In one of his most enduring poems, Rainer Marie Rilke describes a body, broken. “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” — “Archaic Torso of Apollo” via Stephen Mitchell — shows how even without a head and limbs, even in marble depiction, a body can vibrate with light and beauty, “still suffused with brilliance from the inside.” The figure’s urgency is such that the stone, “from all borders of itself, / burst like a star: for here there is no place / that does not see you.” This beauty culminates, famously, in a directive: “You must change your life.” Poet and critic Victoria Chang addresses this poem directly in her latest collection, Obit. Following her mother’s death from pulmonary fibrosis, Chang describes the moment her mother’s body is placed on a gurney, beneath a sheet, and wheeled away.
Her head gone.
Her face gone. Rilke was wrong. The
body is nothing without the head. My
mother, now covered, was no longer
my mother.
How a person becomes a corpse, emptied of identity and meaning, is what Chang pursues relentlessly in this book—and how the living respond to this transmutation, both within ourselves and through social practice. She writes:
A sketch of a person
isn’t the person. Somewhere, in the
morning, my mother had become the
sketch.
For Chang, representation is an empty gesture when compared to the figure it attempts to capture. Rather than regarding a broken body as a site of inspiration for change and agency, the circumstances themselves embody a change that is happening in the survivor — at the moment the body breaks. Rather than attempting to “shade the sketch” for others, for Chang does this for herself. Depicting her mother becomes a task to attempt and fail at, again and again, in order to keep the memory of her close.
Chang begins the collection with a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Give sorrow words.” While it serves as the epigraph for the first section of the book, all of these poems do laps around the complications this directive evokes. What words? Give them, how? What if you try at words, but fail? The latter is the case with Chang’s father who, after a stroke, suffers from aphasia — his spoken words aren’t those he intends. With further strokes and injuries, his words and meanings become more fractured, “As if he were visiting his past self in prison, touching the clear glass at his own likeness.” What happens to language with this affliction, as well as the particularly strange grief of a parent not dead but changed to the point of dreadful impairment and loss, is the center of one of Chang’s previous collections, The Boss. In Obit, Chang investigates the death of her mother, the illness and impairments of her father, as well as her hope for her children — all to show how grief is not simply a response to loss or a fixed cultural routine, but the killing of many things, bit by bit.
Most of Obit includes obituary-shaped prose poems — slim columns in double-justified text — describing the loss of different parts of life, former selves, that grief and death kill off: privacy, friendships, logic, optimism, language, and memory (the latter two, again and again). For each aspect, Chang turns a sharp eye on how life’s elements buckle under scrutiny (social practices, turns of phrase), or warp with grief’s weight (time, memory). After being told by her mother’s nurse, simply, “be prepared,” Chang writes:
I
looked through my purse for the rest
of the words. My pockets empty.
Prepared for what? Could I prepare
if the words were missing?
She pushes beyond the confusion of the fragment implying a whole to meditate on the death process:
A bud
is not a flower but a soon-to-be flower.
No word exists for about to die but
dying but even dying lacks time in the
same way a bud lacks a lifetime.
Chang often engages with language in this way throughout the collection — people sort words, string them together, pick them up, lose them. This is not for the sake of metaphor. The scattering and confusion and loss of language through grief and aphasia extend far beyond the mind.
One poem in particular lands compellingly on the idea of simile as a means for comprehension, after moving through the concerns so much of Obit circles: the strangeness of language, how every desire during grief is fraught. It reads, in full:
The Doctors — died on August 3, 2015,
surrounded by all the doctors before
them and their eyes that should have
been red but weren’t. The Russian
doctor knew death was near before
anyone else, first said the word
hospice, a word that looks like hospital
and spice. Which is it? To yearn for
someone’s quick death seems wrong.
To go to the hospital cafeteria and
hunch over a table of toast, pots of
jam, butter glistening seems wrong. To
want to extend someone’s life who is
suffering seems wrong. Do we want
the orchid or the swan swimming in the
middle of the lake? We can touch the
orchid and it doesn’t move. The orchid
is our understanding of death. But the
swan is death.
The simplicity of Chang’s diction and syntax is a careful misdirection. What seems like strict description is filled with meaning, considering the context of the poem and the book in its entirety. The portmanteau of “hospice” between “hospital” and “spice,” looking at something that “glistens” while a loved one is dying in the same building, illustrate how what is otherwise benign becomes bleakly absurd in the grieving mind. While the nuance of language and its common assumptions comprise one tether of this book, nature is another — as with the bud’s journey towards flowering, towards death. Rain, fruit, wind, trees, all return as images, again and again, to try to provide insight into what grief means. The poem’s final image, “the swan swimming in the middle of the lake” as death, underscores a sense of tangible connection despite distance. There is an intimacy through something you can see, but never touch.
This sense of intimacy from afar is the defining element of Chang’s relationship with her parents, too. She makes explicit note of the lack of physical contact, no exchanges of endearments, only shouting and mocking — no one here comes off as a saint. At one point Chang describes a photograph of her and her mother holding hands when Chang was a child. They never touch this way again until her mother’s imminent death. Change writes, “I love so many things I have never touched: the moon, a shiver, my mother’s heart. Her fingers felt like rough branches covered with plastic.” Thus a more complicated intimacy, defined by remote yet fixed positions, takes shape. Love exists, even at a distance, even with its flaws.
Chang’s desire to capture something of her mother, even if it concerns the loss of dignity or being petty, is grounded in her fear of losing her entirely — even in memory. “As time passes,” Chang writes, “my memories of her are like a night animal racing across the roof. I know it is an animal, but I will never be able to see it.”The failings of description as a method to hold memory, to pin down ideas through metaphor and simile, culminate in Chang writing, “There is nothing like death, just death. Nothing like grief, just grief.” Hence Chang’s pushing back on Rilke’s citing of beauty in a representation of another, so bold it prompts existential crisis. For Chang, it fails. It is never enough. “Why must we draw what we see?” she asks. “Just copy it, my mother used to say about drawing.” Yet what function does copying do, and copy for whom?
The artist is only
visiting pain, imagining it. We praise
the artist, not the apple, not the apple’s
shadow which is murdered slowly.
There must be some way of drawing
a picture so that it doesn’t become an
elegy.
While Chang suggests that description almost inevitable drains a memory of its force and shape, participating in the fading of the dead as we try to remember, the most powerful element of Obit is Chang’s growth through the process. Near the end of the book, she depicts herself visiting her mother’s grave:
I lie down next
to her stone, close my eyes. I know
many things now. Even with my eyes
closed, I know a b bird passes over me.
In hangman, the body forms while it is
being hung. As in, we grow as we are
dying.
Parts of us die, we are emptied of what we know, we lose. Still, strangely, we continue to grow. Rilke had a known obsession with death—he believed it was death, not the prime of life, one must reach toward. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life.”
[Published by Copper Canyon Press on April 7, 2020, 120 pages, $17.00 paperback]