Sheltering a Flame

Daywork
by Jessica Fisher
Milkweed Editions, 2024, 104 pages, $16.00

Jessica Fisher’s third collection, Daywork, weaves together a range of imaginative and intuitive readings of art, dreams, and other people, also incorporating the cycles of interpretation and self-reflection involved in the creative process. Often in the very interplay between these activities, the poems move through daily realities into moments of unexpected perceptiveness, associative redirection, or compassionate witness, intuiting synapses beyond and within the instability that underlies our personalities, interactions and various structures.

Reading Fisher’s poems sparks intuitive insights into our dreams and histories, loves and shadows, that only deepen in recognition through analysis and reflection.

The opening poem, “Shadow Play”, movingly imagines past artists through shared aspects of consciousness, creative work itself, and the facilitating movements of the soul within it:

What fed you, music,
art, or light. Was there an empty room,

shadows cast upon the floor,
the boards liquid with sunshine,
and was that how you imagined

the soul: open, ready, very still,
even if the day itself was windy.
Or was it for you like the wind,

tempestuous, infiltrative,
lifting the fallen leaves.
Did you think about it at all.

Like the soul itself, the imaginal conversation both traverses the boundary of death and intimates enduring mortal realities. The omission of question marks in the interrogatives points towards one locus of pathos in the poem, our awareness of such interactions’ limitations. Yet, the soul seems to meet itself here in the speaker’s use of historical and aesthetic study to imagine the artist, in part through the historical figure’s long-relinquished work and its contexts, but more deeply through experiences of psyche shared with the living.

Fisher deepens our experience of soul connecting with itself through the artistic process by delicately invoking the flow of ephemeral connections between what we often presume to be distinct inner and outer worlds:

Many lights cast many shadows,
so that the hand on the paper
is reflected time and again,

the knuckles like the mountains,
one range after the next, and each
a fainter version of the same color,

so that our sense of the faraway
is brought close, the brush dipped
again into water, a little less paint

for the next stroke.

The poem maintains an elegiac balance between existential clarity and the feeling of self-transcendence, evoked in the metaphorical link between knuckles and mountains, that accompanies the experience of one perspective or mode of perception eclipsing and contextualising another. A subtle, crucial intimation regarding our lives interweaves: as our thoughts, feelings, and intuitions dissipate into evolving contexts for one another, so too our individual experiences of the world in mortal life return themselves to psyche’s continuation in others.

The conjoined psychic experiences of self-transcendence and present eventuality also inform the opening of “Early Spring”:

On the table, a mirror, window
to the sky. A surface through
which time moves, but there is
no record.

All the while—
a shadowy underworld.
A world between us.

In the vegetative image of this “underworld,” however, the speaker imagines “the first flower pushing / through the weight of snow”, highlighting its inherently transformative nature through the embedded paradox of new growth in medium enriched by past lives. The life of a dream offers an intra-psychic association:

And the dream, dissipating
now, in which I followed
a river that dried into
bracken, that gave way

to a dream of you
touching me, as if
no time had ever passed,

and every touch shifted
something, the way
tuning a kaleidoscope
alters the view. Gone now,

though sleep like snow
is absorbed into the body,
and changes it.

The imperceptible transformations that take place within relationships find an unexpected analogue in the ways that the soul presents fleetingly to consciousness in dreams.

The interplay between the two—like the interrelated entanglements with creative works discussed above—transforms the relationships that play in and through psyche: poem by poem, the book finds unique ways to awaken us to different “changes” that take place amidst different varieties of “sleep”.

Incorporating historical aspects of books into its alchemy, “The Match Girl” also associates connections between dream, human relationships, and the soul’s play in creative work. The speaker dreams of “a girl with matches in her apron pocket” from a story of which the speaker “had not thought” until she appeared in a dream “sheltering a flame”. The dream connects with a memory and loss: “When I woke I wanted to tell you, because she had your eyes, and wore in her hair the gold pin that was yours, when you were alive.”

An imaginal turn then transports us from the speaker’s interior connections to the “people [who] wait, in the ornate initials” within “certain illuminated books that have been unopened for a hundred years or more”:

How can you not imagine them oppressed by the closeness of the codex, wanting air, light? I have never been able to shake this ridiculous fantasy, that they are real still, and the scribe who tranced their features, and the apprentice who pricked and ruled the page.

The speaker’s appeal for the reader’s understanding vicariously enacts the transformation of the enduring material nature of the figures into their flickering into new lives within the consciousness of each new reader. They want not for air or light as in the initial imagination that reaches out from its origins in human experience of the body, but rather for the imagination itself, in which they may live new lives.

Via the relationship between reader and writer, the poem’s ending invokes the synergies within and between our interior connections, our creations, and interpersonal bonds. Due in part to their mutable, transitory nature, life in all of these forms has space to continue to unfold in new manners and constellations.

A related view of the ego’s perception of the non-ego takes place through the dual lens of the witnessed child self in “Dark Cryptic”:

I was a child,
night a black box.
I lay in that
narrow bed
as the darkness
took shape
around me
and so I thought,
what cannot
be touched
is real.

The child intuits the intangible’s paradoxical reality in ways to which the poet can offer flexible rendering. The speaker also perceives what her younger self could not, her own “weight” and “the gravity / that kept [her] there / as the lid closed”. In perceiving the duality of the imaginal box with properties of the physical world, we enter the ever-shifting perspective of the ego aware of its impermanent status within the enmeshment of psyche and world: “Nothing said, / there is / form within.”

In several poems, the mature perspective that contextualises these paradoxes from childhood experience wrestles with the mortal implications of this “nothing”, prompted by the suffering and illnesses of beloved friends and family members. “Speedwell” begins overtly “looking for a metaphor. / For someone who knows the way” in response to the news from a friend who “wrote to say / that this spring may be her last”. The speaker considers the rebirths of spring, “fed by death” in her friend’s beloved Whitman, moving into the names of flowers, themselves small acts of metaphor. The emphasis on the act of naming then links to the paradoxically generative life of a poem that

knows it has come to an end
and refuses, like a child stalling
before bed, not tired yet or scared
of the dark. Every death takes

a body; it’s hard to know what it leaves.

The self-referential link between the poem and the consciousness that creates it dramatises psyche’s self-perception in and through the imaginal space of the poem itself.

This practice offers insight but also intimates the impermanent nature of consciousness itself in its necessary awareness of dynamic internal separation. The speaker resiliently employs this delicate awareness as a vehicle of imaginative compassion:

Already it has stitched its signature
into her chest, the scars that chart
her illness like lines on a map

that show where the ship has sailed,
struck rock, found the ocean too deep
to anchor and so drifted windless,
the sea, like the earth, teeming

with the dead.

Again representing an overlapping psychic space, “the poem” concludes by playing out the fantasy of ongoing experiential connection with our loved ones until it empties into the apprehension of mortal isolation, relatable due to shivering recurrence:

This is what the poem’s after,
after all: a figure, no matter how thin,

that might make these reversals
in matter seem like a switch flipped on
and off, off and on. A child playing
day and night, dark and light.

A single life like that, or not at all.
If in the bag the phone rings
and goes unanswered: will she
feel like that, calling from far away.

The final lines poignantly evoke our capacity to imagine and conceptualise greater patterns of life that include us, even participate in them with creative acts of language, none of which ultimately abates the feeling of being the life separated from that greater life in death. The attribution of consciousness to the poem cleverly recreates the way such apprehensions seem to sneak up on us in unexpected events, the poem’s revealing of its intentions akin to mortality presenting as if from outside. However, the corresponding detachment from the speaker’s emotional experience in the final lines also focuses the reader’s compassion on the empathic imagination of the friend’s feelings of isolation. This gentle gesture of open witness tacitly acknowledges poetry’s helplessness to change anything about eventuality other than how we think about it, feel through it, and understand feeling within it. In doing so, “the poem” offers itself as a space in which others may find such reflection.

The speaker engages with the imagined loved one within consciousness in temporary, yet deeply transformative ways that recall the dream in “Early Spring”. Likewise, through imagining the cherished human connection, we can empathise with how dreams might feel in encountering “us”, another window into witnessing and interacting with them more fully. Both of these insights point towards a conception of death similar to the nighttime in “Dark Cryptic”, an unknown that appears as external, yet opens upon the inner universe we paradoxically share with others.

In other movements, such as in “Night Song”, Fisher focuses this integrated perspective on the outer world, its strangers, and their mysteries:

Sometimes on the bus
I felt like a stowaway
in other lives,
looking into the soul
of each passenger.
How, you ask? given that
the soul, if it exists,
cannot be seen, is
like the bird hidden
in the bush, the
air you breathe. You
take it in nevertheless.

The paradox of travelling within the lives of others echoes, in the quiet bond with strangers, another kind of interconnection. The question about the soul, which can be read as addressed to either self or reader, broadens the scope of this interconnectedness to include even us. This book’s deepest gifts arrive through the many ways in which it embodies the soul’s seeking itself in the works and lives into which we intertwine ourselves, felt all the more deeply within its undaunted awareness of our defining transience.

Michael Collins is the author of four chapbooks and full-length collections of poetry, a professor at New York University, and the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. Find more of his work at notthatmichaelcollins.com.