“If I Read Dickinson In A Doorway Someday, I Will Make The Shape Of A Gun With My Hand Near My Head And Pull The Trigger” Please Bury Me In This, Alison Benis White (Four Way Books, 2017)

by Maureen Alsop

Often the circular mouths of the dead release echo, and what breaks the chasm between each signal is a deeper silence. The dead are held in eternity with their mouths in perfect O-rings. In Benis White’s collection Please Bury Me In This, she surgically extracts from the tunnel of echoes a tribute to breath, and in her intensity, lurches forward with those who’ve lost their breath and consummately lost their way. The dead’s lungs, a bellow’s quietude, ease the movement of air beyond earth as a bridge between one plane into another.

Among the collection’s influence is the question of suicide. Benis White dedicates the collection “for the four women I knew who took their lives within a year /and my father,” consecrating the poems as elegy. Among the allusions and the iconic figures wandering the pages, Virginia Woolfe (also committing the end of her life to her own hand), suggest a helplessness and urgency when facing the trauma of inexplicable loss through suicide. She writes:

I mean my head is a napkin folded into a swan.

I mean these are death letters—an obsession with something colorless, private.

You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—

And then nothing but my hands unfolding the swan and smoothing it over my lap.

Here Benis White underscores the confusion and discomfort of bystanders bereaved by suicide; she depicts the awkwardness and imbalance of shock. The center point of the poem draws on a sentence in Virginia Woolfe’s suicide note to her husband (citing the sentence: ”you have been entirely patient...”). As witness’ to suicide, those words surmise the guise the suicidal carry: a tender deceit which blankets the unknown relationship between the figural image of one’s presumptions for living or dying as being a state of grace into a new understanding wherein both acts of life and death appear suddenly clumsy and disjointed. Virginia Woolfe’s novel The Waves, ends: “Against you I fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! The waves broke on the shore.” For Benis White the waves ‘unyielding’ is a recurrent pressure. Benis White bends absence into an order and accountability, yet death acquiesces only to the given structure of the poems. Benis White’s structure is one by which to measure, withstand, and to bear the incomprehensible. Softly, as if sharing a secret, Benis White, as a confident undertaker, exhales the last orders of breath: “Moving my lips as I read the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach.”

Each of the forty poems in the collection are formed as brief, elegantly spaced sentences which act as stanzas. The longest poem in the collection is nine sentences. This structure allows the reader to observe each stanza as if indeed watching waves upon the shore. A shore which in itself is a painting, one with a mesmerizing and calming effect, a communication which allows for the tempo of contemplation and examination of beauty. Each poem is untitled, which offers an organic embodiment of nature, and is composed of five sections, presumably in honor of four woman who committed suicide and the speaker’s father.

Benis White steps into and upon the afterlife to expose the inner life of what death concedes: death as aftermath in art, death as trauma, death as pattern. The tightly stacked sentences in each poem are curated to demonstrate action, reaction, and inaction. As follows, Benis White enters suicide’s articulations:

Like a string of glass beads wrapped several times around my neck.

When I close my eyes, I can only imagine blindness as darkness, death as not thinking.

I am writing you this letter.

I am trying to understand sentences as paintings of windows in the room where I’m alive.

The poem exhales an enactment of death, and, for Benis White, writing is a gauge for insight.

In the collection, each poem is further supplemented, not only by the repeating constructions, but an interweave of recurrent images. As with the image of paintings and windows, another poem continues the dialogue between death, art, and what is communicated from the outer to inner worlds.

As if death was a place and the dream was rectangular.

On the wall near the window, my father wrote and underlined, The

crows are Nazis in disguise.

After he died, I hung his blue paintings in my room to remember his mind.

Now I can see through the wall to the sky.

Trauma, not through suicide, but holocaust is also represented through these elegies. Through the anaphora of waves, windows, letters, Benis White instinctually gropes for acts of disembodiment: speaking, writing, reading, the fragments of loss: glass, hair, paper, whisper, letters… all that bangs at the window: the ephemeral, fragmented, what the wind lifts; that which can be seen as discarded can also be seen as largess.

Symbolically the mouth is a primary channel for survival, the thoroughfare for food, air, connection. The Egyptian Book of the Dead sites a prayer by which to open the mouth of the dead so that the dead may speak. Benis White, as oracle, enacts this burial ritual. Less from the voice of the dead than the voice of death, she writes: “What I want to tell you is ecstasy.” And so, she designs a means by which death enters the world. In articulating the details, Benis enacts the many variations by which the mouth may channel death’s voice:

“Mouthed erased … I drew on my lips with a pen ...I pressed my mouth… whispered mouth… I touch my mouth… I touched his mouth...put my mouth over words...moving my lips as I read...her mouth open to snow… my mouth close to your ear...two open empty mouths… my mouth folded inside...I don’t know how to explain my mouth anymore...the mouth is made to be broken. put your mouth against mine violently… word by word the mouth assembles the soul…”

The mouth cannot be buried as there is nothing inside the mouth. The mouth is a chamber for the voice when words cannot be written. Benis White’s poems are a passageway for the unspeakable and unspoken.

Benis White tells us the story of emptiness as emptying, a telling that circles the gaping.