Your Unfathomable Wardrobe by Harvey Lillywhite, Published by QCG Press, Baltimore, MD, Available in paperback on Amazon: ISBN: 978-1-0910476-2-4, $17.95
A Finger Pointing at the Moon
by
Michael Fallon
Your Unfathomable Wardrobe is a collection of moving and illuminating lyric poetry, as well as a very carefully and beautifully designed book. On the cover is a woodblock print, Hirakawa Bridge, by Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950), a Japanese Artist who helped revive the Ukiyo-e school, a Buddhist inspired tradition where artists attempted to capture “pictures of the floating world,” the sadness and impermanence of life. The book is divided into four sections. Each begins with a haiku with another located about midway through. This is a moon-haunted book. The moon appears over a bridge and in the water on the cover of the book, and the author warns us in the notes about the famous Buddhist admonishment “… ultimate reality is like a finger pointing at the moon. Don’t mistake the finger for the moon.”
The first section of the book begins with this haiku:
First ……………….. before …………………flash
true ……………….. you …………………….us
autumn…………… button ………………..your
moon……….……… your ……….………….sweet
……….………………..shirt ……….………….smile
The next poem, a sonnet titled “The Fall,” displays the rich, inventive imagery, and the graceful language we are going to find as we read on:
……….……………………………………………………..
……….The bustling marketplace and sonorous
……….Tabernacle of the trees flaming limbs
……….The ugly starlings singing out their hymns –
……….Quick coruscations and the high-pitched chorus–
……….To the blue horizon as I come near.
……….Dancing, clapping, amazed by what is here.
The poems range in emotion from wonder and joy to struggle, pain, and sorrow, as we experience the “unfathomable wardrobe” of being. They are full of precise observations of nature as in these lines from the poem “Fall.” “…The velvet green beech/ leaves rubbed to smooth papery brown/ And the bushes that were puffed with summer/ Drop the small pages they were written on/ Transformed to cages for winter birds—“ The first few poems anchor us in the physical, “floating world” of beauty, wonder and change, and often—joy—into which the poet’s children are born as is the poet’s son in the poem “Rising:”
……….……………………………………………………
……….He wants to clamber a little way into the sky
……….Where the perfect endlessness of blue invites us to go.
……….To know anything, after all, you have to get beyond it.
……….He’s already scrambling from his crib,….
In another poem, the poet muses on his sleeping newborn niece, Maya. Her name has a variety of meanings depending on the language of its origin. Is the child’s name derived from the Hindi word for “illusion,” the Greek word, meaning “good mother,” or the Hebrew word for “water.” Is the word in the title simply the name of the child? In this book of rich ambiguities, perhaps it takes on all the facets of the languages of its origins. The poem concludes, that in this ultimately unknowable universe all one can know for sure is “…the love you embody.// Love that holds our only truth.”
In “Ezra’s First Scream, “another poem of wonder and tenderness, the poet tells us:
……….What doesn’t kill us makes us
……….Sing…………………………………………..
……….The cock-crow of sunrise, holy thing
……….In the holy tree like the first miracle
……….Coming true; more than seeing the peeling sycamore’s
……….Crooked branches and thousands of giant
……….Green hands: more than seeing
……….September seventh’s first honking wedge of geese
……….Burrow into the dim light….”
Here, the child’s first scream becomes a song of joy, the song of his being. But by the end of the first section, the mood of the poems becomes more melancholy as in “First Vision” where “…the world began to come apart” and “another face, a hand…separated me from the world.” And “Wrapped in blankets, cradled in her arms,/I could see isolation, my abiding home.” Here the poet as a young child perceives his separateness from his mother and the universe that gave birth to him –and so his now isolated and lonely being. By the end of the first section, in the last poem, “Above the Beating of Their Hearts,” even the moon has become “… nothing much,/ A mirror for coyotes/ to howl at….”
The second section opens with a haiku where the “dark self” is “…wandering the great hopelessness of light….,” and the next poem in this section, “Astronomy”, again expands on the themes of sadness and unknowing as the first lines read: “There is a sadness stretched out across the sky./The explosion bearing everything into the world/ Has left us too far apart….” As I mentioned in the poem, “First Vision,” the poet returns here to the idea of our separateness from each other and from the totality of being. We feel the alienated sadness of our aloneness which is the cause of our longing and so much of our inevitable suffering, but also as the poet has implied, it is what makes love necessary, as in the closing line of the poem, “Love’s Home,” as we are “…perishing, while love keeps feeding from our hand.”
We go even deeper into sorrow now, as sadness has become dejection in “Window’s Lament” where the poet tells us in the last two lines: “I need to grow truly dejected to do my job/ Lamenting the slow perfection that continues to assemble.” –a “perfection” that dooms us all, and he tells us later in the closing of “Sunken Town in Moonlight, “…Now I’m nothing but moonlight and shadow.” It would seem that we have descended a long darkening staircase from the joy of being, of loving, of children coming into the world, down into sadness, the loneliness of being, coupled with the despair of unknowing — before the poet contradicts himself and the dominant somber mood with the poem “Believing” where:
……….…………………………………………………………..
……….Heaven comes a little closer. My wife deep
……….In the ringing of her body, dreaming a child,
……….Too far off to wake. In her sleep she says my name
……….Easily, I watch the sparrows forage. It seems
…………………..We’ll live forever.
What a difference a day makes, what a difference the next poem makes! As it is in life, so it is in a book of poems. We go from ecstasy to dejection. One day the universe is a spectacle of moon, stars and clouds and seems to open like a joyful, transcendent opera before us, and the next day, the rattletrap car goes kaput in the middle of a hailstorm. Such is the nature of this unfathomable wardrobe. The richness of this collection comes not simply from the often lyric richness of many of the poems, but from its shifting moods and its variety of perspectives.
There is more trouble and suffering ahead as in Foxes “… where again spring itself has fractured…and the poem concludes…the compost,/ of scraps and grudges nurturing every new bloom.” and in “Midnight Blue,” a fascinating, but powerfully disturbing poem that begins with love and sexual joy: “At night my wife/ Is a ship in the Armada of Love…” and ends with destructive isolation and the clashing of wills:
……….……………………………………………….
……….Or maybe at night I am her mirror.
……….I hold her the way our tall window
……….Holds her image in the dark
……….Yet allows her to look out beyond our room.
……….She will try to break me, she is so strong,
……….Or she will just forget me
……….And find her reflection along the blade of a knife.
This sinister closing is followed by a poem titled, “The Choice,” and here is where I think the book reaches its crux of trouble. In this poem, the poet wanders his neighborhood at night after an argument with his wife, when “…A Peggy Lee tune/ spreads from an open window: (I assume it is Peggy Lee’s song, “Is That all There Is.”) and he thinks to himself, “… I’m sure I’m leaving this time…” and then he imagines his wife “… probably crying, sitting in a chair; / the heat fogging the window. I can see her there/ already trying to forget me .…” but then the choice is made, “When I Return, knowing all loss/ is unforgivable. The moon rises like a word / I can’t quite think of ….” To me this is the pivot point of the book when the speaker chooses to return, to face the wound that has opened between himself and his wife, to love rather than to flee from the suffering and self examination it must entail—and maybe to say the forgotten words, “I’m sorry.”
The third section of the collection goes back in time to examine the speaker’s troubled, sometimes violent, relationship with his father and the separation, and I assume, divorce, of his parents. After the father’s death, the poet, at last, reconciles himself: “… I’ll just say/ to your memory that won’t leave me alone,/ No one part of the tree there is melancholy, /…Not a capillary/ running the length of a single leaf, Not even in the fall when the whole thing goes/ Up in flames of color….”
It was interesting and (ironically) enjoyable to read here, “10 Things to Do When You’re Suffering.” This is a poem dedicated to the poet’s big sister, where he includes, among the list– and suggests that you visit- the web addresses of the Gyeongbokgung Palace, a spectacularly beautiful palace with lovely gardens outside Seoul, South Korea, and “Letter From Home.” A song by the Pat Metheny Group, that the poet calls, “pure musical heroine.” He’s right, It is. He also– among a list of other distractions, pleasures, and meditations– recommends reading Auden’s “Musee Des Beaux Arts” several times, “out loud, with feeling.” As the final cure for sorrow, he recommends that you, “…Love and know you’re loved/ endlessly, without limit, and for all time….” I liked the opportunity here to experience, directly, a few of the things the poet enjoys and values. I felt it brought me, the reader, even a little closer to the person, beyond the words, who is speaking to me.
The last, and forth, section of the book ends on a more hopeful note; with a wedding of the poet’s son and daughter in law, who will start a family of their own. There is a sense here of coming through and of wisdom gained, as the poet gives the young couple a red kantha quilt (in a poem of the same name) on their second wedding anniversary, which they have no idea what to do with. Kantha quilts, which originated in India, are made up of scraps of discarded cloth sewed together in a patchwork. So the poet bequeaths to them (and to us) some of what he has managed to gather, those little fragments of wisdom, tattered shreds of love, finally sewn together into a quilt in this book of poems,“Your Unfathomable Wardrobe,” The title poem which I quote in it’s entirety here:
……….O great night, I’ve been looking for a jacket
……….As bright as you. I’d try you on
……….But I fear the million tiny buttonholes
……….Would take forever to close.
……….Still, you make me an offer I can’t refuse.
……….Let me walk my dog
……….In your lucky shadow; let me walk
……….With my boys as they feel
……….Their way. Then, having practiced so well
……….For so many years, I’ll know
……….How to hear when you call
……….A last time and promise
……….To deliver the one button I own
……….To your unfathomable wardrobe.
The only criticism I have is that I think the poems are strongest and most compelling in the beginning and middle of the book and then come on strong again towards the very end. But there are many very beautifully written and illuminating poems here, and the collection as a whole resonates with a lyric grace.
In some ways this book of poems is like a novel, as we follow the lifeline of the poet through various joys, sorrows, and crises; the melancholies, the beauties, the lonely wonderings as experience makes him more accepting if not wiser. Maybe he learns to understand that we cannot know anything much for sure–except that we will know nothing and have nothing if we do not manage to love one another. He leaves us this rich, illuminating, and beautiful quilt of poems– a finger pointing to the elusive moon.
© Harvey Lillywhite and Michael Fallon
Harvey Lillywhite teaches writing at Towson University. His books of poems include Your Unfathomable Wardrobe and Ephemeral Blues. His poems have appeared widely in such magazines as Poetry East, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Poetry Northwest, Missouri Review, and many others. He received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bennett Cerf Prize from Columbia University, and an Academy of American Poets Award. He served as editor of Plum magazine and Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose. He earned degrees from the University of Utah and Columbia University.
Michael Fallon’s poems have appeared recently in Northeast Narrative, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, The Connecticut River Review, The Loch Raven Review, Illuminations, Southword, and other magazines. He is the author of 4 collections of poetry, A History of the Color Black, Dolphin-Moon Press, 1991; Since You Have No Body, winner of the Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, 2011; The Great Before and After, BrickHouse Books, 2011, and Empire of Leaves, Singing Man Press, 2018. Essays have appeared recently in The New England Review, on lit hub-The Best of the Literary Internet, The Concho River Review, Broad Street Literary Review, The Razor, The Northern Virginia Review, and Blood and Thunder. Fallon is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in the English Department at UMBC.
The Loch Raven Review 