A Circle Uncompleted

Beast Meridian

Dissociation is incredibly hard to write. When I experience painful cognitive and emotional separation from myself, all I want to do is flee the experience and return to baseline as soon as possible. I want to cut off the residue of a breakdown and be alright. I know that it is a privilege to have the ability to come back to normalcy from a dissociative state. It is important to note that my life has had an entirely different trajectory than Villarreal’s, having been born into a white family who has been in the US for generations. As such, the experiences she lives in these poems are ones I will never go through, and reading poems written in two languages reinforces that. I feel cut off from some of these poems, mirroring the way Villarreal has been cut off from access to opportunities as the daughter of immigrant parents (“the blondes who snitch on you, see them off to college from behind a register” and “you can be anything in America especially when you’re made an example”). This experience of being cut off is so important; this distancing is precisely what brings me closer to meaningful understanding.

But, I am also wondering, is that all? Is it really being cut off, or am I just conveniently supplying this reading because that is my experience as a white reader? Because there were moments where I was completely one with her experience. I felt the sharpness of her observation on the gray beach in “Sea of Drowned Calves.” I saw the silver, glittering sand and felt her grief. If anything is relentless, it is the sea. Waves are ceaseless, and when everything else in life keeps crashing without any fucks to give, the beach is a betrayal. Worse, the beach is a beautiful betrayal. It burps up calves without reason, and perhaps that is the most horrible part -- there is no reason. Carnage for the sake of carnage. And what can you do, shake your fist at the damn sea? What does that do? Villarreal distills a grief that is too big for one body, too big for the ocean, even, to contain. “The cycle of tides implies circles, as if beginning ever met end, recognized it.” There is no answer; the “beach pews” do not lead to worship or revelation.

This understanding is so large it leaves me empty.

[Insert reasonable transition phrase here, or don’t] Maybe I am latching onto geographic imperative this semester because I am obsessed with water. But I see it everywhere in Villarreal’s poems: on p. 67, “Who Waits at the Lake,” water is a steely surface that is as unmoving as the “you” of the poem. Waiting is an impenetrable reality that takes on “the nature of stone.” The lake is frozen. Everything is suspended and inaccessible.

Water is my beloved geographic imperative because it gives. It is a medium of delivery: food, baptismal blessings, travel, swimming and nourishment. In its frozen state, I think of water as waiting to melt. I view ice as in a kind of limbo. That could be my eternal calling to free-flowing streams, crashing waves, or in my Oakland apartment, dripping faucets. But, here’s the point I am trying to make: In “Who Waits at the Lake,” the lake never melts. The waiting is never absolved. The “you” never arrives. What else is never delivered?

In the two water poems I have referenced in this blog, the sea and the lake are not kind beings. The sea kills calves and the lake is stuck in a frozen state that mirrors the speaker’s interminable waiting.

~HJ