Hermitage

Cassandra Verhaegen

Note: The quoted segments are from the poem “Hermitage” by Joseph Fasano

It’s true there were times when it was too much

and I slipped off in the first light or its last hour

and drove up through the crooked way of the valley

It’s only recently I begin to question my definition of escape as it relates to the environment. What prompts this is the idea that nature isn’t external, but something we are bound in, bound to — except we aren’t bound, because binding still implies separation — we are it, inextricably. Given this new reframing, I’m left picturing us like an ouroboros, struggling to avoid yet always entangled with ourselves. I find this whole concept potentially liberating and overtly disturbing. What do I do now with all the times I, like Fasano here, fled the confines of my house and the people in it, the times I fled myself? I always fled “to nature.” Fled outside to the brook or to the woods or to the lake the size of an ocean. I slipped off, he says, in the first light or its last hour — those liminal, vulnerable, enshrouded moments of day. There’s a feeling of protection invoked here, the comfort of knowing that when it was too much, there was an external place to slip off to, where the light existed as if only to hide you, to soothe your tired eyes. I felt that protection. I am not sure how comfortable I am with giving it up, that idea I cling to, and crave, of the possibility of escape.

and swam out to those ruins on an island.

Blackbirds were the only music in the spruces,

and the stars, as they faded out, offered themselves to me

Perhaps the whole escape-to-nature narrative conceals a kind of vanity. The stars faded out, the stars offered themselves to me. I can spot the hubris more easily here, pen poised over a print-out of a poem I’ve had hanging on my wall for five years now. But I never thought of vanity during my night drives through the mountains — alone in a banged-up car which used to be nice but then got kind of moldy, lighting a cigarette with the butt of its predecessor before flicking the spent one out the window, squinting along to a mixtape, avoiding all rooms of my house and myself — winding down Route 17-N which hardly anyone uses anymore because that’s what they built the New York State Thruway for. There are no streetlights there, just signs warning against deer, and the suggestions of mountains, braceleted by train track, condensed by dark.

like glasses of water ringing by the empty linens of the dead.

When Delilah watched the dark hair of her lover

tumble, she did not shatter. When Abraham

The first time I moved west — the first time I could decide for myself to move anywhere at all — I was going to college. I chose Chicago in part because of what I imagined the Midwest, which I’d never seen, would be like. There was something comforting about visualizing a vast field of wheat or grass or whatever the hell grew there. I have always felt small in the mountains, in a nice way. I thought the same would apply to the plains, that I could throw myself down on the dirt still warm from the sun, and it would offer itself to me in this way, and I would be small and protected and safe. In reality, I was surprised by Illinois’ urban decay, pleased by the vastness of its sky, heartstruck over its lake. I’ve never forgotten that image though, a seventeen-year-old’s fantasy, that kid I was who wanted nothing more than to go into a huge space and feel held like it was separate from her.

relented, he did not relent.

Still, I would tell you of the humbling and the waking.

I would tell you of the wild hours of surrender,

I believe in omens. The first omen I believed in overtly was that seeing a light flip on in the evening was a good thing — I got this from a book of poems by Anne Carson. I never remember the line, I just think of it every time I sit on a porch and see a neighboring apartment flare into its night-life. Here in Oregon — another place I fantasized about before having seen it — I’ve found a new omen. The birds migrate here so intensely. V’s, long stuttered threads, mass embroideries of birds in the sky, headed somewhere else. The first time I saw them all flock, I was sitting on my porch torn up over a decision I wasn’t sure how to make. When I saw the birds go, going like I’d never seen before, darkening the blue sky with their life, I was convinced. Of what, it hardly matters. But I was humbled, I surrendered to an idea that required intimacy, risk. I surrendered to something greater than myself, because they were there, and they were grand. Greater than myself — even now, I’m stuck in the crux of it.

when the river stripped the cove’s stones

from the margin and the blackbirds built

their strict songs in the high

I knew Virginia Woolf drowned herself, but I couldn’t remember where. I argued that it was a lake — that better fit my concept of a woman wading into a body of water with stones in her pockets which would weigh her down forever. My interlocutor said it was a river, though he knew next to nothing about Virginia Woolf. It was a stupid fight, it hardly mattered, but it turned out he was right. Fit my image or not, it was a river which took her. I thought she’d wanted to be swallowed up by something still, something whose depths she had agency over because she’d have to wade first. But no, she stepped into a river and felt the current. I guess for someone who fills their pockets with stones, it hardly matters whether you sink intentionally or if you sink after the water sweeps you sideways.

pines, when the great nests swayed the lattice

of the branches, the moon’s brute music

touching them with fire.

I believed in the moon even when I stopped believing in God. On my night drives, I’d stare through the windshield at it and feel safe. I thought it meant I was truly and irreparably depressed when the moon offered me no more solace, when seeing it oozing white into an ink sky no longer moved me. Now I reconsider that moment which once felt like a loss of innocence: perhaps it was not a travesty, but a reckoning. The moon does not need to be there for me in order to be there. It is, and if I am truly part of it, and it of me, that stability should be its own comfort.

And you there, stranger in the sway

of it, what would you have done

there, in the ruins, when they rose

Like I said, I’ve had this poem on my wall for years. Only as I consider it now do I begin to grasp this concept of the stranger in the sway of it. This stranger, placed in the same subjective role as the birds in their nests, is implicated in this scene. The stranger is asked, what would you have done? Would you have done anything? Or would you have accepted your position as someone in the sway of it, that unfathomably vast sway, and just rocked like everything you already were?

from you, when the burning wings

ascended, when the old ghosts

shook the music from your branches and the great lie

The great lie —

of your one sweet life was lifted?

— of your one sweet life. What is it? This line smacks me, always has, but what is the lie? Is the lie that there’s an escape? That a tree touched with fire, or ruins, or strict songs in the high are not truly separate from you, the stranger in the sway of it? Or me, a stranger in the sway of it? There’s liberation here, a demand — what would you have done. What will I do? What will I do with this reckoning, that the self and the world are inextricable, that we never leave?