Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

Melissa Kwasny

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780295742458
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today comprises two interwoven series—one of linked prose poems called "Another Letter to the Soul" and one of individual lined poems that explore the connection between anima and animal. The volume speaks to and questions the ancient concept of the soul and its contemporary manifestations, including the damaged soul, the American soul, and the blind, gagged soul of history. Melissa Kwasny does not define the soul in traditional religious terms, but in a shamanic, perhaps ecological sense, as the part of being that continues its existence after death. The poems in "Another Letter to the Soul" point inward, addressing the human soul directly, while the individual lined poems search outward, sensing the soul in the plants, animals, rocks, waters, and winds that surround us.

I.

THE DEER PEOPLE

THE DEER PEOPLE

Stumbled under the shade of birds. Scratched a little hollow

in the dirt and hid the rings there.

Moved quiet and alone among the others. As if through snow.

Wearing the sage wristbands.

Considered sunshine and its synonyms. Considered its antonym:

the ebbing tide. Spot-lit, entered from the wings.

Stepped into a spirit world where the natural show themselves.

Wearing a guise of the same.

“disconnected” “little dreams” “false continuum” (Alice Notley).

Often a complete and common shyness.

To candle is to examine an egg’s freshness by holding it to the light.

Hole in the ozone. Hole in the soul’s tallow lining.

That grown men can hold their guns to the soft belly of a child.

That they can shoot someone who is so afraid.

The violence we have allowed to blow through us. Locked

bedroom door bucking in its casement.

Considered peace and its synonym. The whitetail doe and her fawn.

Crossed the field of the mind meadow-wise.

To ask a question is a promise that one will listen. How the fir

is within the fire. Wind in the windrow.

Saw not particulars but glow. Fed off the nose. Cleared the air

of all but the smell of clover.

THE PRONGHORN ANTELOPE PEOPLE

Antholops, a Greek name. Intermediate between goat

and wind. “Little horse” to the academics.

We are mirrors. Let the past imagine us.

It cannot be entertained. It is large, like an owl landing.

In the guidebook, the smooth green snake that crossed

my path is named the Smooth Green Snake,

in the story, which I have been invited to take a part in.

In the circle of intimates, which include the deer.

The Cheyenne word for tea: a flower soup, a soup of leaves.

The antelope mime for us the tragedy

of a language besieged, bounding past our industries,

jumping in the snowmelt stream,

falling back in their efforts to mount the bank. World view.

In theirs, few of us exist. A function of eyes

placed sideways so they have to sidle to see ahead.

Hip tricked against the highline. A solitary atop the ridge.

The blue sage whispers to the rattlesnake, coiled around

its stem to escape the heat.

Breakfast, a brewing fest of coolness. Morning fog, a feather

down. Winter burr. Summer rapids.

The antelope emerge from the seed-holes of evening: gully,

coolie, draw. Loosely beaded, an elastic string.

Their cloud design, all eyebrow. All shade unto themselves.

Color of rabbit tail and bone meal.

We could hunt them down, but then they would be dead.

We don’t discover them. They cross our paths,

ancestral members of a world we lost, the terra cotta shards

of a vein. Coal seams set on fire by lightning.

THE WIND PEOPLE

Wind people, like the buffalo,

are indigenous to our plains and demand the same fate,

the same reprisals. Burial after burial,

incremental, so that often we are too late to attend them.

But the sound of grief breaks.

The whimpering begins. The build-up, the acceleration.

Every known culture has taken upon itself

naming of the soul, usually in words for smoke or wind.

It slows us down the road in its direction.

Tourists return from the famous battlefield, chastened.

Where do the ghosts go, are they shouldering these gusts,

or, slipping our senses, do they bunker

floor-length, stooped over us but lost from our thoughts?

Who is it that manages the heavy lifting.

To lament, honor, feel shame. The composer

asks if there is a word that includes both apology and praise.

Confession perhaps, a plea for absolution. An open screen.

The shape of our violence somehow heard by us.

THE COTTONWOOD PEOPLE

Faint. Uncombed. Awash in rain.

They share the kind of beauty shared by older women.

Rhapsody in wind. Buds,

not leaves: the small greens crowding up behind them.

Music, if one could see it, its wicker, its cursive strain.

Spruce, which has the heavier sails, flapping.

You are everything you feel beside the river. (Seamus Heaney)

Through the silver-paned bark, the diamond pores of

sloughed-off skin. If I saw my soul, she would be this tree,

and I would love her.

Placing stops between the strings, a composer

warps the score though making noise is never the intention.

One can draw anything on paper and ask a musician to play it.

For instance, a violinist known for her sheer nerves.

It is good to be cold, to remember cold. Hushed by rain,

to be ordained in a dry place. Suppleness of the word posture.

By the time my friend received the diagnosis, she was no longer

prepared to accept it—

an afterimage shot with stores of pollen.

THE ASPEN PEOPLE

The heavy early snow that came

when leaves were green

bent willows and alders to earth,

broke the waistlets of yellow pine,

but worse, snapped in half

the plumy aspens near the roadside.

Ascetic. Thin and resonant,

thu...