Earthed by Light
Response to Sylee Gore’s chapbook Maximum Summer
Despite the heat in Sylee Gore’s chapbook of poems Maximum Summer, the book holds a cold dark, the baby being fitted with clothes knitted while the speaker is on commute, always the breeze pushes leaves of the sycamore, blue light is a cool light, and the images in her poems only expose flashes of life while all else lingers darkly in the background. The experience of heat is something different, long and drawn out, but it’s not summer heat that makes Gore’s book slow and contemplative. Instead it’s her life built with incomplete pictures or photographs, ones that like to linger only on certain things: the sycamore, the baby’s eye color, thinking about words in translation, home and belonging, knitted textiles. Mundane life.
Maximum Summer forbodes maximum winter: death, ruin. But what kind of ruin, what kind of change? A mechanical one, the speaker’s city loses its forests to housing, and bureaucrats decide who belongs, who stays, who is a citizen. The theme of change becomes startlingly apparent by the second page. The speaker says, “I write my friend, ‘I thought birth would transform me, but I’m entirely unchanged’” (8). Almost like a challenge to herself and reader, she unravels the change before our eyes as she syntactically unfurls her summer through threads of images. From June to September, she reveals the subtle astonishment of new life, how she thought she would be “utterly changed” after the birth of her baby, how she wasn’t, and goes on to unravel how change creeps in slower than we notice, we’re lulled by the ticking of summer’s long days that seem to never end. After all, babies need time to develop in a dark womb; film photographs do not reveal the picture instantly, but need developed over time..
Her pages beckon breath and stopping to notice. She sees the sycamore, she hears the sycamore as her baby sleeps, wind and air. The sounds she tracks. Her life before trickles in to the present as milk trickles out of full breasts: commute, flowers from coworkers that decline, brown and brittle. Her new baby the thread, but this thread must be tied to something, must be woven with, sewn through. Summer into autumn. The sycamore that’s hewn in early autumn. Belonging—who belongs where? What language to speak? What’s the difference between language and song? Color. The book’s color is a dark periwinkle blue, the blue of sky in maximum summer. Her baby’s eyes? They change. What stays the same? Can we depend on anything? Even language comes and goes, “I never thought my language could unravel” (42).
She says pictures don’t change (32). She likens legal forms to a camera’s turning “light to a negative” to the mind translating “one language into another” (31). “Split-second choices” that decide fate (31). What does it mean to retain memories in photographs, when memories change but the pictures don’t? She explicitly does not take a picture on baby’s first day. But then? The book is full of references to taking pictures. “Digital light” (that cold blue) contrasts with organic change. But even in the instances of these mechanized moments, she references movement of time, how, say, the first photograph she takes the baby is in a “turquoise wrap I knitted on my commute” (9). Past leads into the present.
My husband looks back to pictures from five years ago and marvels “how young we were.” Yet the photographs of me now just look like me. How do I change so quickly when I feel so utterly unchanged (and completely different)? Photographs can capture how we change when we have a collection of them. A character in The Overstory by Richard Powers photographs a Chestnut tree once a month, for years. Years of photographs. What do they show? Gradual change, but only in comparison do we find it.
The book’s “frame,” its physical being in the world, demands my attention. The first few pages only hold four lines per stanza, but as she gathers momentum, building complexity, following her threads, the stanzas build into seven, eight, nine lines. Each stanza fits into a measured space surrounded by white, blank pages. It creates a sense of silence around the words, the images the words create, images of her life. I imagine how the blank space can be the silence that has unexpectedly entered the speaker at the birth of her child, her empty womb that once was the home to her baby that’s now in this world of mechanization and decline. The space is the emptiness of life that occurs in the kind of time where we notice each moment for itself (I’ve heard some call this baby time), the way “a moment makes a day,” and “summer birds occur” (10, 18). She says she’s completely unchanged and yet finds that change in these daily moments that make a day, how she photographs her daughter’s hands that once were “within my body” and “now you’re here” (11).
The change she creeps toward is a kind of mechanization, and yet everywhere she finds organic movement. As she ventures out with her baby, as summer begins to fade, as her baby grows more animated with life, her legs “piston,” the city declines, can hold no more houses. Yet life still develops even as maximum summer shifts to equal days, equal nights. Even as cities fall to ruin, as bureaucrats manage living things with dead laws, as her city “once a creature […] has become a machine,” even then something is becoming.
Her poems show me how to find disparate threads of life and connect them, weave them into an image of ruin and birth. In etchings of the mundane, she reveals beauty. I am earthed as her baby’s “bulk earths” her (42). Images and experiences of the first months of a baby reveal these months are nothing what you expect. They are thick and thin with things she never thought would change, change comes in places she depended upon being the same. Are the thing we depend on being the same the things we should depend on?