One book I return to again and again is Karen Craigo’s Passing through Humansville (Sundress Publications, 2018). On almost every page I stumble onto lines that stop me for a while and remind me of why I read poetry. In one poem Craigo says, “Somewhere right now a man/steeples his fingers beneath his chin,” while in another poem she says that “there is nothing more convincing than/the whispered swallows I hear behind me/as my son works his bottle in his sleep.” Her poems are plain in the best ways and mysterious in the better ways and wise—or at least “empty-/but-waiting-to-be-/filled—in the unfathomable ways poems usher us into a sense of what’s holy but also ordinary.
The book begins with a kind of still-life, a meditation, a reluctance, an uncertainty, a breathing:
Meditation with Cat and Toddler
And here I sit with a body reluctant
to bend, a brain that won’t still, a cat
that bumps me for attention, and a toddler
who will come, who has punched
me in the eye for pure love. I’m not sure
how to start, but the cat knows. He suggests
compassion, to life against the dear one,
and if she gets too still, to bite her hand
because there is no virtue in denying
your nature. You offer a constant rumble
of om. You are conscious of her breath,
of the small one who approaches,
then sits down silent by her side.
That toddler punching her in the eye “for pure love” provides a way to consider what many of this collection’s poems do. They punch. They love. They alter how we see. They bring us to compassion. They remind us of “small” things like one’s name, written in Arabic by a student “wield[ing]/the chalk sideways for softness,” or how “tendrils of fog span the road.” She can share coffee with a toddler, the two of them staring into a cup suddenly become a “vessel,” the two of them “close enough/to smell each other’s breath.”
There is a nurturing going on in Craigo’s poems. She nurtures babies, immigrants, even language itself. She understands how everyone is essentially situated between “two independent clauses,” two realities—perilous, “exposed,” sometimes forsaken, entirely human. Such awareness gives us a tenderness toward others, especially “those who have been misunderstood.” How else move through the world except through the lens of fragility, knowing that at any moment one may have already “stepped on the ground/where [one’s] ashes will alight.”
Craigo’s poems ask how we should look upon the world. One answer appears in her poem “Mary of Bethany”:
In church today a woman
rubbed the bald spot of the man
she loved, and did it all the way
through the message, the offering
and meditation. I know.
I opened my eyes to check.
And isn’t that God, touching us
where we’re most exposed,
loving even our emptiness,
those places soft with down.
Maybe Craigo feels comfortable opening her eyes during prayer because, in a way, her eyes are always open anyway, her gaze always prayerful, loving, and kind. She, too, sees us where we are exposed, where we are empty, where we are occasionally “sick in the heart.” As she says in one poem, “In this moment/everything is in abeyance,/stuck between one place/and another.” Perhaps that knowledge informs her “rhetoric,” the arguments her poems make. “We fold and unfold into the other,” she says in “Total Knee Replacement,” and in “Chalkboard Mandala” she is persuaded “to see how all things/are connected by barely a breath.” Isn’t that the “message” we most need to be reminded of by sermons, by poems, by words arranged in syntaxes teaching us again and again where to place the “emphasis”?
In one of my favorite poems in Passing through Humansville, we join Craigo as she chaperones a field trip.
Field Trip
Today the butterfly house
releases monarchs, tags affixed
like tiny suitcases for their flight
south. I’m here to keep everyone
together, to make sure the bus leaves
no lighter than when it came.
One of the children has stolen the wing
of a sulfur. It was dead anyway,
so she palmed it, and now,
fingers flaked in gold, she tries
to work off its color.
A docent points out
a mourning cloak, faded and ripped,
three weeks old and probably
still laying eggs. She keeps going
till she dies, he tells me,
and at forty-five, with a baby,
I relate. Certain fall days
the sun can surprise us
with its insistence, can pin us
to the chair, and we picture
those migrating butterflies,
gold, gold, gold, gold,
gone.
Yes, Craigo is “here to keep everyone/together.” That’s her “insistence” as we all migrate from one day to the next, from one word to another, from “message” to “offering” to “meditation,” from this life to the next one. As we pass through this being human, may all of our voices meet in our vulnerabilities so that we may be “brave, so brave together.”