“Come ‘Ere, Quick, You Gotta See This!” Poet Alison Jarvis’s “Sky, River”

In her slim 2013 volume, “On Beauty and Being Just,” Harvard Professor Elaine Scarry attempts to unravel the mysterious pull and effect of the beautiful on human consciousness. Far from being mere surface gloss obscuring the deeper or truer nature of any given object or experience, beauty is central to human experience, summoning us to ever deeper exploration—and our own depths in responding to it.

“Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation,” she writes.

And perhaps most importantly, beauty instills in us a desire to both replicate and share it—to point, to exclaim, to paint, to sing and dance and exult, to communicate about how we have been moved and inspired and ultimately, changed by it.

And to advance the possibility that others might be changed, too.

Sharing begets a kind of spiritual capitalism that compels us to multiply beauty’s wealth rather than hoard it in some covetous corner of our hearts.

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being,” Scarry says, in its quest, in our quest, for “unceasing begetting.” And in those copies, those who have plumbed one or another of beauty’s depths most always give way to an irresistible impulse to show, share or replicate it for others.

“Thought you’d enjoy this,” or “This made me think of you,” we write in a text message or email or greeting card (or blog post, come to think of it) that carries a venerated image or poem or link to a musical treasure.

Or in the case of contemporary poet Alison Jarvis, we make certain deals or binding agreements about our responsibilities in sharing something beautiful.

And then we write a beautiful poem about it.

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Jarvis was born in Edmonton, Canada, was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota and lives in Brooklyn, where, like most all poets, she carries on with a day job that in her case, is far from just a means of paying the bills. She’s been a psychotherapist for 40 years, which strikes me as just about the perfect companion vocation for poetry writing.

“Sky, River” is a poem from her 2017 volume, “Where is North.” If we take the volume title as an indication of someone trying to get her bearings on a sea voyage, a hike or a life, “Sky, River” points us to sacred coordinates, ever-ready to answer the human longing to behold the beautiful and respond to its intrinsic command to share.

That sharing begets a kind of spiritual capitalism that compels us to multiply beauty’s wealth rather than hoard it in some covetous corner of our hearts.

Which is exactly what happens in the concentrated first stanza of the poem, which describes the ritual a couple has presumably developed when either party is presented with (or trips over) something too beautiful to keep to themselves.

In the poem’s case, it’s a sunset, which rings the alarm of a “Sky Alert” that sets the wheels in motion for giving beauty its due.

The second stanza, however, seems to throttle back on the unconstrained joy of the first; an almost palpable shift in both mood and imagery that occurs as the scene shifts from New York’s Hudson River to the Rhine in Germany.

Let’s read the poem now before discussion on its entirety and what’s likely behind the beauty and pathos of the mid-poem shift.

                    SKY, RIVER

     By Alison Jarvis

This morning, early, you call out
Sky Alert! the old imperative
we use to signal each other—
Leave Everything! and run
to watch the sun burn down
the Hudson, throw fire on water,
melt sky carmine to magenta like a Rothko.
These are the rules—
No one calls out unless they can imagine
nothing more beautiful, and no one, ever
doesn’t come. How many times
did the sky rescue us? Now the river

is the Rhine. The children gone. Barely standing
you hold on to the evidence
of river and sky, call out Fog—
thick, the color of tallow, milk, zinc.
Then there’s a dark line of river just below
and the fog is a shade
on the window of the room. You can almost
reach out and lift it.

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That little text message screen shot you see off to the right here was dated January 7, apparently the most recent “Sky Alert!” I sent to Mary, who was in the house when I left for a sunset walk. I feared she might not catch the unfolding light & color show (an unfounded fear, it turned out; she was already craning her neck out beyond the porch).

But coming across Jarvis’s poem recently put me in a momentarily confounded—though heart-gladdened—state.

“Other people do this, too, using the exact same phrase?” (Earth to Andrew: Other people do this, too, using the exact same phrase…)

If I’d remembered my Scarry at that moment, I’d have recognized the universality of being stricken by the beautiful, like a benign lightning bolt that zaps us out of our perceptual lethargy and makes us see the world anew. And in that moment, we are prone to be a cup overflowing, its waters gushing, a Niagara of joy unbound.

That’s what it’s like for Jarvis watching “the sun burn down the Hudson,” and, like a Greek god, “throw fire on the water.”

And then those two main rules: “No one calls out unless they can imagine/nothing more beautiful, and no one, ever/doesn’t come.”

A pact, written on the face of the eternal, to which beauty always points.

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But then we leave the Hudson and hop across the ocean via that stanza break:

“Now the river

is the Rhine.”

Not only that, but “The children gone.”

The old days and ways and joys of family life no more.

And instead of burning sun, we see neither brightness nor much sky at all. Instead: “Fog/thick, the color of tallow, milk, zinc.”

It turns out that Jarvis’s search for True North is engendered by loss of her husband to a degenerative disease, which she alludes to directly through several other poems in this lovely volume, and indirectly as an undercurrent percolating through others. With a “dark line of river just below” and the fog serving as a “shade,” we get a kind of mirror image from the ecstatic summons and sharing of previous times.

No judgment, though. Merely observation tinged with lamentation: that one “can almost reach out and lift” the fog and its shade.

“Almost” being the key word, though. Not even beauty can turn that trick, at least not in this world.

And yet it abides, in fog, too, as it creates a “dark line of  river” and metamorphoses into “a shade/on the window of the room.”

We need only look, and behold—an ever-available experience made all the better when we summon others to its feast.

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Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing.

Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for the books) grace the rotating banner at top of page.
 https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/

Library books photo by Larry Rose, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com

Coleus, beach and sky photos by Andrew Hidas https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/

Fog bank by Monterigina (Nicole), Montreal, Canada  https://www.flickr.com/photos/monteregina/