Michael Mirolla's "Light and Time": mysteries of imagery and language

One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language." (Gaston Bachelard)

  

Michael Mirolla looks into his art as into a language prism: light glances off  many sides of the  'object' at once and time, particularly time, is what attempts to hold it still. They seem to work as artistic principles, informing and revelatory: the condition and product of the work itself. But as time lets go, the poem is left not just as the brilliantly light-refracted piece it is but also as that always perennially interesting "description without place" (as Wallace Stevens says), the demystified "thing as it is". As he says in "Descendings", "One toss and th' impressions gone./Time is a vengeful puddle quick to dry/behind us." (28); and in the same poem, "And yes, th' impression's still there/where you left it/and, as you slip in, the sun/ rises on thick haunches".(32) Once seen it's changed for ever, and always set afterwards to reveal more significant properties and depths. 

Is this the artist in a Surrealist trance or word-dreamer of daring and verbal precision? A proponent for a radical Canadian nouveauté ?

Or perhaps a classicist at heart, a transmitter of culture, language and literary influences? We can't read Michael Mirolla with pre-set notions of the poem in mind, and it won't do either to restrict him to place, time or literary influence, not if we want to keep the true constructive impetus of the work. Novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright, recipient of numerous literary prizes, Mirolla's appeal must be to a world-wide audience: certainly wherever poetry is venerated as among the highest expressions of human sentience and sentiment. 

Light and Time

Light

and time—

you know the two well

don't you?

The empty heart of the tunnel

that beats against you

photon by photon

and chips away at the edges

     where you exist,

Given time

there'd soon be

nothing left

but light.

Light, time: object of light and then of reflection are promising as literary first principles. Mirolla's is a unique type of impression-gathering that at first can reduce the object to a sum of pure visual (or imagistic) effects.The nature of poetry is to never lose sight of the object, writer glued to it sometimes with an irrepressible tenacity, for whatever light illumines will soon strike the reader as a vibrant living presence. To turn the poem one way, held high in front of you, is to look for delectation and brilliance but to sense also that something's been transformed in the viewing, whether poem, object or reader. Mirolla doesn't just aestheticize his objects in the hope of turning them into traditional vehicles for a personal lyricism of his own: the object that's read also envelops, offering a wealth of phenomenal details. In the case of "Light and Time", the poem that frames the whole work, light is in the end an eerie sort of receptacle for darkness imaged as the "empty heart of the tunnel/that beats against you/photon by photon". A similar sort of falling into the thing's inscrutable heart after an extinction of light appears in "Roman Sketch" where "Gravity sucks you down into/the tombs, the dry unlickable dust,/a shimmer of molecule slipping/past molecule" (46). Instead of simply describing  Mirolla's reduced poetry to mystery of illumined seeing. 

Crane Lake 1

We all speak of depth

as if the water mirrored something

more profound than the dragon-fly

that lands non-chalantly on your arm;

or the snapping turtle that hovers near,

its craggy face blowing bubbles

thru the lattice of sunlight, the gleam

of an ancient presence that ignores

all around it...even our god himself.

We all speak of silence

as if the momentary glimpse

of loon should make us hush

in awe. Should make us forget the rivulets

of a dying lamp pointed

at the tight core of our betrayal.

We speak of memory

as if... as if...

How much can literary first principles help us really to understand Mirolla's treatment of other objects, such as lakes, works of art, philosophical ideas? Light and time are more limitations than ways to unpack the poem, or rather conditions that can only be impossibly met. As they should be.The object of "Crane Lake 1", for example, can't be just metaphor of "depth" and "ancient presences" as if that were enough nor a presentation of fragments of a landscape, "dragon-fly", "water","rivulets" pieced together only and strictly in imagination. Speaking about Crane Lake as the poet's traditional lake divests it of its 'substantive', irreducibly real nature, that more vital something to "make us hush/in awe". 

The depth we've come to the poem for soon reduces to the empty "silence" of language or retreats  into "memory", if all we've got is the stammering language of "as if": if instead of a lake, only a sinister immersion into the "the tight core of our betrayal." Note the inadequacy of figurative language to get the memory exactly in line with the passing of a friend in "Snap: On The Death Of A Friend": "like bed-sheets stiff with starch/like the smell/like the smell/like the smell of me." (40)

So what, and where, is that essential poem we seem to be always anticipating and never getting? Its timelessness, in fact? Mirolla himself can pose the question as "What certainty? What dense core?" ("Between the Lines" 17) because I suspect that each poem is its own unique way into the elusive heart. And the heart seems to lie somewhere between "the ghost" and the "flaxen-haired body" ("Rational Thought" 16); the "green boat" and its occupant "who can't wave back" ("Is It Someone We Know" 77) words and flesh ("Between the Lines" 17); and also between road kill  and all the signs in Nature that should have alerted you from the beginning: like a mourning dove's crucifix, trees "strain[ing] against their leashes" ("The Art of Walking" 79) In every poem an object, dancer, rower, road kill and then its lightless, denuded form as the poem that leaves us only with Rilkean mystery . Perhaps the poet's enjoined the reader "to play with words/like a whistler in the dark." ("Descendings III." 30), sensing the impossibility of giving the poem whole to us.

To Franz K.

Tubercular swimmer in the o'er-

brimming soup, let me throw you a line.

We have voyaged together in short bursts

like DNA but you've outstripped me

now, diving beneath the fetid waves

without cease, only to surface again

with the swollen worm firmly between your teeth.

Severed antenna from a long-lost sense,

you held it tight, held it accountable.

And it wasn't enough that it tugged at the human

in you - how could it have so misunderstood?

I, on the other hand, friend to the shattered

light, the crystal blossoming, have flown

towards a sky full of glass tinkle and

laughter, the intense magic of daily events.

There, I await you, dangling a thread

like a viral infection before your eyes.

Yes, it's a desperate re-creation—

lacking cruelty—but you will reach for it.

Won't you?

Gaunt scissors dipped in red

I suspect that the poem can only approximate to its object, imprisoned in the light of bewitching vision itself. A register not of synthesis but of the essential irreducibility of language to its object, as if the poem itself could only be "shattered/light" and nothing but that. Language can't connect to the subject, poet calling it "a desperate re-creation", and if it tries to the effect is as absurd as trying to throw a life line to a drowning Frank K: a Kafkaesque impulse to revel in the improbabilities (or absurdities) of using the poem as vehicles for meaning. Even at the close DNA level (and what can be closer?) kinship between poet and literary ideal is too impossibly irreal. Life lines, in Kafkaesque style, metamorphose into viral threads, and implements of writing "Gaunt scissors dipped in red".

Its seems now light and time are agents of a new opening to language (as Bachelard says), reconfigured on patterns of incongruities and asymmetrical viewing that mark the true experiences from which poetry arises. Looking at the model of Vieillard's painting, in "Le Repos Du Vieillard", is not to see a person, delineated in shade and tones, but a transformation of a model's stillness, grace into ghastly insect body and a place of Art itself into Tartarean hell. "Foreign hands have gripped her iris./She crawls in the cellar dense with sand,/looks for the nipple of gas her breath can ignite./Snow hisses in recoil." ("Le Repos Du Vieillard" 19)

And, of course, it won't stop there. Not In this new transfiguring language of darkling meanings where light seems to give shape only to sinuous Kline bottles, and air itself "moans when invaded" ("Blind Alley" 44). Metaphor can empty itself out and leave the reader following the insect's trail to sense: for example, "The day is a slow beetle" in whose head a day of mortal living is reenacted ("The Day Is A Slow Beetle" 21). Mirolla also refers to similar "beetle dreams" in another poem ("Blind Alley" 42). A classical author like Prudentius, known for purity and  asceticism, can become a sort of foreground to the poet's portrait of the quintessential  lush Etruscan garden ("The Garden" 23). Or the dying light of day "at the deep end/of the garden" can be imaged as "the silent dog...slashing across the moonbeam throat." ("Extinguishing" 35) Or even a lie's "essential geography", said to reside just below the heart, turns into "the mauve outline of a lamb caught high in the gorse" ("When We Lie" 33). 

Data De Facto

Only from the unbidden will 'things' come clear;

only from the margin will the centre be found;

only from re-vision will the spectacle unfold.

Reverse the prism to see the light;

undo the machine to regain your limbs.

But the opposite of complex is not the simple

and ill-logic won't cure what ails us.

The frozen fields just beyond our doors

aren't devoid of life. They're only waiting

for the right time.

What comes from the unbidden is the blackbird's wing;

all the margin tells you is: Yes, you are here;

the spectacle holds up its own mirror,

bloody at the edges.

Mirolla can now enumerate some of the 'givens' (data) of his work, in an attempt to save it perhaps from the ravages of postmodernism. Mirolla's unspoken references to Derrida ("margin") and Debord ("the spectacle") are telling and well-timed. The reader, first, cannot call forth 'things', for things are already there. The complexity of the poem means envisaging the appearance of sudden (delightfully paradoxical) 'newness': how else to refer to the staleness of old friends as "Zeno upside-down" ("The Secret Place" 52) or even Los Angeles as an outmoded "parable of the world" (("L.A" 50). And, second, if we lose the centre in illumined viewing (as is the effect of reading most experimentalist writing today!), it's all the more reason to refocus or even shift perspectives a bit ("Reverse the prism to see the light"). It seems to follow that, third, the poem is a 'de facto' product, not the mirror but the mirrored, and not so much surface reflection as depth undistracted by chimerical light.

Imagery and language, however valuable in themselves, really can't be seen as anything but limitations of the poetic craft. Approximations at best. But there's no mistaking the centrality of the object in Mirolla's poety, its "Quint Essential (58)" lucidity and also depth and mystery. Unlike a lot of experimentalist writing in Canada, there's a traditional reverencing for object and narrative voice that can't ever be open to the charge of housing sexist or imperial sentiments (contrary to what most Canadian 'academic' readers still think to this day). Here poetry is not textual collage nor the site of multiple discourses nor specimen of any of the experimentalist credos responsible for some disastrous writing within the past few decades. Has it become unfashionable then to speak with "God's Language" (76): has the impetus to that sort of poetic scope and intention been beaten out of the literary psyche? Has anyone dared as courageously as Michael Mirolla to bring back the mystery of reading and the integrity of poetic experience?

Awakening: there are puddles

everywhere; images of time that reflect

for a moment and then evaporate

with the sun.

                         god's language only

is spoken here.