Birthmarks: poems

Whitney Rio-Ross

Birthmarks: poems

Eugene, Oregon, Resource Publications, 2020.

ISBN: 9781725261723 (paperback)

The web describes this edition as a chapbook. It has 26 pages and is bound more like a slim volume than something folded over with finger-tip-biting staples down its tracheae. The contents page reveals that almost every piece is going to play off a Biblical theme. The first half the OT, the second the NT, and women’s names run throughout: Eve, Hagar, Ester, Rachel, then Mary, Mary, Martha, and Mary the next. To set the theme, Rio-Ross gives us ‘Proverbs 31, As Curse’ and it is here that the considered subversions start.

Laid out on the page to stress what’s missing, this first poem is a détournement by lacuna. One part of this poem runs:

She giveth a portion

of her

loins

by night:

she layeth,

she reacheth, needy.

She is afraid of her household – (p.2)

Rio-Ross’s hijack of Scripture here may very well be, actually, a reference to, and a healing of, the original structure of Proverbs 31. The first section of this Biblical text begins with kind and sagely advice from the mother of King Lemuel to her son. The mother’s brief advice suggests he keep away from women who would ruin kings. She then goes on to suggest abstinence from alcohol, that he speak up for the just, and give voice to the voiceless. In this first part of 31, wayward women occupy a very small part of the sound advice being delivered. But then we come to the second section of 31. This is laid out as an acrostic where each Hebrew letter serves to introduce another admonishment to all women who do not live up to the hyper-subservient ideal of hard work and purity that is promulgated by the Jewish patriarchy. The voice of this section changes radically, and it seems unlikely that these words are also from Lamuel’s mother. It is more likely that the royal mother’s brief mention of ruinous women becomes an excuse for a blitheringly dull and constrictive poem underlining a male fantasy of female subservience to be inserted. It is there supposedly to amplify, yet in the end undercut, this small piece of feminine wisdom.

Given this textual background, is Rio-Ross effecting here a feminist subversion of 31, or is she, more simply, fixing Scripture by further mocking the delirious patriarchal intent of the second half of 31? In doing such fixing is she returning the focus of this Biblical passage to the wisdom of the king’s mother? My money is on the latter option – making Rio-Ross’s poem a sound corrective rather than an ideological pronouncement. But within this options and complexities, you can begin to see why this small set of poems is very much worth careful reading.

In the following poems, Rio-Ross brings in a less technical comment on Scripture but continues using female Biblical characters to highlight aspects of her own life and of contemporary life in general. The second poem, ‘Eve Creator’ is a prose poem where the apple becomes an infant’s first taste of apple juice from her mother, and the great crime here is not the fall of man – but the absence of an infant male as the father searches his newborn for the penis he wanted to see. He finds a daughter instead.

The next ‘Hagar, With Her Son’s Teachers’ places Hagar in a position where she must deal with the waywardness of Ishmael. She is asked

Is his father an angry man?

Is he

still in the picture? (p.4)

The allusion being to Abraham, long married to another woman, but impregnating Hagar because of the assumed barrenness of his wife. These questions build the poem into a threat against the perceived inadequacies of the woman. Hagar’s plight is brought swiftly into our own times with intimations of a wayward father figure, domestic violence, and the need to escape abusive homes:

(I took every scrap

that man gave me and wouldn’t,

fled the only home my child had known

Did you have better directions?) (p.4)

The crying out of ‘look at me’ that ends the poem is both the mother asking for help, for recognition of her difficulties, and it is also a mother trying to get the attention of a son whose mind is shooting ahead to more mischief. This is a small, disturbing poem. ‘He is wild’ it begins, ‘He does not play/with other children’ in this way it sadly, but compellingly, sets the scene.

The mix of Biblical theme and immediate personal difficulty is confirmed in ‘Rachel, At Leah’s Baby Shower’. The Biblical story is itself complex – Jacob works for Laban for seven years in order to claim the hand of Rachel. At the wedding Leah is substituted for the bride. Once he realises he has been tricked into marrying Leah, Jacob complains, and so Laban says that after his honeymoon with the elder bride, Joseph can also marry Rachel. Rio-Ross positions us at that point where the ‘baby shower’ has everyone gathering just before the first deception plays out. Leah’s wedding is being celebrated – although the groom has no knowledge of the switch – Rachel does:

…knows this is a lie.

She wishes it were her lie. (p.6)

Rather than focus on the complications of the deception, or the Jerry Springer-like complications of the ensuing bigamy/polygamy, Rachel here focuses on her own womb’s yearning

The truth is she’s tired of grieving

ambiguous losses – ghosts

unheld, though not unnamed.

They have given them names.

In the end Rachel finds herself (an ingenuine) knowing she must trust God but realising he has made her no promises. There is no deal. In this way the poem ends on a note of dissatisfaction that looks back to the centre of the poem where the word ‘enough’ is repeated:

She cannot give her love

the lie he prays for: You are

enough. What we have is enough.

‘Eve, Lover’ is a block of prose roughly similar to ‘Eve, Creator’. The poet tells us, between hints of her mother’s aging, how she took from her a sheer chiffon nightgown and hung it upon her own bedroom door – a ‘garment made for Venus.’ The ending of this poem is haunting and beautiful:

I told her I would get more use out of it, and she blushed.

But it just stays there, floating above the foot of my bed.

Meanwhile I spend the mornings watching the dawn glow

through, translucent –

warming a body

I can’t quite

recognise. (p.7)

‘Bathsheba, Laundry Day’ is again a glimpse into the complexity of the life of a Biblical female. The wife of Uriah, Bathsheba becomes the wife of David because he is the king and has willed it to be so (kings like David and Solomon had multiple wives and dozens if not hundreds of concubines). But just as David desired her, he can, just as easily, desire anyone else. As she cleans the underwear of the king by a stream, she struggles to claw out the stain of this

‘and those eyes

that saw anything could be his.’

‘Esther, Playing House’ evokes a young girl preparing for life. And later ‘Deborah, Application for Promotion’ takes an early figure of authority (Deborah is the only woman in Jewish Scripture addressed as a judge) and gives her the clichéd language of a job seeker. I’m not sure these two are as effective as the rest of the poems here. In between these we have the third block of prose entitled ‘Eve, Healer.’

Here the mother figure becomes a medical figure, perhaps a psychologist, ever writing down the details of her patients on yellow legal pads. The poet tries to work out how her own problems rose above the concerns of her mother’s profession:

When I woke to blood at thirteen, I sprinted to her in soaked panties. Poised over scribbles, she paused with a smile and promised all was as it should be. When I slinked away, she crossed out a line, hieroglyphed its margins, just to make sure she didn’t leave anything out. (p.10)

The first half of this book ends with ‘Naomi, Skinny Dipping.’ What begins as a poem about ‘butter-drowned casseroles’ and ‘pecan pie’ and a mature woman eagerly undressing to leap into water takes on added poignancy if we link it to the destitution of Naomi on her return to Bethlehem,

Greif and age won’t be left alone,

no matter if they need it most.

But night – night pains everyone

deserted, shelled in an unseen

they can’t throw off. (p.13)

In the water she remembers her long-lost husband and sons, and touchingly

all that’s left now –

the cicadas’ hummed hymns, somehow

still loud enough to raise the dead. (p.14)

Section two then takes us into the New Testament. The first poem with half its title in Latin: ‘Magnificat, As Plea.’ Rio-Ross pushes home the continuance of the Jewish world into the Roman empire by presenting another detournement-through-lacuna. The last line of this verse being:

fill the

empty

servant

for ever. (p.16)

Here the plea is less magical curse than worshipful request but also looks forward to the next poem ‘Mary, Annunciation’ which adds the modern experience of morning sickness to the trope of Christian parthenogenesis that is literally embodied in the Mother of God. This theme of spiritualised conception is then doubled in ‘Elizabeth, Invitation to John’ where the mother of John the Baptist invites her child into life whilst also foreshadowing his coming tragedies. It is here that Rio-Ross moves away from the comparison of contemporary references as this poem becomes more an honouring of scriptural story, rather than providing a telling chronological comparison. In ‘The Prodigal’s Mother, Waiting’ we return to the Biblical/contemporary theme where we read,

If can hold a bowl of cereal

sweet enough to turn him home.

If can’t search the attic for comics

confiscated when he failed algebra

There can be no if, only when (p.19)

And we leave her waiting by the door, sure that the son won’t miss another morning and will be home by today. In ‘Mary, Disputation’ the mother of god seeks to understand her relationship with her messiah son. And in ‘Woman at the Well, Between Men’ Rio-Ross shifts the focus of John Chapter 4 from a metaphor of water, drinking, and salvation, to one of the men who come in and out of the female Samaritan’s life. Similarly, in ‘Martha, At the Harvest’ the relation of the woman to the men about her is stressed. These men expect housework and food preparation, and almost stand between her and a chance at salvation, and yet, like a bird, she can do the amazing:

A girl’s exhaustion risks sin.

Hers is a glance heavenward, stopped short

at a robin’s flourish and fall to nest and eggs.

Chest blushed against her glory,

she waits for the screech of gratitude,

announcing she has made something wonderful (p.22).

The last four poems then focus on the crucifixion event yet maintain the focus on female perspectives.

‘Mary, Pieta’ ends with the fascinating line ‘This is how we began’ suggesting that the relationship first mentioned in ‘Mary, Disputation’ only really starts at the death-point of Jesus. With a reference more to Michelangelo than Golgotha, Rio-Ross drives the emotional centre of this poem with the lines:

When offered your marbled

flesh –

I couldn’t.

Forgive me. A mother can

only hold so many scars.

But hovered between nightmare

and waking, my wounds sink

into yours, fresh and warm

as I remember you. In darkness,

all blood sheds embraced. (p.23)

The double wounding here almost elevates Mary to a co-equal sacrifice giving further intensity to the ‘this is how we began’ conclusion.

‘Mary Magdalene, At Daybreak’ gives us Mary among ‘the dead’s hilltop slumber,’ thus upon Golgotha, it is probably the morning after Friday’s crucifixion. The sun rises as a foreshadowing of Jesus’ rise after death.

The moment after the sun struggles up is

the moment to bow your head and witness

life warm to itself, color aching into the shadows.

This – justifies the dark climb

into the earth’s rafters, to behold its waking,

her secret she’ll watch the world discover. (p.24)

There is no parallel reference to the modern world here, so as with the earlier poems on the annunciation and Elizabeth, this verse seems more turned towards poetry-as-worship. The Magdalene’s ‘secret’ carries forth, nevertheless, the female focus with the inference that she may be the original spreader of what becomes the male-written Gospels.

In the second last poem ‘Resurrection, A Resurrection’ is laid out as the former poems-by-lacuna are laid out. Women weep, the poem asks why. The brief line ‘If thou have,/I will take.’ seems here an explanation of heaven’s intent – to take. This is followed with a floating ‘I am’ – which looks back to the burning bush of Exodus, but which is coupled in the next line to the single word ‘brethren’ – a brotherhood which excludes women. The patriarchal intent of the world is wrapped up in the final lines:

Say to my father, Father.

And to my God, God. (p.25)

The final poem speaks back to the previous three and sums up the whole volume. Where the last three poems operated with devotional intent and continued the elevation of patriarchal certainties, ‘Eve and Mary, Emmaus’ gives us a brilliantly appropriate summary to the volume.

A brief reference to ‘the next table’ turns this Emmaus from a house that Jesus visited to, probably, a roadside diner. ‘It’s okay mum’ positions the poet as Mary and the mother as Eve.

Her eyes will land anywhere but mine. We can’t face some questions. Have you considered - ? Regret chokes her. – I’m sorry.

Something between mother and daughter can be either spoken or forgot despite the persona’s ‘It’s okay mum.’ In the last stanza Eve is revealed as a grandmother pushing a biscuit (‘in God knows what’) into her grandson’s mouth. As the poem ends, Eve, Mary, and child are revealed in this small transitory scene and then captured – as if the reader snaps a mental photo when we fully grasp the scene. And Eve,

Folding her lips together, she savors whatever mystery she holds, then yields my portion.

The final line rings out against all the biblical and contemporary problems enunciated in the last 25 pages when the poet pleads –

Let’s just have more of this. (p.26)

The women overcome the tensions between themselves and the small child, who can be both Jesus and the poet’s own son. There is the offer of hope against the patriarchal confusions of the past. This Emmaus becomes a place of hope and confirms that all these previous poems were, in their own way leading up to this moment, this confirmation of that hope.

And now at the conclusion of this review I have the feeling that my critique has turned out to be much longer than the poems themselves – not that this is a problem for me - I felt that I wanted to explain this little book as thoroughly as I could because I liked it so much. Also, this feeling that I have produced a review that sinks in its prolixity in unavoidable when we look again at Rio-Ross’s expertise in radical concision – this is a talent all poets should seek to master, and its fruits are powerfully deployed here. Her economy with words also works because she can lean her book so potently up against other (sacred) texts. Which is to say, across these poems there is something quite ‘Southern’ about the whole enterprise. It is not strange, then, to discover that the poet works at a liberal arts college in Tennessee. But the ‘southernness’ I speak of here does not come so much from cultural referents inside the poems – but from the primary fact that this volume assumes that The Bible is common knowledge and that the reader comes from a world where speech also leans into the world with a King James Version slant.

So, if you do not know your Bible well, or if you did not feel compelled by this small volume to run off and read the Biblical passages that Rio-Ross refers to (and which I recommend you do), then this edition would not work as powerfully as it might. The prize of these poems is their dexterous intertextuality. I say that all this is all done in a tone of the ‘southern’ because there are still parts of the English-speaking world where these huge and ancient texts (Tanakh, OT, NT) do remain communal knowledge. In my own wanderings around the southern states of America, people – shopkeepers, mechanics, even civil servants are just as likely to speak with you in Biblical quotes as they might in more secular modes of English. The do what they can to ‘sneak’ in their favourite passages. It is a delightful game when you can see how this Christian complicity works. This little chapbook, then, has something powerful to say about faith, salvation, but most of all canonicity. And makes me, at the same time, feel some sadness about the demise of what is common amongst us in the Anglosphere.

Although I am not a Christian, I try to keep up with my bible readings simply because there is no denying that the drama and the potency of expression that we find in the King James Version has had such a lasting effect on how we speak – and Rio-Ross keeps that tradition alive and justified here. As you see, I have noted where, I think, some of these poems boarder on the devotional – not that this is a complaint, but they do. Beyond the occasional use of these verses to meditate on the personal faith, however, Rio-Ross achieves something special. She gets us thinking about narrative, its past and present uses, and how much these old texts speak directly and forever to the human condition. Furthermore, she delves into this canonical work, one that is fired by a great patriarchal intent, and extracts from it something vibrant, fresh, and counter-patriarchal. These poems are touching and profound, they readjust received Biblical narratives to better consider the fascinating joys and complexities of the female condition. And they speak in a language that is regionally complicit and yet universal. But more than all this, as I hope this extended review demonstrates, they are an intriguing delight to read and are (Bible close-by) very much worth engaging with.