Nightfall Marginalia, Sarah Maclay, What Books Press (2023)
Sarah Maclay’s Nightfall Marginalia sways on the soundless terrain where the unearthing of dream, a loyalty to lucid states, a reverie to darkness, and the textural experience of language merge.
In the poem “Ode with a Moan in the Middle,” the narrator seamlessly enters the myth of self-identity:
“ …For depriving myself of the truth.
So unlike that poet/priestess photo on the web:
Buddhist shaman in her shaolin, such bright red, that robe—
arms outstretched, her voice outstretched, some tonal jujitsu
so intense the camera records her as a blur: yelling or almost yelling
near-nonstop and it’s not that I yell
but that, midsummer, in some act of half-illegal and untethered grace,
I realize I have actually loved. And it’s like some layer of skin rips off—
final and fast as a car door pulling off the whole front of my body—
flung off, in the genius wind. …”
The poem’s images blend and bend. In the folds and unfolding of twilight, time is held in a chrysalis as one experience pauses and reawakens another. There exists an immutable encounter with awakening.
In the poem “Night Text,” Maclay writes:
“…I am translating something to you—
You, asleep, or sleepless or naming
that third place—between—”
Many poems in Nightfall Marginalia live in a liminal-intuitive fusion, a space embraced by lapses and absences. It is a space of unknowing, which preserves time. It is a space of belief. It is as if we suspend, not reality, but fate—and as we travel through this deferred existence, an “other” materializes. A faith is held. A faith against decomposition, yet it is a space that cultivates existence as ghost. Time and the fidelity to memory, are simultaneously evaporative and emboldened. The certainty of reality is the mixed state. The power of this trance is embraced in the poem’s internal syntactical logic. The poem “Before Us” illuminates and reiterates rehearsals of language which interpose oblique, subtle possibilities with calculated certainty (despite the speaker’s hesitancy):
“There’s a cat/a catch in the breath at the edge of the bed in the lush
Hush of morning,
A slant/a sliver/ a sip of new light in the palms…
I’m certain of the armature of nothing. …”
The oblique/ the virgule create and impose possibilities in language. Here the choices of each moment, inlaid and impressed upon the page, are markers within the illusions set forth. These pivot points, score gradients in formulating reality. The poem is further sheltered in several sets of parentheses, throughout, but end definitively:
“I am certain.
Certain.)”
These endings and initiations are instructive and patient, providing emotional joy within the eye of the poem. The poem “Girl Standing With Death By The Sea” is reminiscent of Marguerite Duras’ Malady of Death; and though an ekphrastic poem ‘after EM [Edvard Munch],’ the poem’s images read cinematographically, embracing sensuality and maturation:
“she carries a tambourine
of yellow roses, and death
is only herself, older, and then much older.
The one in the middle—that self—opens her legs in a V,
naked, clasps her hands behind her head—
but she, the sea-looker-she, looks out at the sea.
Feels them, standing behind her.
She has never seen her own exposure, though she feels it.
When she finally sees it—its strangeness, her own—
well, I tell you, I can’t explain why,
but it makes her radiant.
Even when everything goes to woodcut white and black,
she stands on a road
and, behind her, it is not death, but a woman with hair—
herself—and skin. And brows. A woman fully exposed
and her dark-clad companion—night, herself.” …
The scene depicted in Maclay’s poem would well accompany a similar visual effect as Duras’ noted in imagined stage directions at the end of Malady of Death: “A big dark opening admits the sound of the sea—always the same black rectangle, never any lighter. But the sound of the sea does vary in volume. The young woman's departure isn't seen. There should be a blackout when she disappears, and when the light comes up again there is nothing left but the white sheets in the middle of the stage and the sound of the sea surging in through the black door.”
In the collection’s final poem “Letter Almost Sent,” the narrator shifts fluidly between memories. These vibrational transitions resonate as powerfully as the crescendo of a “cymbal crash.” Transportations between worlds highlighted by various movements or reflections, echo the ‘almost.' As the narrator jostles the ‘wear(ing) two coats," she reminisces on the warmth of the one who is absent. The reader is guided from one somatic experience to another. It is through these movements we come to understand that reality, when contrasted to illusion, is not an equation of betrayal:
the ice made out of cellophane
and paraffin;
the snow a mix of aspirin powder and soap flakes
—just as hard to walk through as real snow:
Not ours to enter.
And anyway it doesn’t exist.
The poem ends in a post-script as the narrator describes “trimming apple trees in the yard/ as sunset flecked its pink and orange against gray/ We caught it just in time.” As in life, as in the poem, as in the mind of the narrator, each montage is filled with the beauty of what is real, and these captured moments are not fleeting, not ephemeral, nor as elusive as they may suggest.