Volume III, no. 1 (Spring 2008)

in which are contained

a meta-poetical divination of the death of a Saint who did not die like one,

the tragic praise of a lover's silence,

some reflections verging on nonsense,

a measured gaze into the globe of a moment,

notes toward a reconciliation with the adversary called "time," and

a pilgrim's digressions.

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Hermitage Piece

by Amos Johannes Hunt

The span of winter afternoons
spreads out between the hollow moon's
two distant ends. It is a bear
gone far ahead. It is elsewhere.

Monika Cooper on Amos Johannes Hunt

I’ve spent the past week with this little lyric hovering on the peripheries of my mind. The more I ruminate on it, the more it speaks to me of time. In particular, lyric time. I began to notice how longer poems tend toward narrative, while shorter poems, if they do not thin into vapid jingles, bring us closer and closer to absolute lyric, in which the serial form of time disappears.

Narrative has, as its basic form, chronology: a sequence of events, connected causally. Lyric, as we see in “Hermitage Piece,” can hold in its four cornered stanza a round total moment, like a fruit or a globe that can be seen into.

The three sentences that equal the four lines of “Hermitage Piece” do not carry the reader through time in a progression of events. They keep the reader in a now that nothing but poetry can attain.

Now. Think it and it’s gone. It can drive a philosopher crazy. But the poet has found a way to build a house in now, a hermitage. Not only can he dwell in this now indefinitely, he can invite others into it. And yet no matter how many respond to the invitation, the hermitage of the poem remains a place of pristine solitude.

The hairsplitsecond of the philosophers’ now becomes the magnified and luminous eternal now of poetry. Its span, “the span of winter afternoons,” opens into the immeasurable, “between the hollow moon’s two distant ends.” With his first sentence, the poet squanders two and a half of his four lines. But as the sentences grow shorter, they purify, so that the next two sentences each equal, if they do not surpass, the first one in content.

The “bear gone far ahead” defines the winter scene by what is missing. No longer “here,” the bear is still “now.” “Now” he has “gone far ahead.” His absence in space is a presence in time, and also a presence in another space, which the poetically sustained now allows the reader to intuit. There is a suggestion here of infinite nuances of distance. By staying in one place, writing a fermata over one moment, the poem lets layers of space, series of long fields, woods, rills and depressions in the ground, to spread out around it.

The poem ends, or rather, fades out, on a metrically silent foot, a pyrrhic. The poem’s “now” is the “not here”: “It is elsewhere.” We can even say that the poem’s “now” is the “not now.” Nothing simultaneously so short and spacious as its “winter afternoons” exists in the raw experience of time as a series of uninhabitable nows. The lyric is a resting place, a respite from time, that exists both in time and outside of time. Very much in time and very much outside of it. The hermit’s hut spans measureless dimensions. The limitless distances of “elsewhere” huddle in the small span of a stanza.