Contributor’s Marginalia: Michael Bazzett responding to “Consanguineal” by Maggie Millner

To me, the word solitude has always had at least a little shading of loveliness, a connotation of good books, quiet music, blue ache. The word isolation on the other hand just sounds cold, boring, and lonely.

I think this is one of the things that drew me to Maggie Millner’s “Consanguineal”: how, to my ear, the poem lives in the shaded area of the Venn diagram of those two words, how the speaker’s yearning for a sister echoes the poem’s yearning for language & imagination to be enough to create true kinship with one’s self and the world.

As someone who spent hours in a boyhood maple and who still considers the elm tree in my backyard a close friend, I can relate to this speaker spending her afternoons in a lilac, “sitting / on its one thick bough, make-believing, breathing / its perfumes.” I love that little slant rhyme that couples “make-believing” and “breathing.” It’s a marvel of musical economy: to imagine is to be alive.

And learning to flex those imaginative muscles plants seeds of compassion, connection, and self-knowledge, so when the lilac grows ungainly and sags across the path and the speaker’s mother hacks “its foreparts with a saw,” I feel it. That word foreparts is strangely perfect in how it quietly invites the lilac into kingdom animalia. “Syringa Vulgaris / is no name for a girl” perhaps, yet it becomes a cousin nonetheless.

I delight too in the merging of the two Lauras of Goblin Market and Little House on the Prairie, one seducible, the other noble, and how slyly that blurring captures the indiscriminate hunger of a reader unconcerned with the eyes of the world, peering into books to find herself.

But it is not to be. Not exactly. It seems the solution is not so much to become plural as to recognize that we already and always are, as the speaker hints in this lovely hinge: “But I had to be both of us, myself / and she, witnessing me.”

As I return to the poem, I find myself lingering inside that lovely little enjambment—in a sort of pleasantly plural unknowing—before I once again pick up the thread of syntax and return to the world and the self-consciousness of being witnessed. Somehow, through this unseen alchemy, the speaker’s I morphs into a we by the poem’s final lines. It is a transformation I confess to feeling more than understanding—which makes me trust it all the more.