Wilderness in the Mouth: On Vievee Francis

Abstract

Wilderness in the Mouth:On Vievee Francis Phillip B. Williams (bio) When we love the Earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully. I believe this. The ancestors taught me it was so. —bell hooks, "Touching the Earth" In fall 2009, I had the privilege of spending Thanksgiving with a friend whom I met at CU-Boulder while doing a one-year stint in their MFA program. This was the first time I could remember spending Thanksgiving with someone else's family. In the years prior, I often spent the holiday alone. Before any festivities were to take place, the uncles wanted to take a short walk around the rented cabin. In the distance, deer, startled by our presence, froze and shot glances in our direction, where surely safety would betray them had they come any closer. We carried on, avoiding berry-filled bear scat in mounds that marked territory some human certainly at one time called his own. Mountains dauntingly pierced the horizon. Trees stood seemingly espaliered against the shadowed angles of rock. It was obvious how small we were in the world. [End Page 265] Maybe a quarter mile out, the direction unknown to me, I found a furry rabbit's foot still attached to its furless leg bone, bent like a hinge to a door through which I would willingly step. With a leaf, I grabbed the thin contraption and held it up to the light, and I showed the others how the rabbit paw resisted leaving the calcareous stem of its leg. "Bobcat," one of the uncles said. "Coyote," another chimed in, and I lowered the partial corpse back to the copse ground as autumn air shaved my lungs clean, made a bone of the soft in me. I remember taking a photograph of this pawed leg abbreviated at the humerus. I have since lost the evidence, but I remember the image without mnemonic and find myself abruptly haunted by the vision with endearing grace, as though a window shade has been lowered over my mind and projected onto this partial carcass, the hinge still beckoning to be opened further. It is the door that the natural world makes of itself in a mind animated by its own abuse of the sacrosanct, and even now I most willingly wish to have that chance again to peek through the bone door to find something strange and violent—a divine and unrequested mirror. Perhaps this is what attracts me to Vievee Francis's work: that I find in her poems a necessary ritual of opening that door to nature to have my expectations upended. From her very first collection, Blue-Tail Fly, to her second, Horse in the Dark, to her most recent collection, Forest Primeval, Francis makes strange the fixities of the human mind, revealing it to be a poor compass with which to navigate nature especially when not even the human self has first been understood. To call her work honest raises the question, "To whom?" Reading her work, I find myself on the receiving end of votive emissaries, my palms upturned and waiting for Francis's promise of truth. If I am to speak about her work across three books, I speak about Francis's motive to unclutter the clumsy ways we consider nature: as [End Page 266] privatized, as conquerable, and as wholly exterior. Across the span of Francis's career, what we find is a desire to first scrutinize mankind's complex psyche through persona, to understand that human self, only to later turn the mirror upon the reader to find ourselves scrutinized through poems increasingly made personal, revelatory of a self that seems exhausted with hiding behind the stones, behind the obsession to dominate nonhuman realms. One can argue that the opening poem of Blue-Tail Fly, "The Scale of Empire," sets the standard and rubric for so many that follow: The wood that engulfsan empire of stonecares only to maintain itself, to green again the decadentprogressions—discovery,desperation. Our delusion: digging into the earththat submits only temporarily. The poem enacts the ways nature overtakes the presumptuous "empires" of mankind. But Francis's work is not merely...