Judith Hall presents a poem by Jennifer Clarvoe

MI RITROVAI

Here I was refound by a dark self;
My self was found by a darker self, obscure.
I was not one self, but made of wood

Within this wood – not single, but multiplied
On into darkness.  No way to see for rest,
For all the trees, for all the terza rima.

A tree grows in the wood – what would you have me
Do?  They all diverge into the darkness,
Dive into darkness, urge to obscurity.

How could one do anything but fall
Into a swoon, svanire?  One cannot
Stand this, one cannot stand in the middle

Of this.  And then I was found out by an
Obscure greeting – salve – strange advice
From something dark and savage that nonetheless

Spoke of salvage, through the loss, darkly.
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.
I back myself to the edge of a dark shelf.

Man hands on misery to man, it deepens --
So much deepens that one cannot stand
Here, in the middle of this mirror trove.

-- Jennifer Clarvoe

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2009, v. 67, no. 1
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Note by Judith Hall

     Dante’s pilgrim begins in a forest and ends looking at the stars. Lucky pilgrim, whose inarticulate terror is met and cleared by faith, hope, and charity! Clarvoe’s figure faces “a darker self, obscure” and speaks in the end in the tongues of stars:  Dante, Marianne Moore, Philip Larkin.
    Recognition haunts but may not edify, not immediately, if “strange” or unsought:  Dante’s doubt; Moore’s despair; Larkin’s beloved selfishness. Such blessings, such lessons -- nearly a parody of succor -- are familiar and perverse: symbols Baudelaire would’ve flung at any earnest reader:  doubt, despair, selfishness.
     Blake thought Dante saw clearly but did not always comprehend his visions. Clarvoe comprehends the very postmodern terror of a “mirror trove.” Clarity, in this context, is irrelevant. Obscurity, as in Monet’s late water lilies, or Dickinson's circuits, tells a slanted truth no less enchanting for its complications.