Contributor’s Marginalia: Christine B. Jones responds to “I Used to Imagine What It Looked Like” by Regina DiPerna

Then & Now

At six, I drew pictures for God
of flowers & rainbow fish.

Sitting on the kneeling-pad of the pew,
crayons & white paper on the bench,

things my mother knew would keep me
busy during morning mass.

I gave them to the pastor
who I believed was Him.

At fourteen, I washed His dishes
in the rector’s house, found out,
He was as messy as the rest of us.

At twenty-four, I married—
same church, different God,
told my ruffled-self it’d be okay.

*

Today, at forty, I’m undressed, wading

in the Atlantic               & silver fish veer

quickly, collectively,     except

for the straggler,          another

kind of God,               a crayon-smudge

of then & now.

___________________________________________

Often, when I get a new collection of poetry, I thumb-ear the pages that attract my immediate attention, knowing I want to/need to return to that poem and reread. This was the case with Regina DiPerna’s “I Used to Imagine What It Looked Like” because her vivid snapshots brought me viscerally back to that time of my childhood when I sat dutifully during mass, busying myself with crayons and paper that my mom wittingly brought to keep me quiet. And I drew pictures for God, for the man in the flowy white robe, with wispy white hair, depicting what I imagined heaven to be: flowers, rainbow fish, smiley suns.

“I Used to Imagine What It Looked Like” is a poem that petals with each read. DiPerna’s choice of concise imagery refracts from the poem as light does from the scales of a fish, providing our senses with multiple experiences. Like the speaker in DiPerna’s poem, I stopped believing in the God I imagined to be, and found answers in the sea, in my time learning to open-water swim. Those lines: “…like a school of silver fish / swimming suddenly together” were an actual nodding-of-my-head moment, that ah ha moment Lucille Clifton spoke of. A poem keeps us company. This poem, as I believe all good poetry does, provides a sense of belonging to a greater, and collective whole.

DiPerna chooses her words carefully. “A fuschia smoke / billowing madly. // A lash on soft skin / blossoming red.” initially evoked a beautiful sensation; I thought eyelash, heaven, flower, images my childhood-self once believed. But after my second read, I saw the tension that every good poem has and needs. I saw the rising of wounded flesh, I saw crucifixion. This associative imagery allows a reader to connect on multiple levels. It’s what our brains crave. It’s what Robert Bly insists when he says “[n]eurological speculation belongs in our literary discussion as much as speculation about breath, imagery, or meter.” I call this element of craft, association constellations. Constellations are landmarks of the sky, just as I believe associations are landmarks of a poem. Without them, the sky is a bunch of random stars, and a poem is a collection of random words.

DiPerna’s own version of a constellation made up of “white shells / slipped under the tide” embeds heaven to earth, before it disappears, just as our imaginations have a tendency to do, just like my flowers and rainbow fish did.