Bones, Birth and Rebirth: Supplications in Emily Wall’s

Poetic Journey

It’s as if my mind creates shapes that I don’t know about. I get this shape in my head, and sometimes I know where it comes from and sometimes I don’t. When I got to New Mexico that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I’d never seen anything like it before but it fitted to me. It’s something in the air, it’s just different. The sky is different, the stars are different, the wind is different.

Georgia O’Keeffe

In the act of reading Emily Wall’s poetry, I feel shape and form beginning to congeal in my brain. A window opens to a world of reimagining my own relationship to the poet who is our guide into her own vision of what it means to be a human, a woman, a mother, a daughter, a child of the world. We will be taken on a magic carpet ride into what feminism is. What the ultimate act of creation can be in childbirth. We will see who we are in the poet’s hands: the son-daughter, niece-nephew, mother-earth relationships we as children of mother earth and mother culture hold dear, open and secretive. Emily Wall opens up our journey.

We have Wall in the crystallized energy of a fist, or flame, or birth canal. As we read her work, we are reborn, remade and recentered, even for just a moment during and after being with her as she sings songs of honor, love, body and spirit femina.

It’s not hyperbole that the reader of poetry will begin to shape her own vision of the fragility and strength of human existence after galvanizing within Emily Wall’s work of profound mimesis. Let me explain how Wall’s work has tied into what many have looked to as art’s purpose: as a recreation of our own psychic formation (mimesis). Art is also shaped by its “otherness” and by history, and Wall is a studied writer of history.

To take this further, I see in Wall’s body of work—whether she’s with Georgia O’Keeffe’s artwork/life in her chapbook, FIST or through the life of The Virgin Mary in a conjuring of Wall’s proto-feminism in Flame, or in birth in her Breaking into Air (Birth Poems) this undergirded idea which states all stories are about exile and homesickness. That is, all art contains a narrative.

As reader of Wall’s art, I must comport myself mimetically "to lose myself, forget myself, extinguish myself in her artwork." Given that philosophical overlay, I enter the world of this artist with openness to her magic, her myth making and her willingness to envelope herself in persona. I am taken by Wall’s magical incantations.

The Angle of Emily’s Repose

For Emily Wall, the words in her poems are benedictions to women like Georgia O’Keefe, Alice Waters, the Virgin Mary and the collective female of gestation and birthing.

In FIST Wall transmutes O’Keeffe onto her page. O’Keeffe spent much of her life at Ghost Ranch in Pueblo Indian country. She was a Wisconsin-born rebel, who was told many times by many a man that she would or could not be an artist. Wall utilizes a proto-feminist epigram at the start of her chapbook, FIST, written by Georgia O’Keeffe:

One morning as I climbed to the top floor for the Life Class, there [Eugene Speicher] sat with his fresh linen smock, blocking the whole stairway and threatening that he would not let me pass unless I promised to pose for him.

I was annoyed and wanted to go up to work.

‘It doesn’t matter what you do,’ he said.

‘I’m going to be a great painter and you will probably end up teaching in some girls’ school.’

Here she is challenged by sexism and parochialism. O’Keeffe laughed at all these “great” male artists Back East wanting to write the great American novel or produce the great American play, while none of them spent any time away from their East Coast haunts. O’Keeffe left that world and embarked on a rather unique journey for not just a female artist, but for any artist.

Wall’s book FIST is in seven parts, and all poems are shaped as letters Wall imagines O’Keeffe writing. Part 1: Amarillo Texas; 2: New York, New York; Lake George, New York; 4: Taos, New Mexico; 5: Ghost Ranch, New Mexico; 6: Abiquiu, New Mexico; 7: The Far Away.

For the studied poet, Wall’s formulation of FIST is around three specific styles or techniques: ekphrastic, epistolic, persona poems. Wall explains that she had O’Keeffe paintings printed out and taped to her walls when she worked on this chapbook.

“I’ve lived with and worked under these images for the past few years, letting her colors and shapes and vision guide me,” she writes at the beginning of FIST. Each poem comes from an original work, and at the end of the chapbook she pairs each poem to the title of a painting.

The last letter in this book, “The Faraway—Pelvis Blue” impregnates the reader with both the words Wall envisions and what O'Keeffe might attribute as influencers of her painting: desert and bones. It is almost a séance with Georgia O’Keeffe, as Emily Wall imagines the chillingly authentic song O’Keeffe would have chanted:

The rush of wind in lungs when I cross the world of sky and heat and there, the one wing— —of bone— I didn’t even know I was looking for now found— and carried— all the way home.

Now, I trace its deep curve— this pelvis, this cradle — this very center— that tethers me to forever.

Flame, Fire, Spirit, Mother

Taking a leap in her world as a poet and conjurer, Wall tackles the inner shape of a woman—certainly one of the more famous women throughout history. Mary. The Virgin Mary. For Wall, her book, Flame, is in a nutshell what she posits as an endnote: “This chapbook is a collection of persona poems written in the voice of Mary or Mariam (Marian), mother of Jesus (in the Christian tradition) and Isa (in the Islamic tradition). The biographical poems are interspersed with poems that read like letters—her voice now, speaking to us, and offering us both direction and hope this current political climate.”

We are part of an act of living, of being, as Wall imagines the daily life of Mary, mother of this “holy spirit,” this god and master. God and spouse. This is a book that simplifies a woman’s universal role in holding life inside, giving birth and raising a son or daughter.

Wall brings to life a world of a woman living in Nazareth, Bethany and Ephesus. A Jewish woman, and through that incarnation, Jesus became the savior of the world. For millions, Mary became Mother of All the Living. For my friends in Mexico and along the border, she is the Divine Mercy Incarnate.

For Wall’s Mary, we see her power of homemaking and raising a son; of food and spices; of womanhood, sisterhood, daily tasks; and of the quietude of aging. She captures the essence of Mother of the Church, this Queen Mother of the King of Kings. Somehow the socalled refuge of sinners is not part of Wall’s personification of Mary.

It’s ok to pray to me. You’re not going to blaspheme the creator, or my son.

Some men will tell you you can’t pray to a woman, to anyone but Him.

I don’t sit on a throne. I don’t start or stop the rain. I don’t cause a girl to look over her shoulder.

But one night, I did birth a beautiful boy. I did hold a first breath in my hands. You mothers know this weight. I do stop by his house, on Saturday nights with a pot of soup, and sometimes, advice.

I’m here now, watching your hands light that prayer. I do sometimes remind him to listen, when those who

birth the world, are asking.

This is Wall’s poem, “Soup,” emblematic of the voice and tenor of this woman’s continence and spirit. Throughout, Wall creates a Mary who is fresh, a child of the earth and mother of a man of miracles. The Mary in Flame comments on the power of women who bring the living food and drink, who attend to birthing, to the aged, and to death. This Mary is the chronicler of life where Jesus was born, lived and died. The resurrection truly is in the voice of Mary, in her wisdom, her ability to see through the hubris of religious dogma and endless squabbling interpretations of her son’s acts.

It is Wall channeling the poet’s own hope for this woman of two millennia.

In "Stone," Wall writes a poem imagining Mary speaking to Joseph, the husband but not the father:

My husband is a mystery to you who search thin pages for mention of his name, what he might have spent his time doing. A carpenter is what you imagine. A man with a beard, dressed in brown. Standing in a hut with animals, standing loosely beside a child not his own.

What was he thinking?

Was he even real?

It is the stone-on-top-of-stone-and-mud house building that best describes Joseph, who is the strength of a man who acts the father of Christ. His role is to be a builder, a carpenter, and in the end of the poem, at the end of Mary's pregnancy, the work of Joseph is enduring and necessary:

This is what I know to be real: a small stone house on the edge of the village. A pair of hands used hard, used well.

A baby that is coming. A place for us to sleep.

With one profound yet simple poem after another, the book becomes a talisman of sorts for both mother and child, wife and husband, woman and mate to undertake the long stretch back in time. This is a holy book only in that the process brings to the page evocation of the force of the mother, aunt, grandmother, daughter, sister.

Yet she is the giver of the son, The Son, who has been tutored and guided through powerful wisdom of women—bearers of children and givers of food. “Blood” is a poem that further solidifies both Wall and Mary’s vision for humanity:

Have you noticed? The men count the days we bleed and they shy from birth with its rich blood.

They spend days and pages on the way my beautiful son bled.

It is the work of women to talk about food and rooms and blankets. We begin with the work of the body.

Mary talks of her son not conjuring up a miracle of food for the hungry, but giving piece after piece of a loaf of bread to fill their bellies.

He didn’t take away their hunger. He picked up a loaf of bread and broke it and gave some to the small girl in front of him.

She took a bite, swallowed. I know now, I have done my work well.

No matter your belief system, or religiosity, the shape of these poems is the vessel of a woman lifting the processes of life into acts of humanity, love, caring and seeing. In Flame, imagine clay and water, or the rising dough of bread, or the veronica of golden sun on one’s lap, or the stone in hand to stave off the pain of childbirth, or the simple things like goat cheese, oregano, olive oil, and the sky.

Take Flame with you to a valley, or some hill, maybe a beach, a place of running water or wind in pines or aspens. The silence will evoke a deep resonance in your heart. The sound of earth will be the rhythm of birth, living, dying and rebirth. The light in the sky will be the shape of life held in your own mind’s eye.

You will read Flame as if it is a prayer and if you are like me, a believer in all myths but unbeliever in the giant manwoman in the sky directing all things big and small, this book will be, still, an awakening of what power is to be a life giver.

Emily Wall has rehoned the universal holy trinity, the mother of all mothers, and we have song in her poems, as well as supplications to the hearth and home. We will care about a thousand year old olive tree and a two-dayold lamb. We feel-hear-touch wind, rain, sun, snow, cold and warmth as the bosom of the mother. Her womb is our home. In these poems, the mother holds the reader close to her heart.

We are self-afflicted in this earthly suffering. Wall is a voice shaping Mary’s hope. Wall is dream catcher who is able to paint beauty of a life through her simplicity and suffering, so we can ebb away our self-injury, self-effacement, and self-hate for a moment in time. She (Mary/Emily) is there for us, as we read this book. We know the suffering, the horrors, and the agony of what women on earth have had to endure, and still do. We recognize that mother/mother culture we have abandoned. We know she is there wailing for her fallen children. But somehow Mary/Emily is also here to heal, protect, resurrect hope.

Poetry as salving and salvation.

Upwelling — Births Foretold

In Wall's Breaking into Air, she starts off with magnificence in the first poem, drawing the allusion of birth, and labor as a goodbye. As that feral fetus leaves the feral place, the womb, the woman in the first birthing poem is both reveling and regretful, momentarily, that the growing of flesh, blood, bone and brain inside is about to be a purging. Expurgation.

This first poem is a pulsating description of birth:

And then it’s time to let go. The midwife has told you this moment would come, yet you linger in that feral place, where you hold your hands in the rich loam of birth, feel the bold cracking of your body, a rock deep and sweet as Henry, resting upon the floor of the world, in this feral place, where you hold and hold and hold.

That’s the high caliber of the poems shown early on. With “Henry,” we understand that all our births have left us upon the floor of the world. Gravity, earth, as we have left the bubble world of water and muscle, movement of our mama, and our own syncopation with our mother’s body magic, the sound of her voice, her crying, the spasms, each ache and pain, and her joy. Left to the gravity of the world.

The next poem covers three births, in the figure of Samantha. The third birth is a journey of a child, like a fish, unfolding its fins, moving head out of the birth canal, as the mother, Samantha, is there with midwife and her mother, with the heart monitor signaling 140 BPM, and the healthy baby emerges, strong strong, both baby and mother, strong strong. Emily invokes: and your momma put her hands on your head holding as much of you as she could and you rested on the soft sand dunes of your mothers strong and strong our momma-talk drying you. Our hands opening, finally, your own silver wings.

The next poem is of Mary of Nazareth, as the midwife. There, a neighbor calls forth to have Mary assist. Savta, Mary’s grandmother, has the birth stone, and Mary mixes herbs with wine to put on the lips of the birthing mother. The men are outside, on the roof. Two sisters hold their sister’s thighs.

We talk the baby out. We quietly share a glance that it’s a girl. Then we call to the placenta. Come, sister.

This is the way of simple birth, done a billion times. But Emily captures, again, THAT Mary, which we have been introduced to and shaped by in her previous book, Flame

The women’s work is glorious, life giving and life shaping. The birthing ends with the simple acts of living and sustaining:

We do our work well and then Savta and I eat a few bites of bread, breathe in the smell of blood and new skin. We walk home in the final hours of darkness, under that faint curve of moon. Come, sister.

We are there, outside the door, somewhere, listening to the birthing. We too can smell the sea, the blood, the urine and sweat. Sometimes, Emily takes us to a difficult labor. In a hospital. These are the last lines of “Hazel’s Birth”:

This is about me, and Hazel, stepping out of that dark lake, stepping onto the shore, and learning how to breathe.

In her poem “Shaawatke’é’s Birth,” there is a deep resonance in Lingit identity, as the birth of a daughter is a celebration of the Lingit language, which is the language of culture, history, guiding a family that must move forward in a modern world where indigenous people are shunted aside, at best, pushed toward cultural extinction, at worst.

Interspersed in the poem are the songs, the words, of the father and mother of this child coming into the world with a strong tongue, one that will carry on language, therefore, the Lingit culture, people: ch’a haa kát uwagút. haa yoo x‐’atángi yaa nanáan i een áyá k‐u.aa, kei gux‐ latseen. kei gux‐ latseen: haa Lingítx‐ sateeyí. sometimes this life is so difficult, it has come upon us. our language is dying. but with you, though, it will get stronger. it will get stronger: our Lingít identity

In Breaking Into Air, each birthing poem takes the reader through a gallery of births Emily was able to tap into by reading personal journals and listening to stories from both mother and their partners. The book is shaped by her friends, many of whom are in Alaska, and Emily thanks three nameless Juneau doctors who helped her with the telling of birth experiences. The book is a collection of deep moments of creation. Many of the births are cradled in the reality of pain, hospitals, spinal blocks. This is a deeply personal book, one that takes the reader into the heart and soul of mothers.

Cynthia Steele