Supernatural Love

I recently read an interesting poem.  It's called Supernatural Love and it was written by Gjertrud Schnakenberg. Isn't that a cool name?  I doubt that everyone has the sort of experiences that Gjertrud Schnakenberg describes in her poetry.   However, mystical experiences that occur through coincidences are very common amongst psychics and spiritual people. They are called signs.  Nowadays, most psychologists will send you to a psychiatrist for meds if you start talking about signs. These experiences are called synchronicities. After you read this poem, imagine Gjertrud's father trying to explain this experience to a shrink  Then imagine her father trying to rationalize it scientifically.  

Supernatural Love

My father at the dictionary stand Touches the page to fully understand The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand His slowly scanning magnifying lens, A blurry, glistening circle he suspends Above the word 'Carnation'. Then he bends So near his eyes are magnified and blurred, One finger on the miniature word, As if he touched a single key and heard A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string, "The obligation due to every thing That' s smaller than the universe." I bring My sewing needle close enough that I Can watch my father through the needle's eye, As through a lens ground for a butterfly Who peers down flower-hallways toward a room Shadowed and fathomed as this study's gloom Where, as a scholar bends above a tomb To read what's buried there, he bends to pore Over the Latin blossom. I am four, I spill my pins and needles on the floor Trying to stitch "Beloved" X by X. My dangerous, bright needle's point connects Myself illiterate to this perfect text I cannot read. My father puzzles why It is my habit to identify Carnations as "Christ's flowers," knowing I Can give no explanation but "Because." Word-roots blossom in speechless messages The way the thread behind my sampler does Where following each X, I awkward move My needle through the word whose root is love. He reads, "A pink variety of Clove, Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh." As if the bud's essential oils brush Christ's fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh Odor carnations have floats up to me, A drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy, The stems squeak in my scissors, Child, it's me, He turns the page to "Clove" and reads aloud: "The clove, a spice, dried from a flower-bud." Then twice, as if he hasn't understood, He reads, "From French, for clou, meaning a nail." He gazes, motionless,"Meaning a nail." The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail, I twist my threads like stems into a knot And smooth "Beloved", but my needle caught Within the threads, Thy blood so dearly bought, The needle strikes my finger to the bone. I lift my hand, it is myself I've sewn, The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own, I lift my hand in startled agony And call upon his name, "Daddy Daddy" - My father's hand touches the injury As lightly as he touched the page before, Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore The flowers I called Christ's when I was four.

T

he poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg, whom William Logan once called "the most talented American poet under the age of forty," published her first book of poems in 1982. She has since become one of our most respected authors of verse.

Schnackenberg's first three books, collected in Supernatural Love, show the thrilling evolution of a unique voice in today's letters. From an early mastery in which precision and heartbreak are inseparable, her poetry accelerates book by book through the searching, dense, and metaphysical imagery--as well as the cascading syntax--which have become her signature. Whether we are witnessing her classic portrait of Darwin in his last year or discovering the vertiginous brillance of her elegy for the Byzantine monuments of Ravenna, we find in Schnackenberg gemlike poems offered as visionary documents, unmistakable in their glittering range and passion--and never the same twice.