Luke Hankins is in conversation with numinous disbelief. His second collection of poems begins with Simone Weil’s statement that the barrier is the way through, the roadblock is the threshold, and somehow, in this, the vessel is doubt — not the doubt of skepticism or cynicism but a luminous, voluminous doubt, a series of radiant obstacles.
Because so many of these obstacles are interiorized or carved from a spiritual space, I’d like to pay special attention to the poet’s shifting use of address in these poems.
2.
The collection begins with “Vow,” a story of creation which references a god of female gender, and analogizes the poet to the divine. The poet doesn’t address this divinity directly but wonders:
Does She suffer as She rejoices?
And then, a few lines later, the poet’s gaze moves from the divine to the personal:
But being here,
having been brought, briefly, into being,
I gather in my mind the moments I glimpse a marvelous life
or witness a startling arrangement of matter.
Though these things all pass away, I vow
to harbor them until,
like heartworms
they bring so many copies of themselves into being
I die of it.
This positioning of poet as witness to wonder recurs — as if the poet has arrived at what writing and life ask of his existence.
In the next poem, “The Garden Reaches”, the audience changes. The poet begins:
The most remarkable thing has happened —
I exist, and you,
reading this.
This you evokes what Joanna Klink describes as the “ontic you.” In an essay on Paul Celan’s poems, Klink distinguishes between two “two kinds of second person” that may be addressed in a You[1]:
“One kind of you is actually there, the body which appears. It is immanent, mortal, intimate, social, reciprocal; the you attached to a particular life; the one who is irreducibly singular. The other kind is the you attached to the general life, the “Thou.” This you is abstract; it partakes of the category of the real; it is the you with respect to which anyone can be said “to be”; “everything and everybody is a figure of this [you] toward which [the poem] is heading.” It is sometimes called the ontic you …”
I feel this ontic you in Hankins’ address. I feel the Thou in the reader is being reached towards as a form of relating.
3.
In “Meditation”, the poem is addressed to what may be a god or the god in a human. Here, Hankins capitalizes the You. This is a love poem which could be addressed to a divine being or to a co-partaker in this divining, a Thou:
When we touch, it is the touch of a Thing
to an idea. I am obliterated but reborn
in Your melting, an image of what is above me
in what is beyond me.
You are. Therefore, in a small way, I am.
The reader assumes that capitalization indicates poems of direct address to a deity, though this may not be the case, since Hankins’ perspective tends to distribute divinity as a gaze or a manner of speaking rather than a particular form of being.
4.
The gendering of various divinites is also fascinating. The poet addresses an ungendered god in “Wake,” a poem about the pain and troubles of the world, a poem that addresses the injustice by speaking to a god that presumes to be watching:
Then, dear Lord, what so troubles your dreams?
So the poem begins, continuing for a page until we arrive in the present:
A man crying I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe
provokes not the slightest adjustment
of the policeman’s grip
and he drowns in broad air.
Because we are so in need of comforting, I long to comfort You.
In “Aid,” the poet returns to address the female god, the She, but not the more intimate You. Here, Hankins creates a paradox in which the silence of god is taken as a gift; the lack of aid interpreted as a form of generosity.
I sensed an implicit masculine, Old Testament god in “I Said to God,” where the narrator aims to win an argument rather than rest in mystery. The poet often pits his mind against this male god — and it lies in the marrow of these poems, that repudiation of a god that failed him. The fear of death, the obstacle of not knowing, the poet shifting between addressing himself, the gendered gods, the luminous You, the particular, beloved You, the garden or forest.
5.
The witness continues. In “Mercy Kills,” the poet wraps a poem around a word to examine complicity. The initial framing is a single-line stanza: “It was a two mercy kills day.” We need the poem to flesh this out, and the poet keeps his promise. First the snake, then the possum, both dead, each buried in a separate stanza. The frantic washing of hands sets a distance between the act of killing an animal with a car or a shoe and its meaning. The question of what mercy means, or what mercy kills, is answered in turning:
Don’t call me merciful.
Call me mercy’s executioner.
Here, the word executioner feels immediate. There is an unwestern sensibility in these poems — an attention to uncertainty and inchmarks rather than benchmarks, an interest ih history and how it will hold us or leave us unheld, as indicated in the use of second-person declarative.
6.
As promised in the title, Hankins presents the reader with multiple obstacles. There are morsels of scriptures strewn throughout stanzas like bones. There is a varied use of white space which alternates between sprawling or lineated lines from the left. There are questions of direction, division, the poem’s body “divided against itself” like the snake in “Divided.” There is no attempt to hold it intact. The wound’s mouth stays open.
There is the obstacle of knowing, and being known, in our humanity. Hankins’ love poem, “Changeling,” offers a self-portrait of the lover as menageries of metaphors, the animals love makes of us, addressed to a personal you, an intimate you, a un-named particular one rather than the ontic.
There is a poem where the poet attempts to comfort a river. There is a landscape, a ruined garden, a forest, that demands to be soothed and touched. Are we the animals who did this? What is the difference between having done and doing? How can we describe the ongoingness of our actions, the wallpaper in a room we have always known?
7.
There is the obstacle of fear, the phobia of elevators in “Tomorrow My Dad and I Face the Elevator”: “the cage of the mind in front of us”, and how perception shapes fear. How fear, itself, is a particular.
In “Claustrophobia,” the fear of elevators returns as a fear of closed spaces. The poem, itself, is a closed space one senses the poet wants to hold open, to keep winged. The link between claustrophia and fear of closure in the poem or the relationship, whether to divinity or to life, implies Hankins’ commitment to the unfinishing.
8.
There is the epistemological reckoning of “Two Views,” the question of imagining in these minds, and how the poet parses whether we are “ill-eqipped” or “well-equipped / to dream a forest into being.”
Hankins is adept in this poeming of opposites, using the same material to challenge its sameness. And he does this in “The Night Garden,” the Tao of the initial daylight garden poem, which I quote in full for its expansion on the garden, the theme, the obstacle of what we can imagine or remember:
I am the waterer of the night garden.
I can hardly see.
I water what I remember
being there.
The night garden feels more sacred, more liminal than the first garden–and still a different side of this garden, a self-portrait in given light rather than an attempt to establish origins.
9.
In “Wreck”, the poet meditates on walking past a telephone pole bent by a car. He stops to address the wreck, both the ruins and the absent wrecker:
Blind or distracted soul,
what are you careening toward, and what
already waits to appear
to you
with bone-shattering suddenness, and awaits
not only what damage will do,
but what damage it will receive,
tilting and splintered
against your headlong and heedless embrace?
The hands of mercy or the hands of god are complicit in all accident and contingency.
Another obstacle is ontological, the paradox of existence. The title poem, “Radiant Obstacles,” is lit from below with a quote from Liebniz: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Hankins addresses Zeno’s paradox, and the challenge it makes to reason. The question of Being, what Steiner called “a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious,” still draws its light as a crown or a halo, a hallowing of what is beheld, a way of looking.
“Equal and Opposite” follows immediately, an encounter with the word sky, that thing without referents. Again the poet poems by laying the object and its opposite side by side, not in a Taost fulfillment, but in a generative tension, an incompleteness.
Looking at the sky, the word sky
comes to mind. The word has a referent —
the sky itself–but the sky itself
has no referent. To live in language
is to anticipate metaphor,
but in this moment I sense the void
upon which, all these years, I have built
my house of words.
11.
And now I waver — because “Ex Nihilo” references the Tao but I almost can’t buy it. The Tao, in a sense, feels closer to the rational explanation that the poet struggles with in the day and night gardens. Although the Tao superimposes its image so perfectly on the opposites, the strategies of paradox (and I feel like I’m blaspheming to question it), there is something about Hankins’ disbelief that doesn’t seem ready to settle for a system.
If the Tao is here, I’m not qualified to judge it. Especially when my mind keeps wandering abc into gardens and angels and Ross Gay’s reference to Rilke’s unique form of terribleness. “All angels are terrible,” Rilke said, in their sublimity.
And Ross Gay expanded: “… all angels remind us that annihilation is part of the program.”[2]
And what if this beauty and terror — this life and this death — is stitched into the human experience of joy? What if sorrow and grief are the most ravishing wilderness? To follow (and quote) Ross Gay again:
Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to
mine–what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
Maybe Hankins is writing towards joy, but I don’t feel that in these poems. I sense something equally elusive and less certain.
I feel like he’s writing towards witness, wonder, and awe. I feel something closer to the Kierkegaardian question Louise Glück poses at the end of “Matins”:
You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?[3]
Or something kinned to Paul Celan’s understanding of the poem as that which “tries to reach across time” but never quite arrives at a final reality. At the finality of materialism. The poem stops reaching above the world to a silent god but reaches, instead, to its reader. To me on my porch in Alabama. To You, wherever you are.
[Published by Wipf and Stock on August 1, 2020, 92 pages, $12.00 paperback]
[1] Klink, Joanna. “You. An Introduction to Paul Celan.” The Iowa Review 30.1 (2000): 1-18. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.5234
[2] Ross Gay, “Joy Is Such a Human Madness”
[3] Louise Glück, Poems 1962-2012, page 267. (There are the hands, looking for guilt or dirt. And there is the title, a noun that designates a service of morning prayer in various churches. Alternately, a service forming part of the traditional Divine Office of the Western Christian Church, originally said (or chanted) at or after midnight, but historically often held with lauds on the previous evening. The literary meaning of “matins” designates the song of birds. The symbolic meaning of hands in a garden is something that feels kindred between Glück and Hankins. There is conversation that may not be intentional but is worth exploring. AS)