GREEN PLANTS AND A BAMBOO FLUTE

Oaks tear up the storm floor

Nothing left to warn

The poisoned rat has poisoned the owl

The striped air of the state is choked

With pointed salty star materials

They've cut the tips off dollar bills

Now chipped stars everywhere seems like

Death planes with Daisy Chains

Bomb planes with cute little names

Swordfish stab the water's skin

The sea has no plot

 

Earlier thinkers thought of air

As a mist not a context

With each bomb the part

That was narrow shrinks.

Our god passes by briefly

From another existence

With his pretty floating rib

The one they call the twelfth

The webbed arch of caravans

Frames the desert horror

The owl's eyes follow them

on this side of the pale

One night in a vision

Your future car was buried

Today they drive the buried car

Turn like a three-part song

Electricity wants not to be anymore

Or to be darktricity

The brain is an atmosphere of rooms

A situation without a future

Where us presides over an it

The doom's-whim-bride's-trace fog

Doubles as a shroud

 

If the flute cannot be found

Its breath is in you

Making an @ sign of sex or grain

What was it thinking of

The catkins look so like grenades

Maybe the particle spirits

Will spin in the at of each address

Knock the wheel of fate from its orbit

Race to a curled up

Solomon's sleep in the clock's

Ring moist with air

 

Brenda Hillman’s “Green Pants & a Bamboo Flute” appeared in an online anti-war anthology before it was published in her book Pieces of Air in the Epic.  Its most ostensible theme is the anguishing omnipresence in Hillman's consciousness of the American war in Iraq. But Hillman’s unique poetic architectures are integral to her poems, and often (as in the title sequences of Cascadia and Loose Sugar) they are very elaborate. Here, the title “Green Pants & Bamboo Flute” immediately sets into curious relation two elements (pants and flute).  Almost every subsequent line does the same (not always as twin nouns).  The notable exceptions are where Hillman’s hallmark, quirky semantic shifts, often launched by sequential modifiers—“pointed salty star materials,” “cute little names,” or “his pretty floating rib”—quicken the syntactical movement and shift the register upward. 

The stanzas map out a relationship that is even more temporal than textual.  The first unfolds in PRESENT tense: tear, is, have cut, seems, stab, has.  The next stanza overlays references to “Today” and “Now” with specific allusions to the FUTURE.  Words like want and bride are also future-oriented.  The third stanza invokes the PAST with its first word, “Earlier,” its reference to a myth of origin, and its image of a “webbed arch of caravans” (which calls to mind U.S. calvary). 

But if we read into the construction of the poem indications of Present, Future, and Past in the first three stanzas, how do we consider the fourth stanza, the shortest one? That’s precisely where “fate” and the “clock’s/ Ring” mete out the time, joining it “in the @ of each address” to its events.  Read this way, the poem is a secret history of eternal recurrence.  (A disturbing realization, considering the allusions to violence and war). 

Still, the full impact of Hillman’s poems arise from the relationship between larger structural patterns and smaller, spidery ones.  For instance, we quickly find that each stanza weaves together natural, technological, and philo-theosophical terms.  And each stanza bares a black hourglass: poison, death planes, darktricity, doom, shroud, desert horror, grenades, etc.  The spin of material, tone, and reference is not unlike “the spin in the @ of each address”.  But Hillman’s lexicon is loaded here.  On the one hand, address locates each reader, each atrocity, each thing.  But at the same time, address designates the speaking voice of “particle spirits,” that resident chorus in Hillman’s expressively animistic universe who so often address the reader. 

“Green Pants & a Bamboo Flute” anticipates some of Hillman’s concerns in her next (great) book, Practical Water: the materiality of language (in her attention to symbols, typeface, and the use of reduplicatives, for instance), the focus on relationship (here in juxtapositions, in Practical Water through prepositions such as “up & under & in”), and political passions concomitant with experiencing the moment as temporal and so exigent (“our little hourglass up on the screen”).  Because in all of her work, Hillman reinterprets objectivity as intersubjectivity, and hierarchy as holism, her poems unhinge us.  The tonal register in her recent poems is often a harmonic of keening, outrage, and palpable exuberance.  They tune us toward an attentive listening, as though all our cells were ears.