Paddock
Mary Lou Buschi
Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021

M

ary Lou Buschi’s second full-length collection, Paddock, centers around a sequence of short poems structured loosely by aspects of classical theatre that dramatize interwoven psychological and creative processes. Interspersed are narrative and lyric poems that provide mutually contextualizing modern contexts for the “play,” which is set in a dramatized literary present invoked by Chorus: "Once, as there are many, / time stretches infinitely, / 2 girls set forth, / to find a mother.”

The girls operate on an interesting formal spectrum between lyric and dialogue:

Girl 1

Lost? No, there is a crystal storm and moss grass
where the path forks, a mountain
between two valleys where the goats graze.

…

I know because one story has ended
as another began, witnessing one
or another outcome.
It’s happening—
happening now.

Girl 2

We are here!

We are here!

In the opening stanzas, Girl 1 reads landscapes past and foretold for auguries of their awaited outcome as if it were imminent, yet in the third she shifts to a meta-narrative in which a new story is always starting and ending, with the newer stories bearing witness to the earlier. The shift to this more philosophical justification after the studies of omens seems to indicate an increasing uncertainty in her own predictions. In this context, Girl 2’s concluding cheers have the effect of deepening our questioning of the claims. However, it’s hard to assess since we don’t know the rules of this world, or whether the girls themselves have any idea how it really functions.

We do learn from Chorus that they “built parents out of branches,” a substitution of creative works for ideas of or longings for family members:

Girl 1

What are you doing?

Girl 2

Assembling a box of toys—

Girl 1

          But your box is round,
and full of fluid,
       full of whispers and black channels,
              a blue-eyed doll,
a grey cat, and a speckled sparrow.

Girl 2

Yes, I want to make whole, of these fragments.
          If only to invite her in.

Here the interaction is closer to true dialogue, and we get to see a bit more of Girl 2, who seems to be the intuitive or mystic of the pair, following her hunch that her “box of toys” which seems to resemble an alchemical version of “art,” could conjure a mother if she could just perform the right assemblage or process of images, sensations, memories, associations. Underlying the girls’ stated intentions is a sense that the play exists in a world that puns the form, a world wholly governed by the mindset through which children interact with objects of play, without the pretenses of logic or authority that promulgate the adult—or material, or literal—world. Of course, without those reified creative constraints, there is no definition whatsoever; the play “takes place” where there simply is none.

Indeed, the poems’ experiments with form themselves feel like different alchemical experiments. The “drama” is not the traditional tension between characters’ circumstances and conflicting motivations, but between various formal hybrids of lyric, narrative, dramatic—and erasure. Each its own expressive “box of toys” as if their journey were an accumulation of such creative experiences:

Girl 1

Then you be the big sister. I’m done with always telling you to
     sweep the dirt into a table.
Wipe your face
             and stop asking so many questions.
        We are only light.
We have no voice.
             Our skirts are made of smoke,
     our eyes, concentric circles.
You don’t listen!

Girl 2

         It’s you who doesn’t hear.

Girl 1, the logical, self-appointed surrogate caregiver, nags the younger one about her failure to make a table of perfectly useful dirt. Perhaps being “only light” with “no voice” locks them in a sort of Sisyphean creativity where they endlessly make expressions that go “unheard” because in our world we interpret their works as mere things, seeing the “smoke” and ignoring the “skirts” in which they have dressed themselves. The poem dramatizes this fractured communication when Girl 2 casts her “big sister” in the place of the reader/mother, who “doesn’t hear” either of them because “she”—and most of us most of the time—are not listening in the language of image. In these passages imaginal contents are presented, sometimes tragically, as messages from another world, even if that world is part of the same psyche as the speaker of the modern poems in the collection—or even, in an unknowing way, the mother the girls seek. The girls also intuit that their world will collapse if such messages are understood, if they are incorporated into the material world: “Waking as flesh, / that is death.”

Danger is another, albeit more ominous, object of creativity for the girls’ world, “where girls can die / a thousand deaths / only to emerge even more beautiful.” Several poems, however, narrate journeys of more literal peril in “this” world. “Night Swimming” involves a girl who was accidentally maimed while running from a man with a gun. The play poems inform our reading of the psychological aftermath of the trauma. Here she reconnects with another survivor of the same incident:

Her thigh tight for years, a yard missing,
a chasm she’d never discuss, while he,
the one who didn’t make it,
turns up the drive, climbs the stairs,
to dive inside the furious oscillation
of her bedroom fan, both of them cut to ribbons.

What we think of conventionally as “the speaker’s” metaphor renders in language the connection between the fan and the trauma that left two lives “cut to ribbons.” However, the girls’ misinterpreted material forms of self-disclosure in the play poems add a layer of potential significance to what we would normally read as a representation of the interior aftermaths of the harrowing event by a correlative object. We experience this poem from our world’s side of the communication, where the “furious oscillation” appears to stand in for the inexpressible in the survivors’ processing of the experience; however, the context of the collection reimagines the depth and reach of that inexpressible gap itself. The result is a reinvigoration of the mystery of metaphor per se. Imagining metaphor as a portal of mysterious communication with a correspondent otherworld imbues “our own” metaphors with deeper consequence. Though Paddock does this without reifying the creative expression into a doctrine, the affective presence of the girls on the “other side” of the metaphor nonetheless evokes the unquantifiable healing “feeling” of the metaphorical expression being received. The important imaginative achievement of the book is casting these mutually imagined worlds in relation to one another, somewhere in the borderland where myth, metaphysics, and “creative” writing intermingle, without reducing one vision to another.