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Edward Weismiller

Originally titled, One-Sided Conversations, About The Trees concerns a poet who asks the existential questions in a beautifully haunting voice, and only at the right moments, as in the first section of his "Part Song" from his 1980 collection, The Branch Of Fire.

I

Be sure that the winter will come to the arbor,
Expect that the leaves of the flowers will go
(Less shining than summer’s; leaving their ardor)
Under, and over, and under the snow.
Death is the strict completion of order:
What we were taught, we know.

Summer’s obscure, but winter is open;
Summer’s profuse, but winter is slow
And clear and exact as a wave of the ocean:
Up to that wave we go.

Why do you rise, with your face turned ashen?
What do you still not know?

The thrust of Weismiller’s poetry is the romance of experience from the point of view of "The accomplished dreamer," with, as Weismiller modestly puts it, his "clumsy dream." It certainly is not a clumsy dream, and through the process of personal displacement, we find ourselves magically transported into the muse, into the dead, into a child, into a bear waking from hibernation ("My heart opened, and a bee crawled out . . . I fought / Rock, and lost, / Branches, and lost, / Water, and lost"); or a heart waiting for transplant ("I throw blood / Like a rainbird. / What for? / How long?"); or a youth from Ovid’s era, metamorphosized into the modern malaise (". . . Nomad / of the one place, I pretend I see colors / through windows. I did see / a tree once. It shook me"); or a letter from a lover leaving home found blown against a fence (". . . I love life, / I can’t help it. Soon I’ll tell you where to send money").

William Stafford called Weismiller "a fastidious craftsman . . . often powerfully colloquial, in ways that give a controlled shock, this as against the scattershock of a lot of modern poems." Aside from carrying the inevitable, if world-worn, modernist shock of the new, many poems today do seem scattered and hardly crafted at all, merely broken into lines as if from habit, or for a purpose now dim in the memory. We find lines broken where each phrase ends, or in the haphazard middle of phrases, or after a certain visual distance from the margin in a way that has no discernible point.  We find lines that contain no images whatsoever, and no special language. Weismiller writes by valuing every line as an artefact. Thus he does not cross his lines simply to get the information to the other side. He was an intelligence officer in the second world war, and he has devoted himself to the careful scholarship of English versification; regardless where his control comes from, he uses it with lyrical music and the punch of wit. For Weismiller, each line of poetry is one more chance to create a thing of beauty and energy.

In August, 1999, I read a stunning poem in Slate. It was simply titled  "Poem," and not since Mark Doty’s "Visitation" have I read any contemporary poem that uses an animal in such an exquisitely moving way. You might recall that in Doty’s poem, the power of joy in whale form displaces a long and bitter sorrow. Like James Wright’s "March," Weismiller’s poem concerns a hibernating female bear, and is about the joy of waking back to life and to creation, but in language that recreates an experience from beyond the human realm.

I dreamed
My fur grew,
Snow came and drifted up the cave mouth,
My heart opened, and a bee crawled out.
Under their lids
My eyes caught blue fire.
I saw
The wind, and snarled.

In "The Metamorphosis," we meet the indolence we have all perhaps attained in our era of convenience. The character speaking is intentionally lazy, but even in that soporific voice, Weismiller finds gestures sharp enough to paint the entire world in the poem’s first six short lines.

North of north, citizens were holding
cold straps, riding. I do not
finish journeys, so turned off that dream.

South of south, mountains of meringue.
Egret feathers.
And east and west, spices and all that.

Later in the poem we get a second take on olaf’s famous complaint, "there is some s. I will not eat" from cummings’s "I sing of olaf glad and big:"

Will they make any shit
I cannot eat? I doubt it.
Anything that can be refrigerated, I’m for.
Later.

That last one-word line creates the kind of punch-line that comes with comic delay. You’ll find that close attention to timing in other poems too, as in "Tales Out Of School:"

But slowly others starve.
Nobody knows why,
Or how it feels, to starve.
Not close by.

Because of the spare elegance of the lines, other poets’ familiar phrases sometimes echo, from Yeats, to Frost, to James Wright, to Robert Bly. Weismiller’s "I am seventy. / A hole works toward the toe of my left sock. / My mind shames me. / Not one struggle is over" echoes the Rilkean series of simple but profound statements we find in Bly, Wright, and others. And there are many other phrases that similarly reverberate Yeats: "the green sea is crazed to stone" or "The handle will not turn. / The music will not play." I am not pointing out any debt that one poet owes to another; poets always echo other poets; Yeats is filled with Shakespeare and Blake. I simply mean that with such lush yet simple lines, one can’t help but "listen around."

Often, the prettiness of Weismiller’s lines comes from his judicious use of rhyme. "LOVE THAT TWISTED VINE / involves this flesh of mine." "I fly to see a friend. / Earth’s colors fade from air / Somewhere below the clouds. / Down there. Down there."

At other points, there are perfect similes. A moose "stomps up out of the lake / (Which is beautiful) trailing from its clamped jaws / As from a half-packed valise, torn water-flowers."

And then there are those existential ponderings. Some fall, or fly past, as if the "language / is gone, a sailing / of gowns across endless stages, a swirling / as of snowflakes, and the cold / moon stares."

But when they hit, even when strange and esoteric, they carry behind them a kind of unexpected punch. From "Houses," "What I do not know is / what I would shelter or do shelter, what houses I am, / strange to my understanding, that will fall."

About The Trees is not a perfect collection, as it sometimes seems overly personal, or philosophical, but it is filled with, as Mark Doty put it, ". . . lush vowels / mouthed by the plain man / hunched behind the stage". I hope it finds its way into print soon. It certainly deserves to take its place on the bookshelves of that city of ideas.

BRAD BOSTIAN is a contributing editor for ForPoetry.com.   His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including The Alaska Quarterly Review and Rattle.

Click here to read poems by Edward Weismiller.

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