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Editor’s Note: The arts are a significant thread in the fabric of Rockland County. They inspire, enrich, and chronicle our lives. They also play a role in our economic well-being; theater, writing, dance, crafts draw us to spaces. They invite strangers to share in our bounty. They are an indelible contribution. Welcome again, Christine Potter, a poet, to RCBJ.
H.E. Fisher: Sounding Things Out
By Christine Potter
One of the harder things about doing a monthly column about poets and poetry in Rockland County is that our sweet, parkland-rich home is still a part of this troubled nation. So I woke up this morning and read over notes about East Village ex-pat H.E. Fisher’s life here as editor, health literacy advocate, writer, and poet. This afternoon, I sat with her poems, all the time fending off distractions from outside. My neighbors up the hill are doing something with power tools. The snarling chain saw of war news has also been impossible to avoid today.
I kept stopping my work, wondering what’s going on. My neighbors: are they taking down a chunk of our shared woods that has made its way onto their property? I squint out the window and see that I’m worried about nothing. It’s probably just post-blizzard cleanup. I’m not so optimistic about this new war. At least we’ve got poetry, and that’s a pretty big “at least.”
H.E. Fisher and I agree firmly about the power and importance of poetry. She says she does not know how not to write, and I’m right there with her. Freedom of expression, “freedom on the page” as she says, is everything. Yes.
She says “my husband Dan and our two kids moved during the post-9-11 diaspora from the East Village in New York City to Rockland County in July 2002. We were looking for cleaner air, decent schools, an okay commute to NYC, space, green, and right angles.” She sent along this poem about the move:
Graffiti on Moving Day, East Village
The front door spray-painted silver
over black, emboldened by sun
in a language I never deciphered—
someone’s name, their tag, longed-for
instructions, a warning. Or a prayer,
something to touch, a kind of mezuzah.
Maybe it’s natural
to want to understand
a place that is home, at least gain entry.
The building’s super often painted midnight
gloss over it only for the Krylon to return
a day or two later. Even as our moving
van drove away from Seventh Street,
I wanted to know what it said.
First published in Broadsided Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.
I really like this poem. The images are super-sharp: who hasn’t seen that door?
But there’s more going on than just a vivid snapshot. It’s subtle: there’s a mystery about just what the graffiti says. H.E. has also written and published a series of poems about the old Dick and Jane readers in which she expresses her childhood frustration at having to “sound out” words she could already read. Me too, sister, me too: they stuck me in the slowest reading group because I refused to sound out and then gave me the award for “most improved” when we all took standardized tests and my teachers discovered I actually read as well as my mother was trying to tell them I did.
Graffiti’s different from Dick and Jane readers, but it makes for an interesting metaphor. It’s rogue writing. The narrator here wants to understand it and cannot. Graffiti letters are hard to read, like the scrawl that kept appearing on H.E.’s old door as soon as it had been painted. I admire how she says the graffiti was “emboldened” by the sun. The verb is perfect for silver Krylon spray paint on a black door. Its sparkly mystery remains—even in the last line of the poem.
H.E. calls the spray painted words “a kind of mezuzah” that she could touch. Brilliant line! Mezuzot (the plural of “mezuzah,” as I discovered just now) enclose a scrap of animal skin on which are written words from the Torah. Although my family is white-bread Protestant, I grew up in an old house that had mezuzot in fancy little metal cases on many of its door frames: hidden words that I could not read. The narrator of H.E.’s moving day poem still wants to know what the graffitied script says as she drives off. So the poem is about moving day seen through the lens of—what? We never find out exactly. It really works!
H.E. says she doesn’t keep regular writing hours, but her practice is constant: “Some days I write, some days I don’t. Mornings are my favorite time to write, but I’ve learned to write whenever I can. I read a lot, listen a lot, which often inspires me to write. A single word may trigger an idea. Often, a phrase or a line will come to me as I’m trying to fall asleep and I’ll type it into Notes on my phone. Those are the nights I don’t sleep much: I’m up writing, thinking. The next day, or soon, I’ll keep adding to the Note; then, I’ll move my notes into a Word doc and start drafting and revising.”
I love mornings, too, if I can unplug myself from the distractions of the world and write with a sleep-cleansed brain. Speaking of cleansed, here’s a poem called “Washed” H.E. wrote about her father’s loss of faith. She lived as a child on Long Beach, NY.
Washed
There was once something bigger than a parent.
My father called this bigness “Yahweh”—
held a shell to my ear—Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey.
We lived on an island. The ocean seemed
arithmetical, Yahweh’s manipulation of math.
One day, when I was still losing baby teeth,
my father shook god loose like a bee on a jacket.
God, as though in arrears, was evicted
from the house I grew up in. In the house I grew up in,
spines of sacred books were turned to face the wall,
wicks left unlit; the number seven disappeared,
making it impossible to count on anything.
The white-knuckled ocean drew back its fist,
then came at me. I could taste the salt.
First published in EcoTheo Review
I love how much is going on here! The first couplet is a really brilliant take on how enormous our parents seem as children: the only thing “bigger than a parent” is God, “this bigness.” The shell in the second couplet is wonderful, too: it sounds out (really!) God’s name, Yahweh, I Am. The father holds the shell to the narrator’s ear, but then loses his own faith in an enviable simile: “my father shook god loose like a bee on a jacket.” Dang. And so all the holy books in the house get their spines turned to the wall—not as an HDTV decor trick, but as an oddly respectful rejection. Books with the name of God in them are supposed to be buried like people in Jewish tradition, instead of being discarded, and until that can happen, they are stored spine-in that way. So his faith is broken but the ritual remains.
Except candles are left unused, and even the number seven and its holy associations vanishes, so the narrator can’t “count on anything.” Then there’s that threatening ocean in the last couplet. It’s terrifying and wonderful. What a poem!
It should come as no surprise that H.E. revises like crazy. You don’t get poetry this rich without a lot of polishing. She says she tries to stay loose in order to write freely and keep her imagination working, and like many of us, reads aloud as she refines her work: “During the revision process, I read my work out loud over and over—until I get a sense that the poem is cooked. Fun fact: several times, I’ve read work at a reading that’s been published and I’ll start editing it as I’m reading it out loud,” she says. (I have done this, too!!)
H.E. reads lots of different poets: Emily Dickinson, Enheduanna, and Michael Longley. She likes Diane Seuss, and I hear Seuss’s straightforward voice in H.E.’s poetry. Here’s a poem that mentions another of H.E.’s heroes, the Polish-American translator, scholar and poet Czeslaw Milosz.
My Family Was Organized Around War
My father’s shame for never having fought.
Three draft-age brothers in lottery.
I sat on pale blue and green linoleum with thin gold
glittered stripes, enemy lines. I impelled
toys to speak, they spoke back—a world I believed.
I once read that Czeslaw Milosz watched silent
films in Vilnius. Little truths pantomimed in Mary
Pickford’s eyes. Buster Keaton’s pratfallen body,
the face of a house collapsing around him.
Did you know he did his own stunts?
Most of the celluloid was destroyed.
Milosz wrote about the people in a town, how No pain
can be experienced by the body spared them.
Executioners and victims—crimes that over
time became vague,
misremembered, missing—
history like an address
without a street number. All my stories
were conflicts. Play without battledress
was nothing. Silence crucial to every plot,
every casualty.
First published in Tupelo Quarterly. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Another stunner! There’s lots to like here, too. I love the evocation of that famous Keaton stunt—yes, I knew he didn’t use body doubles—and the windows of the falling-over house becoming a face. That turn from its narrator’s childhood war games into the silent film imagery is pretty great all by itself.
The idea of silence in this poem interests me. The films, of course, but also the narrator’s toys that speak back. Wouldn’t that be silent speech, that fantasy? For some reason, I’m thinking a little of Milosz’s poem “A Song On The End Of The World” about the day everything ends by just keeping on going. And then the real wars fading into the past, and the child playing war while her brothers are in danger of being drafted…. I don’t want to pull it all apart too much. There’s real magic here.
H.E. Fisher’s two collections, Jane Almost Always Smiles, and Sterile Field are available through her website (https://www.hefisher.com/).
Since we’re getting into March, Easter is coming, and I’ve been writing about God a lot as I look at H.E’s wonderful poems, here’s one of mine from my new book Why I Don’t Take Xanax. Thanks to Kestrel Magazine, who originally picked it up.
I’ll Tell You A Secret
I want to tell people that I am sure of my faith
so they will be sure of theirs, even if they
believe in something stupid. Maybe it’s like
this noontime thunder: all the fussy blossoms
on the trees but so much rain that the air
actually looks bright because of it. See there?
The sky off to the south’s iron-colored, full
of straight-out cursing. Oh, yeah. You think
that scares me? Actually, it does a little but
radar always looks worse than ground truth.
Maybe I want to see base reflectivity images
of God passing overhead. And maybe I don’t.
Somebody said that metaphorical resurrection
wasn’t enough for him, as if literal really is
more important. I’ll tell you a secret: there’s no
such thing as the literal, only the sudden rush
of this creek. Only the smooth, tight fists of the
stones in it, silently remembering everything.
See you in April, National Poetry Month!!
