part two in a series of
three personal essays mixing travelogue and review
see part one here
Day
2: Fremont || Cluster Flux
In my pockets I have lines from DS Stymeist’s second book of poetry, Cluster Flux, but I wish I had his book with me. It opens with an epigraph from Walt Whitman, that most famous of big-voiced American poets whose vision was optimistic and encyclopaedic. Stymeist’s poetry travels similar routes of openness and would be at home here in the midst of everything. Not that there’s any pop-culture nostalgia, but it’s expansive. What I love most about Cluster Flux is that the poems and sections are framed by a long poem about trains and riding the rails, a mode of travel that doesn’t necessarily care about borders. Train tracks criss-cross the continent and this borderless movement frames Cluster Flux.
Sounds “jolt and jive” us in “Mass Transfer: Passage 1.” This opening poem of long lines that take us through an inventory of train travel is grounded in alliterative pairings. “The plank and ping of it bangs into soles,/ travels the leg, runs up spine,/shakes chest and chassis.” The mechanical is made most manifest in the body, but there’s no explicit mention of who these people are. It’s only in the last stanza where human characters appear: “on a culvert abutment, two people sleep together. / Discrete layers: cardboard padding, bedding.” These travellers (‘knights of the road’ in the old hobo slang) are sleeping in the rough and in going back to the start of the poem, we might imagine the unidentified speaker allying themselves with the anonymous ‘masses,’ people on the move from one part of the continent to the other. We’re all anonymous to most of the almost eight billion other people on this planet, not to mention the billions of other beings. The pairing of sounds that runs through Stymeist’s long poem might be a stand in for the comfort we take in companionship.
Poetry doesn’t always comfort, sometimes it challenges, confronts, or perplexes. It delivers as many purposes as the items in any big antique shop. Cluster Flux, however, ultimately offers a strong mix of language (and therefore an open-eyed awareness of the nooks and crannies of the world) along with personal comfort. In “Oblation,” a poem following the poem “Sea-Jelly,” which itself is written as a direct address to a future child, we witness a reimagining of the future child who is no more. But first, in “Sea-Jelly” in Whitmanesque language, we see the “pleasure of elemental increase.” This creature will someday stretch their limbs “across the firm earth’s countless trails.” Two poems entitled “Oblation” follow, with the first one beginning: “In the midst of our loss.” This first oblation (a term meaning a prayer to god) ends in a vision akin to Bottocelli’s Venus “riding out / the tide on the edge of a pink shell.” The second oblation re-envisions this hoped for child as something aquatic: “a sea-throng of blue jellies blooming.” The prayer preserves this loss as a beautiful entity that once was in the speaker and his partner’s lives. “Salt” and “Chimera” are short single-stanza poems that seem to come out of grief. Pain is acknowledged but the effort to preserve the beauty of a hopeful period in a couple’s life is safeguarded in two small prayers.
Poetry can also comfort through its layering of experiences. Stymeist incorporates his experience living with Crohn's disease most directly in the last section of the book Midsummer Disjunction. The first poem in this section opens with the radio: ‘“Expect set-backs,” lilts the medical pundit.’ The backdrop is the pandemic and the snippet of radio is something that speaks in a different way to Stymeist, whose body “sweats out fever, // overreacts subverts…” The poems in this section are interwoven with imagery from nature. For example, “A cicada-killer wasp clasps a paralyzed cigale / in its mandibles, drags it through the leaf-litter.” The speaker then shares a conversation with another poet over “socially-distant drinks.” This poet explains the pain of his gout and at the end of the poem, the speaker explains his own pain, but this is within the context of others’ pain. It’s a scream within a scream within a scream. We experience pain but it’s the condition of our shared existence.
The line explaining the fate of a paralyzed cigale (French for cicada) makes the Whitman epigraph of the collection all the more resonant: “stiflings and passages open… the paralyzed become supple.” The dream of recovery for all sorts of creatures runs throughout Cluster Flux.
I consider giving some lines from the opening of Stymeist’s book to one of the employees at Fremont Vintage Mall. I’m buying a small magnetic frame as a gift and after the sale, I explain that I’m from Canada and I’m sharing poetry on my trip to Seattle. I give him the opening stanza from the poem “Abrasion,” which I’ve written out by hand:
Bison venerate the rare boulders sunk
deep into prairie sea. Generations spin
around stone, crushing blood-sucking
creatures beyond the curve of horn.
DS Stymeist from Cluster Flux
He’s wearing a military cap and a plaid shirt. He’s intrigued by the poem. He appreciates the gesture and holds the slip of paper up like a bill of sizable denomination. His perfect posture stands in contrast to his loose angular smile.
We talk a little about how the line acknowledges the culture of animals, but I wish I had the whole book with me. I didn’t anticipate the exchange would go this well. If I had the book, we could read it together and see the last line: “How can I be more like them, rub against / roughness, learn to shed my skin?” In the end: a poem of longing for the strength to deal with difficult change.
Cluster Flux offers multiple visions and paths to healing, none of them straight-forward and most of them with an eye to the many moving connections that are made in and around the earth. How there is so much more than us.
I leave the Fremont Vintage Mall to go see how Cheryl’s doing in her search.
