Death Tractates. Brenda Hillman

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       Death Tractates

       Death Tractates

       Brenda Hillman

       Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress © 1992 by Brenda Hillman All rights reserved

       Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 CIP data appear at the end of the book

       Originally produced in 1992 by Wesleyan/University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755

       ISBNs for the paperback edition: ISBN–13: 978–0–8195–1202–4 ISBN–10: 0–8195–1202–8

      Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines for printing some of these poems: American Poetry Review (“Much Hurrying,” “Near Jenner,” “Reverse Seeing,” “A Dwelling,” and “An Entity”); Berkeley Poetry Review (“First Tractate”); Pequod (“Possible Companion,” “Split Tractate,” and “Black Rose”); Ploughshares (“Sideways Tractate,” “Keeping Watch,” “Divine Laughter,” “Subtle Body,” and “Finding Her”); Zyzzyva (“Yellow Tractate”). Many thanks to Joe Ahearn, Fran Lerner, and Carol Snow for their advice, to John Prendergast for his guidance, and to Bob Hass and Louisa Michaels for being close by.

       A Note about the Book

      At the beginning of 1989, my closest female mentor died suddenly at a young age. I had been working on a manuscript to be called Bright Existence.

      The poems in this little book presented themselves as “an interruption” to the other work (though the themes and sources—many of them gnostic—are similar); I tried to will them to be a part of Bright Existence, at first allowing them only a certain number of lines, twisting them to fit assignments. But they would be written only when/as the present form showed itself to me (like a butterfly opening out on a leaf).

      In this process, the relationship between the two books changed as well. Though this book was a sister to the other, it still needed to break away, to stand by itself.

      February 1989–January 1990 B.H.

      FOR LMP

      1947–1989

      On the day that I am nigh unto you, you are far away from me. On the day that I am far away from you, I am nigh unto you.

      —from a gnostic identity riddle

Calling Her

       First Tractate

      That the soul got to choose. Nothing else

      got to but the soul

      got to choose.

      That it was very clever, stepping

      from Lightworld to lightworld

      as an egret fishes through its smeared reflections—

      through its deaths—

      for it believed in the one life,

      that it would last forever.

      When she had just started being dead I called to her.

      Plum trees were waiting to be entered,

      the swirling way they have,

      each a shower of

      What.

      Each one full of hope,

      and of the repetitions—

      When she had been dead a while

      I called again. I thought she was superior somehow

      because she had become invisible,

      because she had become subtle

      among the shapes—

      and at first she didn’t answer; everything answered.

      Tell now red-tailed hawk