Review: Folk Taxonomy (A Review Of J.L. Moultrie's Cairn)
By S.G. Mallett
Like Keats’ Nightingale, the lines
in Cairn by J.L. Moultrie through Pig Roast Publishing please the ears rather
than the eyes. The pop ep the chapbook is blurbed as earworms itself into the
part of one’s head that conjugates as it conjures. Piles of perfect rhymes
among imperfect rhymes among slant rhymes among feminine rhymes among masculine
rhymes among eye rhymes among weakened rhymes among thought rhymes among
trailing rhymes reinforce the arranged instantiations of despair as steps in an
incantation when what is between a cairn’s elisions are the spackle less gaps
that do not bury up so much as they define what comes next. Lines break like ‘armor
falling off my body’ when the speaker wears how the speaker feels and grammar
is incidental to what the noun you are hears as a rule. The visibly felt is ‘blood-slick’
and not runic. While it seems like the spiritive action a shrine sees is a
function of how its definition shifts past its etymology (as far as the OED is
concerned), it seems like a cairn, singular, stays the same. A cairn is a
personal thing, communion less, masturbatory, a thing somewhere between yourself
and what you leave behind. But not profane, despite what National Park Services’
standard operating procedures are.
Like Stevens’ peacock, color is the
colored object repeated, ‘every room choosing between leaving and departure we’re’
repetition when what completes the Ryonji rock garden’s circuit is you sitting
before what is ‘altered by each instance of awe briefly forgetting all the
body.’ To watch that ritual which may only work when the world wiles it—or, if
not the world, whatever words we use for when what is around us wields us, particularly
when ‘Judas is in every man’s heart’—unfold before the trigger warns you
through morose colored glasses, broken stained glass ‘recalls the heavens aren’t
gated underneath both of us faded’ as you concurrently recall the cry of the
peacock ‘in a garden my garments reek of hardship / but you look past my
blighted leaves’ awash cycle without an object of the verb; eideticism is a
curse ‘but each sublevel of / grief reveals another hue’ like pentimenti put to
practical use.
Like Larkin’s free bloody birds or
swords to ploughshares or Sontag’s gun, Dickinson’s hope is in italics the
thing with feathers under the influence of the memory of Mnemosyne’s daughters’
inspirational posts, and a prison gets to be a friend whose ‘cell is somewhat
Darwinian’ and ‘each conclusion is a facet of the / beginning’, as if it is
Moultrie instead of Herbert who states that “sorrow was all my soul; I scarce
believed, / Till grief did tell me roundly, that I lived’ and Herbert instead
of Moultrie who asks “who are we when / unperceived? Intimacies vexed from
places you / wouldn’t believe.”
If a cairn can be a caged bird, I count it eleven times: ‘birds [whitespace] out of tune’; ‘cardinals or note before immolation’; ‘barely knowing where you’re going the / pinion’s frayed’; ‘geese flew felt the undertow’; ‘pigeons’ nest in the attic’; ‘the blackbird’s nest in my chest’; ‘skein of swans’; ‘in mosh pits. Like a feral wing—’; ‘an augur bartered’; ‘displacement took / place in an age of / flight blight in my / mind...’; ‘doves / got used to the chains //; and if a cairn can be the tides, I count it ten times: ‘hardly entered my mind still carved inside riverbeds / my apostasy signs accosted me yet storms lift’; ‘silhouettes at the moon’s request you took me to the remnants of / your armor each departure’s a receding tide’; ‘an ocean / open yet forbidden’; ‘I sat on the shore until you / implored me to come to you. / Glimpsed cypresses behind / your irises. Breaking waves / mirror pillars...’; ‘effaced moon my mind’s a series of detours’; ‘out the river splintered in real time’; ‘altered by the ocean—ruin my prurience’; ‘tenderness was rarely involved the ocean now resides in / every room choosing between leaving and departure we’re / altered...’; ‘leading to upturned rivers’; ‘waves and form. Signals / become lost, immersed in sand then gone’; and if a cairn can be both at once, I count it twice: ‘inaccessible cornered all a wounded animal a condition of non / existence essentially the initial miracle’s quicksand...’; ‘recall time being a mirror, / and by degrees, answers separate us from home. Who are we but stones / thrown amid leaves? / Sieved into shape, borne of / tides. / I was scarcely alive yet arrived before night on this plane. / A short flight; all I felt was blue’; and this is more than the four stones I count. If it is possible to see with poetry’s eyes, as Hirshfield says it is, then Moultrie does. If it is not possible, then Moultrie has, at the very least, moved the scholarship of lithomancy by 33 degrees, one for each knot of the prayer rope around the left wrist, Sts Pachomius and Anthony substituting how to hold wool for how to cast stones in a bowl to keep track of one’s place, set to a musical adaptation of an existing composition for extended petitions to ‘enter our hearts whenever we’re / gone changeless returned to god as sculpted stone’ in the total carat weight a service of the tensile strength introduces and resolves. If a cairn can gestalt the stones it is made of, then a life is more than memory: both project from the past into the present, abjected to the axes of gravity and subjected to bird shit.