An Autumn of Black Carriages (some thoughts on Brock-Broido's "Periodic Table of Etheral Elements")

Recently, a friend of mine again pointed me to the work of Lucie Brock-Broido who I first read several years ago when she visited the University of Montana. My professor at the time, the poet Joanna Klink, sat us down with the Master Letters, a collection of poems derived from the trilogy of letters by Emily Dickinson recovered posthumously in a desk drawer and addressed to a receiver specified simply, eerily, as Master. Still in draft, the letters, in all likelihood, were directed to a God to whom they were never sent. Also, as of late, in secret and in solitude, I’ve found myself preoccupied with the promise and possibilities of prayer.

When I re-crossed the Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements a couple days ago, I was reminded the line dividing elegy from prayer is not necessarily discernible. As a form of faith, the assertion of loss changes the experience of suffering to the degree that the abstract is made tangible in language and can thereby be met and welcomed and let go in terms familiar to the afflicted.  Loss is subject to transformation. And I am grateful for this assertion. In “the extraordinary elegance / Of calcium and finery / And loss…” an important mooring between the world of things and the world surrounding things occurs, a tethering together of the living and the dead, the here and not here, the actual and after-actual. In this, the speaker creates a middle distance capable of holding together opposites, uncertainties. When an object leaves the world, becomes an abstract shadow of its former self, no longer real to any literal or tangible degree, the elegiac prayer preserves a sense of access to that which has departed.

But it is not a resurrection. Though the dead transfigure in language, though their light is kept alive in speech, the tricky breath of utterance, they are not returned to us through elegy, not completely. We must leave the safety of our own real lives, meet them in the middle space. Thus, elegy is violence and prayer a handing over of a portion of a life. The poem as sacrifice, a grey smoke rising, dark sky. We are speaking through a death mask.

Opposed to the typical elegy focused on the physical death of a lover, a family member, a friend, what strikes me most about this poem in particular is the nature of the object of the loss itself, its formlessness already given, its already absent character experienced as such, prior, even, to its vanishing. It is not an object which has vanished, for “even in life // You did not inhabit, necessarily, a form, // But a mind of // Rarer liquid element.” An element of ether, water, the heavens, air, both of the world and out of it, invisible, the object of loss is projected as a ghost, a subjective God known only in the imagination and accessible primarily through hypothetical meandering and metaphor. “If you had a psyche,” the speaker posits,

"...it was not known to me

If you had a figure, it would be heavy irony.

If you were a man, you would be

An autumn of black carriages filled red with leaves

From sycamore trees,

Not scattering…”

Loss, here, is the loss of the unknown, the mysterious, the empty and the abstract, the invisible and the divine. The ethereal is posited as real, as once-present, as no longer inhabiting the space of things through which the speaker travels earthward through the aftermath, un-eased.  I enjoy this poem because it expands the notion of loss to include that which is and isn’t, deepening the horizon of the possible. For Brock-Broido’s speaker, experience is fullest precisely in the place where is is also empty. And to lose this, this specific way of seeing and believing in a world where the physical and the ethereal intermingle, where the actual and the imagined exchange identities, this is perhaps the greatest loss of all.

*Here is the poem in its entirety:

Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements

I was not ready for your form to be cold

Ever. Even in life

You did not inhabit, necessarily, a form,

But a mind of

Rarer liquid element. It had not occurred to me

You would take

Leave and it will be winter from now on, not only

Here, in the ordinary,

But there too, in the extraordinary elegance
Of calcium and finery

And loss. Keep me

Tethered here, breathtakingly awkward and alive.

If you had a psyche it was not known to me.

If you had a figure it would be heavy irony.

If you were a man, you would be

An autumn of black carriages filled red with leaves
From sycamore trees,

Not scattering. I was not ready for sure
Earthward and unease.

Goodbye to the imperium, the rinsing wind. You, cold
As God and the great

Glassed castle in which I’ve lived, simply
Now a house.

A girl ago, a childhood gone like a phial of ether
Thrown on fire—just

A little jump of flame, like grief, or,

Like a penicillin that has lost its skill at killing
Off, it then is gone.

                                                   -Lucie Brock-Broido