On the Road to Double Adobe: A Look at cloudlife by Stefanie Marlis

The poems in cloudlife, at once rigorously autobiographical and starkly metaphysical, resist analysis as stubbornly as they resist paraphrase. They do ask that we walk side by side with the poet into an introverted and circuitous exploration of personal loss—“love’s last hairpin turn,” and then, in Elizabeth Bishop’s phrase, they ask us to “practice losing farther.” On our way toward perfecting this practice, we find ourselves in the austere desert landscape Ms. Marlis has drawn for us. At times on our journey here, we nearly lose ourselves in a blissful “idea” of place: luminous, seductive, cerebral. When we come upon an implacable stand of yucca or an immense thorn-clad ocotillo, we are likely to respond with wordless awe or even fear. In the first poem, “vernal,” when we “walk around a bend” with the poet to find the “pink rock” she seeks, we know we are in unfamiliar territory: this rock, emblematic in its hue and stature of the physical landscape we have entered, seems also to suggest that consciousness and dream inhere not within us only but within the mineral world as well. We have entered an otherworldly-seeming-world, lushly and intricately layered, strict in its rules and demands—a lean place of thrift and necessity --dangerous as well as beautiful.

Danger and beauty: within these poems the two are inseparable. They are tied together in “a knot that does not slip.” As we read, we feel exquisitely and disturbingly caught between terror and awe, between nature and art, between “waking life and otherness.” Threat and exhilaration ring as warning through thin desert air—“ragged neon scarbolts.” Each place we stop to rest or to think is precarious, whether it is the physical world (“on gnawed cliffs above queued traffic/garish, derelict casas are losing their footing”) or the world of words (“there are no words to make things right”). This is a world where “sleek angels” pack the furious energy of violent and destructive storms: “why did you take off your wings and come down?” a ghost-voice asks.

Where dream and doubleness preside, the certainty of error and misapprehension is ever-present (“bleached grass/I mistake for snowfall”). We feel we must have two faces: one that looks toward a sensory world we have always assumed we can know and another that turns toward an interior, dream-like place, fluid and undulant, carpeted with rolling “seas of yellow grass,” a world that is always going away from us in watery waves. We are afloat in a medium of displacement and confusion, a “thrall of change” and transformation. We are here and not here.

Not in us solely does the problem (privilege?) of “doubleness” reside, but in the world exterior to us, which splits and is constantly in a flux of becoming. The leguminous mesquite tree, for example, “lissome” in spring, with new leaves that are “tender as sea plants,” becomes in late summer “pod-tinseled”—rattling and ominous, as if with death in its throat—the “same trees twice.” “Stars bifurcate.” A lover “no longer is though isn’t not.” These complex poems comprehend both desert and verdure, and there is rupture between them just as there is rupture between the self and the world. Home is not here. There is “this other life.” There is exile. And yet, paradoxically, exile or displacement in the context of these poems may be synonymous with oneness or atonement. To be incapable of being at home in this world is to affirm the gift of conscience.

At the center of the poem is “Peter’s Crystals,” a section that explores the psyche of Peter, the poet’s father. A survivor of Dachau, Peter inhabits the poems subcutaneously. He is “the unforgivable/unforgiving/Peter.” His refrain, “I’m so lucky,” echoes again and again, even though “the infinite/crystals /cut inside him.” “(And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier).” Crystals exist as sinister metaphor throughout the poems. They dazzle, are intricately faceted, and they blind us with their chemical brightness. Some of us remember that Nazis used prussic acid crystals, in the end, in death camps as a “cleaner” final solution (“a chain of chemists juggling/elegant formulas”). Bunch grass on the dump road where the poet walks her dogs is decked in December with ice crystals. The skin of the poems throbs with Peter’s worldly knowing.

Tenderness and pain reside side by side in these poems. Stafanie looks at the world she loses daily in fragments. She gives us synecdoche: body, house, trailer—these stand for the world. The blinds in her trailer allow her to see a crack at a time: “blinds raised for clouds,” ”moon-proof /icy Venetian blinds,” “I peek through the blinds/and see the night sky/pinned up/like a death notice/at the post office.” Wherever we are, we are “slant among tattered pine/telephone poles” like Peter. Or we must seek refuge in alchemy and mythology like the astrologer who lives “on the road to Double Adobe” sweeping “his doves and planets” into “windrows of love’s molting.” The world the poet gives us is torn and fragmented, and, still, it is most whole. We emerge from our reading knowing that “what breaks one breaks thee.”

* Sharon Osmond is an MFA student in poetry at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California and a professional garden designer who lives in Oakland. Her poems have appeared or will appear in the following magazines: Eleven Eleven, Xantippe, Five Fingers Review, Slant, Spire, The Big Ugly Review, Phantasmagoria, and Full Circle Journal.