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Impressions, doubt and questions - the body according to Jorie Graham

More impressionistic than narrative progression creating space for doubt, questions and uncertainty.

‘The poem that contemplates the relationship between body and mind. At what point, the poem asks of its readers, subject, and speaker, can the work of the mind transcend the body, or is the mind permanently fixed to the body? There is a paradox in this relationship in Graham’s poem. Signorelli, who painted bodies of exquisite precision and beauty, who understood the physical nature of the body as well as anyone of his time, found himself plagued by doubt upon the death of his son and could not understand his son’s death until he explored every cavern of his corpse’


***

 

At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body by Jorie Graham

 

See how they hurry

to enter

their bodies,

these spirits.

Is it better, flesh,

that they

 

should hurry so?

From above

the green-winged angels

blare down

trumpets and light. But

they don’t care,

 

they hurry to congregate,

they hurry

into speech, until

it’s a marketplace,

it is humanity. But still

we wonder

 

in the chancel

of the dark cathedral,

is it better, back?

The artist

has tried to make it so: each tendon

they press

 

to re-enter

is perfect. But is it

perfection

they’re after,

pulling themselves up

through the soil

 

into the weightedness, the colour,

into the eye

of the painter? Outside

it is 1500,

all round the cathedral

streets hurry to open

 

through the wild

silver grasses…

The men and women

on the cathedral wall

do not know how,

having come this far,

 

to stop their

hurrying. They amble off

in groups, in

couples. Soon

some are clothed, there is

distance, there is

 

perspective. Standing below them

in the church

in Orvieto, how can we

tell them

to be stern and brazen

and slow,

 

that there is no

entrance,

only entering. They keep on

arriving,

wanting names,

wanting

 

happiness. In his studio

Luca Signorelli

in the name of God

and Science

and the believable

broke into the body

 

studying arrival.

But the wall

of the flesh

opens endlessly,

its vanishing point so deep

and receding

 

we have yet to find it,

to have it

stop us. So he cut

deeper,

graduating slowly

from the symbolic

 

to the beautiful. How far

is true?

When one son

died violently,

he had the body brought to him

and laid it

 

on the drawing-table,

and stood

at a certain distance

awaiting the best

possible light, the best depth

of day,

 

then with beauty and care

and technique

and judgment, cut into

shadow, cut

into bone and sinew and every

pocket

 

in which the cold light

pooled.

It took him days,

that deep

caress, cutting,

unfastening,

 

until his mind

could climb into

the open flesh and mend itself.


***


Jorie Graham is an American poet. The Poetry Foundation called Graham "one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation." She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 and was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.


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