Contributor’s Marginalia: Gustav Hibbett responding to Elizabeth Diebold’s “Vantage Point”

Even my name / sounds strange here.

Here. Here, we are concerned with place. Place as emotion; place as turbulence; place as something that changes state. Although “Vantage Point” meditates on the conceptual and emotional, all of it is transposed back onto place. Time, grief, and loss are not simply concepts — they are spaces where things happen. Time is somewhere that can be turned upside down; traumatic pain is somewhere a name can be blown away by wind that fluid dynamics could never map. (A name blown away: place as absence.)

Diebold is describing a strangeness language can only scratch at; an asymptote we can only ever hope to approach, but never reach. A disturbing sort of synesthesia.

I could ask // the years my father and I didn’t talk / but distances are like secrets

Place as absence, as the empty space between things. Time is suddenly physical—made so by the language here—and then, immediately, it is conceptual again. Years are like distances are like secrets. Even the shift of form isn’t fixed, isn’t something our speaker can hope to map. As soon as they pin it down to the physical (years as distances), it slips into another plane (figurative, hidden—that of secrets). A sensation that even the word liminal wouldn’t quite be able to reach.

My latest circumstance / is my earliest wound.

Grief has a way of reaching backwards as well as forwards, up as well as down. Losing a loved one can very easily slice a wound into your earliest memories of them. Healing can be a process of turning yourself upside down and shaking everything out; patching each piece separately and reordering your own chronology.

A cairn in a wood // marks a trail but stands in my heart / for what’s buried there.

Place (both figurative and literal) as simultaneously start and finish, beginning and ending. (And we stay indefinite—a, not the; this place isn’t fixed.) A marked trail evidences a path, and a cairn can serve as a beginning, a spot to follow the trail from. But a cairn can also serve as a sign, somewhere along the trail, that you’re on the right path. Or, simply, a message that someone has been there before you and kept going. My mother used to say that deja vu was a sign from the universe that you were in the right place; you think you recognize the moment because it’s a significant one (even if the moment is mundane). Even now, even though most of my deja vus come with a feeling of foreboding, I still think of them as signs, trail markers showing that I haven’t strayed too far from my path. Deja vu as cairn. But cairns, before modern day, often used to serve as gravestones, or as markers for caches of supplies. Beginnings and ends but also middles, rest or fueling stations. To come across a cairn on your trail, especially in the situation of this poem, brings a troubling multiplicity of meanings. Here, we are simultaneously at a grave (for the speaker’s lost mother, or for something or someone else they’ve lost) and a trail marker (proof that, even in this indefinitely-located wood, they are somewhere charted—that they are on a path that continues onwards). What orients you, perhaps, is your own interpretation: home is just / a point of view.

it’s the blowdown / along the ridge with the thirsting roots // and the reaching limbs I sit down / next to, kindred.

A tree can also grow sideways—can even sometimes grow upside down—but that is not where our speaker is. For a tree to grow like that, it often has to start that way, to seed on the side of a cliff. Such a tree does not account for time as an axis. What if a tree starts upright, and then is blown sideways? Roots once positioned to access water now bring in only air. To move past this, the tree must find new sources of nutrients, new ground to attach itself into. To continue growing after being blown down requires new growth, new roots.

I think of all the animals who make it across / the road or don’t.

Part of what enamors me so much about “Vantage Point” is this attention to the truth of how pain, loss, or grief feels. Diebold does not try to capture any of those in and of themselves, but instead focuses on faithfully depicting how they feel, how they are able to disrupt our paradigms of reality in ways it becomes almost self-defeating to try to comprehend. A road is, to non-human animals, a site of violence. To deer, armadillos, foxes, a road is a gauntlet, where something they don’t fully understand—something it would be distracting and counterproductive for them to try to fully understand—can speed out of the darkness at any moment and end an otherwise healthy life.

Grief is a road we have to cross, somewhere it behooves us to keep moving forward, where we could at any minute be permanently knocked off of our feet; but it is also a blowdown tree you need to sit down with in order to for your hurt to feel seen. It is both something we need to work to heal from, something it might help us to see as having an endpoint; and something endless, a tree making the best of a sideways situation. In “Vantage Point,” Diebold successfully depicts the incapacitating synesthesia that muddies the landscape of grief.