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Lifelines

Anthropology and Humanism v. 21 no. 2 (1999)

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Lifelines

Toni Flores. In Place. Geneva, NY: Hobart and William Smith College Press, 1999. iv + 70 pp.

DON MITCHELL

Anthropology Department

Buffalo State College

1300 Elmwood Avenue

Buffalo, NY 14222

This collection of 47 poems, written over a span of more than twenty years, was published about a year and a half after Toni Flores's death. The poems are grouped into four sections: "In," "In Spain," "In Mexico," and "Water Table." Ten were previously published; one, written in longhand and undated, was found among her effects. We who knew her will find it nearly impossible to read

these poems without trying to place them in the context of her illness and death, but the truth is that only a handful were written after she was stricken, and but one after it was clear she would not survive her illness. This is the poetry of a woman confronting life, not her death.

Everything in this book is carefully rooted in time, lineage, or place. Everywhere there is context, as we anthropologists understand it. No moment "floats" for long. "Two Old Men at the Syracuse, New York Airport" is a poem about the parting words exchanged by two brothers. It is probable they will never see each other alive again.

"I won't/be there to kiss your face/in its coffin," one says to the other, and then Flores strikingly connects them to their—and possibly

her—reproductive pasts and futures:

... we loved the same

woman, laying our seed,

for a time, in the same place.

So we have shared two wombs.

Now she is dead. Her daughter

stands here beside me, to help

me away from this place

when you have left. [p. 18]

These are very much poems about fertility and mortality: the vivid and peculiar demographic calculus of being alive, reproducing, and dying. Flores is hardly the only poet to have done this, of course, but she does it with a subtlety that perhaps only an anthropologist, or one trained in the life sciences, can bring to poetry: the ability to apprehend defining events not just in their immediate contexts but as way points on a continuum of time and generation.

Consider the stunning ontogeny of "Her Last Young Man":

... all that wide, weeping life

into which he is about to dive

and through which she has already swum.

He reaches for her, and she

will take him, or perhaps not take him,

but certainly thank him, and go home. [p. 54]

Language forces us to speak of death as termination and birth as beginning or a kind of initialization, but to Flores, birth and death are punctuating events in the evolutionists' sense: neither is a full stop or a beginning de novo. Neither makes sense except in the context of what came before or after. In her poetry both are loosely analogous to the evolutionists' punctuation: they mark bursts of

activity, spewing, even giddily spawning new lineages and terminating others.

There are poems about birthing ("Footling," "It Is because We Die, and This Is All... ") and about conceiving, as in "Reluctant Love Poem":

... You and I

have talked about making me heavy

with a child of ours, and I have looked

between your lovely thighs and waited

without patience for that time. [p. 43]

"To Adam, on Coming of Age" is addressed to her son: "You began in the mild warmth of me. As it happens/it was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception" (p. 23). He is imagistically linked to a river, and will

... range far

down the hills, moving, moving,

deepening, widening, until you come to that place,

river-sea, where you too dissolve, and I

will not be there to hold you at that birth, [p. 23]

Flores crosses cultural and historical divides in "On Dressing Up as an Indian for the Mardi Gras at Lochland School for the Mentally Retarded, Geneva, New York," dancing "dressed in feathers and lipstick war paint," realizing that the schoolhouse

... covers burials—pottery,

beads, the little long bones of Seneca children

who played right here, under

that very oak out there, and bones of women

and men, who danced their own dance,

as we do,

who made their houses and the bodies

of their children out of this same soil [p. 13]

Surely only an anthropological poet would have inserted long into the line "little long bones." "Long bones" is part of our shared speech. It is a small but telling point.

To Flores, the natural world can be admired as a source of beauty and metaphor, but it is immune to human valuation. This is not so for the social world, though, where wrong can be felt and even done ("For Black Nellie, Dying" and, perhaps, "The Moron's First Communion"). The short "For Ann" is the only poem in which we see the poet bowing to custom; perhaps tellingly, it is set in her own culture:

When I remember you, it is your skin

I think of, your arm faint beneath the heavy sleeve,

the cheek and hair meeting quietly, the white and blue

of your hands. I would want to touch you.

We sat, do you remember, with the bottles of wine,

rubbing each other's feet, until we were

told that people would talk. [p. 20]

Toni Flores profoundly affected many of us, teaching and counseling with power and grace. These lines from "His Dignity" offer us her vision of a life confidently and nobly lived:

... so sure in competence that anything

he turned his hand to was done well and surely,

from the very beginning. He was better at things

than the rest of us, and he knew it.

And for this reason, that he knew it, and also

that he feared pride and knew that his quality came

unbidden, unmade, and somehow out of himself,

and also, and baser, because he wanted to be loved,

he spent his life insisting that all the rest,

who are not royal and who lack his sureness,

are great in themselves, and that all are equal.

So as not to let himself think that he was better,

or to let us know that he knew himself to be better,

yet unable wholly to deny that he was great,

he willed for the others that all be great

that all of us bear within us divinity, dignity, [p. 58]

I hope "that she knew it" too: her excellence, her dignity, and the regard in which we continue to hold her.