The Art of Being Boundless
on OCEANIC by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread those little meteors on a hunk of still-warm bread this winter. Any trace left on the knife will make a kitchen sink like that evening air
the cool night before / star showers: so sticky so / warm so full of light
— from “End-of-Summer Haibun”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil poses many questions in her new collection from Copper Canyon Press. How many jam jars does it take to “can” a summer night sky? And how can a kitchen sink be like evening air? These lines in “End-of-Summer Haibun” gesture toward larger questions that span the collection in various forms: What does it mean to be contained? And what does it mean to be boundless? Oceanic is a stunning book of poems that explores much more than the ocean. Nezhukumatathil urges her readers to consider the relationship between language and experience, between poetry and life.
A poem can’t fully contain (or “can”) a feeling any more than a jam jar can contain the night sky. But it can still touch upon experience, tap into something’s essence. Elaborate words aren’t always necessary; Nezhukumatathil uses them sparingly. Even in the middle of winter, evoking a feeling that calls back to summer can be as simple as so sticky so warm so full of light, so clear-eyed that it demands the absence of punctuation.
Nezhukumatathil gracefully lifts up the smallest things: the eyes of a scallop, the buzz of a bee, the twinkle of light contained in jam that sticks to a knife. She employs a poetic gaze of adoration, especially for living things. But just as quickly, she’ll shift into an entirely different scale, turning her attention to moons, planets, and galaxies.
In this way, many of the poems do what the title suggests they might — they engage with a feeling of cosmic connection and boundlessness. For example, in “Invitation,” she invokes the word “oceanic” itself (just one of several moments in the collection where this occurs):
If you still want to look up, I hope you see / the dark sky as oceanic, boundless, limitless — like all / the shades of blue revealed in a glacier.
Here, the fragility of tiny life forms becomes wrapped up in a grander scale of time and change. The voice remains tender as ever, but the image of the glacier—especially in 2018—is necessarily loaded with climate change anxiety and precariousness. The shades of blue are “oceanic, boundless, limitless,” but the glaciers that contain these colors are continually slipping away. Earlier in the same poem, Nezhukumatathil writes:
Deep where / imperial volutes and hatchetfish live, colors humans have / not yet named glow in caves made from black coral and clamshell.
The possibility of “colors humans have not yet named” lying undiscovered in the ocean’s depths suggests a world of experience that is beyond language. This ongoing paradox is weaves in and out through Oceanic: we can use language to talk about boundlessness, but language itself always presents us with structures and limits.
Meanwhile, the dramatic shifts in scale produce a kind of lyric electricity that holds the collection together as a unit, even though the individual poems cover such vastly different registers of imagery and emotion. Consider the final lines from “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate One Second before Waking Up” — after the painting with the same name by Salvador Dalí:
In one million years, Los Angeles will move forty kilometers / north because of plate tectonics. A spaceship zooming along / at the speed of light would not yet reach the halfway point / to the Andromeda galaxy. One billion years: one ocean born. / The time it takes for the last waxy smudge of me to stop loving / you. Only at the bottom do you find anything about a bee.
It’s fitting that Oceanic engages with Dalí, who also explores dreamlike potentialities at the outer reaches of experience. The grand time scale of plate tectonics moving across the earth’s surface and lightspeed travel between galaxies might seem incommensurable with the small moments of intimacy that also characterize so many of these poems. Nezhukumatathil’s ethereal rhythms somehow stretch across those distances.
The boundlessness of experience—not just human experience—is something she returns to again and again, each time from a different angle. Sometimes with ecstasy, thinking about all there is to see and learn in the universe, and sometimes with the sober acknowledgment that many people are barred from that kind of poetic freedom.
The poem “Two Moths” dwells upon the upward gaze of girls who, as victims of sex trafficking “on the other side of this planet,” are confined in one place:
These girls memorize / each slight wobble of fan blade as it cuts / through the stale tea air and auto-rickshaw / exhaust thick as egg curry.
These moments throw into stark relief this question of “containment.” Nezhukumatathil seems to be asking: How can a poet write about boundlessness when there are so many people in bondage? How can we celebrate the beauty of the universe when there is also so much human suffering inside of it? The answer is something else beyond language, like those “colors humans have not yet named.” It dwells in the empty spaces between words throughout the collection.
Over and over again, the gentle voices of Oceanic seem to be telling us something about poetry, or maybe about language in general: that it does not capture or contain lived experiences, but instead expands them and brings them into the light. Readers of contemporary poetry should not miss this lively, elegant collection.
