San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
STATE LINES California Poetry
Ada Limón’s “What I Want to Remember” reminds us that escape is one of memory’s chief purposes. The sound of frogs singing at dusk serves as the poem’s animating recollection; it delivers Limón from a noisy plane ride toward the peace and innocence of her own childhood. I like the sense of separation she creates in the fifth stanza (“all the humans are so loud”), as if she has drifted outside the human species. From that vantage point she appears to see the fate of all beings, human and otherwise. Beyond the plane’s noise and the day’s depressing news feed — which includes a report on the death of children — Limón’s memory embodies the holiness of nature.
Right before General Vallejo’s home, with its stately stone and yellow walls there’s a field along the footpath where spring rains bring the frogs, a whole symphony of them, breaking open the hours just after the sun sinks into the Pacific Ocean only an hour away. Why am I placing you here? I’m on a plane going west and all the humans are so loud it hurts the blood. But once I sat next to a path that was still warm from the day’s heat, cross-legged with my friend named Echo who taught me how to amplify the strange sound the frogs made by cupping my ears. I need to hold this close within me, when today’s news is full of dead children, their faces opening their mouths for air that will not come. Once I was a child too and my friend and I sat for maybe an hour, eyes adjusting to the night sky, cupping and uncupping our ears to hear the song the tenderest animals made. From “The Carrying,” by Ada Limón (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Ada Limón. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions.
Ada Limón was born in Sonoma and raised in Glen Ellen. She is the author of five books of poetry, including “Bright Dead Things,” which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and a finalist for the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award.
David Roderick is the author of the poetry collections “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.” He is co-founder of Left Margin Lit: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley.