I went with Fanny Howe to many museums. In our decades of friendship, we saw art in LA, New York, Boston, Columbus, San Diego, Iowa City. At the Hirshhorn in D.C. around 2010, we watched a 21-minute video piece called “Flooded McDonalds” by Danish art collective, Superflex, in which they gradually drowned a McDonald’s restaurant, whole—food, containers, straws, the clown. The video looped in front of us in the gallery, and when we left Fanny said something like, “To be an environmentalist is to be driven slowly mad.” The poet is a witness.
Behold the broken
Hearts, backs and parts
Of nature
Evolved to follow
A finite path
Behold the gray rain
In a house of mirrors.
Oak leaves shining
On glass, two kisses
In one spot exactly.
In her 2011 collection, Come and See, Howe’s poem “The Witness” begins: “Behold the broken hearts / Backs and parts / Of nature / Evolved to follow / A finite path”. To “behold” is to command visual indexing—beyond watching, viewing, or merely seeing, the speaker directs her listener at the beginning of each stanza to attend, to wake up, to marvel. From the implicit rhymes calling up stepped upon sidewalk cracks of mother nature’s broken back, we’re soon shaken awake to “Behold the gray rain / in a house of mirrors” in the next stanza—asked—no, invited—no, told to consider disembodied nature (“gray rain” and “oak leaves”) touched by human creation (“house of mirrors”, “shining on glass”) marked by love (“two kisses”). Is the apocalyptic image here an illusion, a filmic thing where we nail our natures down? X marks the spot.
Behold the scabs and cuts
Of city streets.
Crusts, stones, smoke.
As many people
As nails from a factory.
Behold the space
Between each star
Or a child under nine
Laying her hand
On another’s face.
The third stanza asks us a third time—to “behold.” This time the broken humanscape reappears in front of us, in multitude: we are in Chaplin’s Modern Times, made to look and look again. The image sustains the stanza, we do not look away from our mass. The poet describes us and our urbanity in cuts of sibilance, and I can see us everywhere, driven slowly mad. Then, just as quickly as crowds disperse, we are looking skyward at “the space / Between each star”—the opposite of the previous stanza’s compulsive compression, a Frank Lloyd Wrightian release heavenward. Or, as Fanny would have it, child-ward just the same. To return to the minute and palm-sized present, we behold the beatific young “child under nine / Laying her hand / On another’s face,” another release, as significant as the stellar measurement that came before. We are not just beholding, we are held.
Behold the foundation
And the secret of it.
Close your eyes
And breathe.
When seized, don’t speak.
Like so many of Howe’s poems, there is an interior logic, much like a secret language shared between children, what she elsewhere terms “an ethics” of “bewilderment.” Who asks us to behold—the Bible; the mother; Linus. The witness, the beholder, in the end protects us from being driven slowly mad by flooded McDonald’s, by mass detritus everywhere, by the beclowning of America now: she returns us to “the foundation / And the secret of it” with a deceptively simple meditation, “Close your eyes / and breathe.” The ensuing visual and respiratory rhyme between “breathe” and “seized” calls us forward, emplaces us in a Shaker house waiting to be moved by spirit. To be “seized” here is inevitable—not “if” but “when”—and there is something maternally menacing, loving, in the commanded silence demanded in reply: “don’t speak.” Beyond Quaker meeting protocol where attendees await prayer in collective quiet until compelled to speak, Fanny Howe as God’s little sister/poetry’s favorite mother shushes and reminds us: The poet doesn’t speak, the poet listens.
When a poet leaves us, their poems all become one long poem, their concerns knitted eternally together in cohesion. To read this poem after Fanny’s death is to be reminded of her attendance to life, her ever-wondering: will humanity ever learn, will divinity salvage us, will we bow to behold the child and thus behold true mattering, are we willing, are we able to stave off being driven slowly mad by being suddenly stunned to silence. Reading this poem is knowing all these things now about Fanny Howe, who always put me in mind of that embodied perpetual girlhood starlet, Lilian Gish, as elder woman protector of children in Night of the Hunter, rocking and reminding, “It’s a hard world for little things.” Behold, Fanny, we’re listening.
