by Aline Soules
Inspired by the Chauvet Cave and Walter Herzog’s documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the authors explore and ensure that the “forgotten dreams” are not forgotten. By quoting Herzog, “Will we ever be able to understand the vision of the artist over such an abyss of time?”, they remind the reader that we never fully understand, or, perhaps, we understand differently.
This provides a complex context for this work. While the poems stand on their own, they are enriched by the authors’ choice of what is essentially an ekphrastic inspiration of the cave art, the film and, ultimately, their own collaboration. They “traded readings, images, and ideas” from their research, but, interestingly, they “were never really tempted to blur [their] separate voices into one voice, despite an experiment in writing a collective poem, which did not get into the manuscript,” something that suggests the importance of retaining individuality in the face of this blending and exchange. While the author of each poem is listed, the reader could be excused for ignoring the individual poet and reading the collection as a composite.
The collection is divided into Voice Prints, Bow, and Buried Constellation. The opening and closing three poems are set off within their sections and contain one poem from each poet as introduction and conclusion.
“Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc” opens: “I am dark and near dying.” This impressionistic, lyrical poem begins in the dark of the cave with near death, but the persona moves rapidly to the “light in my fur / bright as fire,” and ends with “Red palm alone with crooked finger / an abrupt shiny echo, the color of snow.” An amazing poem to bring us from dark and death to light, the illumination of this cave, and the centuries between the drawings in the cave and our lives today.
“Mind in the cave” brings us to the present, but it echoes the first poem. “If I’ve pulled free I still find the shadow / on your side of the bed.” Free from the past, but the shadow remains. The ‘we’ of the poem “press votives of clay and quartz / into fissures live images congealed.” We are trapped between past and present. The link to the first poem is the “red palm”, the implied red in the line “Where do our fingers end and flames begin?” and the hand that’s offered “from the other side of death its seal of red impact / its crooked thumb.”
“Paper Sky” returns to the dark. “Ink wounds the sky,” our cities are “surrounded by revolution’s fur” and we are rudderless with “Nothing to do but sit like handprints / to listen to our flowers in flight.” This loss offers us not red, but blue as the daffodils and sunsets are “blued by winter’s dust.” This shift prepares us for what follows.
The rest of “Voice Prints” takes us from “songs” to “sonnet.” “Little (Subterranean) Song” is a breathtaking journey through past to present, even as the past “catches” in the present.
Here is where atlas makes room for x-ray. Shepherd stone shatters
cuneiform. If cameras perch long enough for ice ledges
to melt, the turnstiles will be ready
for their handprints. The conundrum tail catches
in its windpipe.
“Sun Made Blue” echoes the opening three poems in its “blue” and “red” and “sand in our tunes” and the last lines:
The race of sepia against stone / wheels up
Our hair aflame and our skin / chalked
“Confetti Score” begins Section Two: Bow with “If your hands had drawn me, would I have been marooned?”, a hint again of the drawings in the cave. The line that in multiple ways. In the poem, it leads to “glyph structures: Us on the Internet,” and “Carbon dating cannot determine how we walked or slept here.” Contextually, the line offers the drawings in the cave, the isolation, and today’s equivalent of the cave drawings.
“Wolf / Boy” begins directly with “Between one footprint and another – / 10,000 years” and takes us back to “one whisper / against the match-struck others, / the hard-liners of breath. That hint of fire comes again, where “crow and fire bicker” and the reader is haunted by charcoal and red.
the fatty inside
of the moment, its put downs
and settlings-in distilled in charcoal against
the death drive of rushed red arrow.
The section title poem, Bow, is a concrete poem in the tradition of Eugen Gomringer and George Herbert. It arcs down the page, leading from artistic striving to the core of the body that “become[s] / its own lever” with “all the various rafts of the medusa / you taught me” to the final question:
How can one flesh
unhand itself
arc from the heartwood with taut
string theory or find its
fingering nock to nipple
the thinking body turning turned
to stone
In the third section, “Buried Constellation,” “Neanderthal Bromance” begins in the past, “You were always wrapped in your story,” brings the reader into the present, where the persona has “started to accumulate your syndromes,” and moves into the future, “Still, I want to try on all / your masks – see through your tree ring / bull’s eye.”
“Say” brings back the color motif, “You say there isn’t water enough, or blue enough, / there was one red sun there were many.” In “Drag Racing with Dust Particles,” we come back to the light and the glare, the daffodils and music.
Please don’t zip me to the stars; I’ve hemmed enough light.
I’m simply eye-hurt in this trapped glare.The thousands took the daffodils away.
The Octaves have run.
The last three poems are the coda. “Let’s Say,” imagines “hollow bag, / dart bone, socket,” and offers a picture of someone “held tall / without mortar,” living on “lightning,” “flinging.”
“Mutt d’Arc” riffs on what happens “under margins and eaves / under spurred ceilings,” claims that “we” are everything from “dishes for the moon” to “sealed envelopes / wearing rented tuxedos.”
In “Microbiome,” the “sealed rooms” are “already contaminated / by our thought.” Reflection follows. “What we found was more than ancient echo, spotted horses, or starfish symmetry.” The poet offers a disclaimer: “We did not set out to study cave art or hang ourselves from the cave mouth. Instead, “The guts / of the question [are] contained the bacterial answers,” as the poets have delved deeply.
This last poem ends, “We have sealed the rooms. / There will be no further questions.” That conclusion is absolute, but for whom? The poets? Perhaps. The reader? Perhaps not. It would be impossible to read this collection and not ask more questions, deepen our desire to connect to the cave and learn from it.
Aline Soules’ writing has appeared in such publications as The Kenyon Review, Houston Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, and The Galway Review. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, and lives in Danville, California. Learn more about Aline at http://alinesoules.com
