Contributor’s Marginalia: Robin Myers on “Oh Wonder” by Traci Brimhall

One thing about living in an earthquake zone, which I do, is that you often think the earth trembles when it doesn’t. Or else it does tremble for some reason your body thinks is an earthquake but isn’t. The other night I lay in bed, electrically awake, as a nocturnal road crew jackhammered into the street. I was perfectly aware that there was no earthquake at that particular moment—besides, the earthquakes I’ve experienced don’t even feel like jackhammers; they roll you around underfoot; they make you dizzy—but I shifted and jittered nonetheless. And I thought, lying there, about Traci Brimhall’s poem “Oh Wonder.”

It had been haunting me. No: it had shot me through with wonder and stayed there, crackling. I’d read it several times on the page at first, then aloud. I wept. Which is to say, I found it wondrous. Why?

Because, for one thing, of how it does what it says. Just as the very feeling of wonder tends to resist appraisal, fixity, and even language, the poem glints, shifts, and touches what it passes without staying there. It unfurls and darts forward and to the side, like a ribbon unspooling rapidly down a flight of stairs. It pivots beautifully on the relationship between the title and a wandering, anaphoric “it.” Just take a look at some of these lovely, slippery its: “It’s the garden spider who eats her mistakes / at the end of the day…” “It’s a million pound cumulus. // It’s the stratosphere, holding it, miraculous.” “I think it’s also the hummingbird / I saw in a video lifted off a cement floor by firefighters // and fed sugar water until she was again a tempest.” “It is the orca who pushes her dead calf / a thousand miles before she drops it or it falls apart. / And it is also when she plays with her pod the day / after.”

So glittering and kinetic is this “it” that it makes me stop and wonder: am I sure I know what this “it” is? Of course I’m not. Oh, wonder. It is definitely about love and definitely about loss and very definitely about the inextricable intertwinedness of the two. It is, I think, about attention as a form of love, about astonishment as a kind of celebration. Which is to say, a kind of solace.

And it’s about language! It’s even about the glancing inexactness of language. “Sometimes it’s so ordinary it escapes your notice—pothos reaching for windows…” “It’s / a mammatus rolling her weight through dusk / waiting to unhook and shake free of the hail.” What kind of Greek-rooted quality is pothos, I found myself wondering, and why does it reach for windows? What kind of animal is a “mammatus” and what is its relationship to hail? Well, maybe you already know this, but I had no idea that a “pothos” was a common variety of houseplant (in Mexico its nickname is teléfono), or that “mammatus” was a category of cloud. These words thrill me in “Oh Wonder.” Not because they’re beautiful, not because they’re unfamiliar, not because they sound loftier than the things I would recognize by another and more ordinary name, but because they take on the strangeness and the glory and the shape-shifting and the inter-species evocativeness that the poem itself brings to life. Because they bring things to life.

To me, “Oh Wonder” has three essential hinge-moments. The first is the shift from descriptions of natural phenomena—the stuff of observation, the raw matter of awe—to something darker, more personal, and more painful: “It wasn’t when my mother lay on the garage floor / and my brother lifted her while I tried to shout louder / than her sobs.” The second is the bit about the orca I mentioned above: it is both the mother whale carrying her dead calf a thousand miles, in the purest demonstration of anguish that we humans could possibly anthropomorphise her into, and her playfulness in the group the next day. And the third is the breathtaking appearance of the speaker’s own child, tiny and anguished, who cries, “The sad is so big I can’t get it out”: “It is lifting my son / into my lap to witness the birth of his grieving.”

It is in these moments that the poem’s wonder hums loudest, pulses warmest, becomes truly mortal. It is here that Brimhall registers the sheer marvel of being alive—which also means losing, mourning, having certain hurts branded indelibly onto us forever, and of course dying—in a way she refuses “to invade with empathy.”

What I love most about “Oh Wonder,” then, is how it honors with its acknowledgment. How it trusts the mysteries, praises the unplumbable. How it lives and lets live. Even empathy imposes something from outside. Not wonder, though: wonder is what lets joy and gratitude embrace pain and grief. Because they already do. Embrace, I mean.

It is the earth rumbling below us, drinking deep from the volatility that sustains it. It is the cadence whirring through a vein in my neck when I can’t sleep. It is jackhammers and streetlamps and the toxic halo of dust rising up from the street and the all-night taco stand down the block with its snarl of extension cords and favorite stray cat. It is the man who stirs beside me in bed and sighs a jumble of words in no one’s language but his own. And it is these lines from Derek Walcott, among my favorite ever written, which leapt up in my memory as soon as I read “Oh Wonder” and which share, I think, a kindred beat to their blood:

Because memory is less
than the place which it cherishes, frames itself from nowhere
except to say that even with the shit and the stress
of what we do to each other, the running stream’s bliss
contradicts the self-importance of despair
by these glittering simplicities, water, leaves, and air,
that elate dissolution which goes beyond happiness.