they

developed a taste for our dry air—or

had they not turned back. Their bulky city,

vast hospitals specializing in joint repair.

Instead, woozy bags of organs, little more.

Even with those hearts big as rental cars.

But the bit of fur, the milk remind us

to Windex the lens before we aim

and shoot. If we look close enough we see

ourselves ticking along to magnetic north:

this way for food, this for sex,

how to enter a current, and to escape,

the way shade quivers when orcas circle

a calf. We remember how to begin

again, day after day, letting others moor

or latch as the ticking clock requires. For us, life

drags on for two hundred years. Half-breathing,

half-awake, floating or swimming—we’re not

sure which: but push out/drag in, through

the blowhole flexed as a starved nostril,

we’re at the surface for a flash, foaming

plum, plum or was that from our mouth,

beak, pineal gland, appendix, the flukes

we can’t shake? We can’t say which, or where

we are, or when we split into legs—didn’t we

live here once?—but which direction

to summer, unthinking lung? Lung, it’s been so long

since we’ve dragged against a new shore,

carved a sandbar into a question mark.

Muscled along the freshwater beaver’s tail,

well out of our own water. Just listen to all

the claws out there, clicking along

unfamiliar strands. Breathing, any way

they can, as if real sleep might arrive

with the next wave.

IF IMAGINATION AND MEMORY MET UNEXPECTEDLY, ONE LAST TIME

it would be this moment, the dark slow mess

of one body unpiling toward another in sleep, the longing of two

waves reeling in queasy parallel. Mostly it’s like you

never rested here, this body, your head never heavy

as sorrow, as troubled bone, neve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Clearing
• I
• II
• III
• Notes
• Acknowledgments