Pastoral before Decomposition + The Grief Artist by Traci Brimhall

Pastoral before Decomposition

I imagine it lovely, the place he was killed
imagine darkness as clear as it was before God

learned to speak, imagine the Milky Way burning
through the light-stained night, imagine trees blacker

than the sky, and then imagine cicadas grating April.
The cold was crisp, I imagine, and scooped out stale

carbon dioxide from his lungs. One of those good pains.
My imagination wants to redeem the bareness of fact,

so I imagine the field he dies in as a place we might
have picnicked, imagine wind entering his clothes

and leaving again—not the knife. No. I will only imagine
the way the cars versed themselves in curve and velocity

through the arterial streets. Not how the men took turns.
not the way his body proved to the medical examiner

that he struggled, lifted his hands to defend himself—
no, I imagine the grass, how it must have nodded along,

how his phone lit up with a blue light blinking, blinking
at the driver who stayed behind, his thumb brushing

the red END from the screen like wiping an eyelash
from his lover’s cheek. I imagine her, only hours away,

letting the spring salt into her sleepless room, Atlantic
waves curling in on themselves, red tide creeping toward

shore, and the suffocated fish with bellies like moonlight
doing what is surely required of all the dead and rising.

—from Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod by Traci Brimhall.

Like many people, I’ve spent much of 2020 and 2021 thinking about and processing grief. Individual and collective, minute and global, cellular and generational, past and present. This week, I read Traci Brimhall’s poetry collection Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod from Copper Canyon Press and found myself challenged on my own beliefs about processing grief. If this book is a woven piece of art, the warp yarns are made of taut grief and loss and the weft shot through—over and under, over and under—is made of joy, wonder, curiosity, and most surprisingly to me—imagination. Through every poem, Traci makes clear how intrinsically linked grief and imagination are. Often grief and loss are the result of violence, whether it is violence enacted by another (such as what the main character of this poem faces) or enacted by our own bodies (miscarriage, cancer, chronic pain, etc.) the two are often companions.

To process violence we have to access imagination. We have to imagine how such a thing can happen, we have to imagine why it continues to happen, we have to imagine ourselves as part of that violence and ask “Could I? Do I?” In opening our imaginations to the violence, we also open our imaginations to its opposite—what can I do to create instead of destroy? Living through grief. Surviving violence. Rejecting violence as a choice. All of these require imagination.

Reading Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod wasn’t enough, so I sought out more from Traci. In the essay “The Grief Artist” at Guernica, Traci writes: “The body has instincts for grieving, though I’ve always had trouble understanding them.” Traci’s poems in Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod explore how the body grieves, works through the process, imagines more and different ways of being. In short, the poems in Traci’s book provide a guide for how we can move through grief and violence, not with grace or patience as is often called for in grief literature, but with imagination. As a way to soften, reshape, remember, relive, pave a new way forward. Traci understands grief does not have to be graceful or fluid—“In art and grief there are days you’re not proud of, days the emotions turn ugly, days the images don’t turn out the way you want. But that’s the human in us, and it belongs in the process.” These poems contain the human, the ugly, the hard, the process. And they are better for it. And I am better for reading them.

For more on Traci Brimhall’s thoughts on grief and imagination, read this interview.