My Shining Archipelago

Winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition
 
Talvikki Ansel’s My Shining Archipelago gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says poet and contest judge James Dickey in his foreword, “Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism—more, always more, in the Amazon basin.” This cycle of “freewheeling sonnets” (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second sonnet cycle that inverts the subject of the first: instead of European civilization (the opera house Teatro Amazonas) coming to the jungle, an untutored human who is just learning to name things—Shakespeare’s Caliban—is dropped in the middle of Elizabethan London.
 
Flemish Beauty
 
Yesterday, all winter,
I had not thought of pears, considered:
pear. The tear-shaped, papery core,
precise seeds. This one channeled
through with worm tunnels.
Bruises, a rotten half—
sometimes there’s nothing left
to drop into the pot.

                                  That phrase
I could have said: “you still
have us . . . ”
                  The knife
slides easily beneath the skins,
top to base, spiraling
them away.

The insubstantial us.
It could as well be the pear
talking to the river, turning to
the grass (“you still have us”).
Besides, it’s just me
a pear in my hand (the slop bucket full
of peels)—and sometimes, yes, that
seems enough: a pear—
 
                                      this larger one,
yellow-green, turning to red:
“Duchess” maybe, “Devoe,”
or what I want to call it: “Flemish
Beauty.”
                 When I can’t sleep,
I’ll hold my hand as if I held
a pear, my fingers mimicking
the curve. The same curve
as the newel post
I’ve used for years, swinging
myself up to the landing, always
throwing my weight back. And always
nails loosening, mid-bound.