If you live in a city and are, at all times, subjected to its latticework of avenues, alleyways, sidewalks and streets, it becomes easy to take for granted moments which offer insight. These can be rare, and are rarely gained through conscious search. Perhaps you find something meaningful in the face of the old woman sitting across from you. Or perhaps, sitting with friends, an errant breeze distracts from your conversation, and you detect some esoteric code in the swirl of leaf and trash. Here the city is attempting to communicate. Though the words are not sought, they are taken in. This is before the dire front page news, puddle-soiled, slams itself on the glass, its messaging now perfectly explicit.
Such occurrences are the vagaries of life, and the uncertain particles of art. Living in a big city is no requirement, of course, but having spent a few days wandering through one (Chicago, specifically) quite recently, the experience of having your senses press-ganged into engagement by any number of clonking mechanisms or jammed junctures seems to be one unique to the modern metropolis.
And yet, the moments of stillness abide, which allow for another kind of engagement to take place, where the imagination can more meaningfully sift through sensory data and assemble patterns, narratives, and so on. Once one becomes habituated to this mindset (dry and fertile periods will alternate, inevitably), artistic possibilities assert themselves more and more. One’s senses, no longer battered into dull passivity, are now piqued to detect (and distill) a fuller range of phenomena. The city, no longer so rowdy in its mood-swings and din, might now be restrained and reformed into, say, a poem:
Ephemerid
by Mina Loy
The Eternal is sustained by serial metamorphosis,
even so Beauty is
metamorphosis surprises!
Low in shadow
of the El’s
arboreal iron
some aerial, unbeknown
eerie-form
of dual mobility,
having long wing, an unbelievable
imp-fly
soars
trailing
a horizonal gauze;
trudges, urges,
crouches;
its knees’ apexes, a roach’s.
Humanly sized
a magnified imago
towing in twofold progress
nameless nostalgia through slush,
enigma among gloom.
As always, has a wisp of whiteness loveliness
to lift the eyelids;
to whisper of subvisual resources
in the uncolor of the unknown.
Across indefinite curbstones
focus
this creature of fictitious
faery,
this eccentric of traffic:
after all
the illicit insect
is only
a little girl—
—a long white muslin curtain,
tied to her pull-over,
afloat from her,
she pilots an ideal load
taking a heavy child
for a ride
in a fragile,
stalling
doll’s perambulator.
The dilating wing
billows from her shoulders
the wondering of windows,
mildews, as the soul does,
penury
with dream.
Ponder this
metamorphosis:
Infancy’s
kidnap into Fantasia.
First, the title. “Ephemerid” is the technical word for the common mayfly – but let’s stretch out from technicalities for a moment and think about how the word might be poetically played with/around. Although its original home lies in zoology, “ephemeral” eventually came to mean anything (be it creature, substance, object, issue, concept, etc.) that was short-lived or fleeting. So, while one can rightfully anticipate descriptions that are insectoid in nature, one also might suspect a generalization of the term to encompass issues/matters of, or pertaining to, finitude at large. As a side note, Mina Loy often used bug imagery to examine deeper concerns about (usually sexual) relations.
The Eternal is sustained by serial metamorphosis,
even so Beauty is
metamorphosis surprises!
The first two lines seem to set up some philosophical discourse with such weighty words as “Eternal” and “Beauty” being bandied about. The break between Lines 2 and 3 is a good one, as Line 3 leaps out of the almost academic posing of the first couplet, which is apt, given its final word and exclamation. Already, tensions are present, with the idea of the “Eternal,” or unchanging, being “sustained by serial metamorphosis,” or change – with “metamorphosis” calling to mind a caterpillar’s chrysalis, which extends the insect metaphor. Abstractions, transformations (aesthetic, substantive?), unexpectedness – these seem to be central in the poem’s opening salvo.
Low in shadow
of the El’s
arboreal iron
some aerial, unbeknown
eerie-form
of dual mobility,
having long wing, an unbelievable
imp-fly
soars
trailing
a horizontal gauze;
trudges, urges,
crouches;
its knees’ apexes, a roach’s.
An urban landscape. Chicago, maybe, as the “El” or “L” is the nickname for the city’s elevated public transit system – but it can be any number of major cities. “Arboreal iron” is a nice re-phrasing of the “concrete jungle” cliché. The following lines now focus on the poem’s main specimen: an almost spectral creature that the speaker seems to want the reader to only liken to an insect, despite the rather suggestive descriptions. There’s a flight, with the varying line and stanza length formally imitating such movement (see the isolation of “soars,” and how “a horizontal gauze” literally trails after its previous line; how the “long wing” line attaches itself to the diminutive “imp-fly,” as if it were its actual appendage).
Humanly sized
a magnified imago
towing in twofold progress
nameless nostalgia through slush,
enigma among gloom.
As always, has a wisp of whiteness loveliness
to lift the eyelids;
to whisper of subvisual resources
in the uncolor of the unknown.
But now, what once was thought to be diminutive is now enlarged to something human-sized. “Imago” (comfortable in both etymology and psychology), as described, ushers in esoteric associations, perhaps, what with its mysterious baggage through an indefinite space.
Stanza 12 delves deeper into the subject’s inscrutability. It’s clear, at this stage of development, that the “imp-fly” represents something a little grander than a bug, if it compels the speaker to wrap it in such ambiguous (albeit aesthetically alluring) language.
Across indefinite curbstones
focus
this creature of fictitious
faery,
this eccentric of traffic:
after all
the illicit insect
is only
a girl—
—a long white muslin curtain,
tied to her pull-over,
afloat from her,
she pilots an ideal load
taking a heavy child
for a ride
in a fragile,
stalling
doll’s perambulator.
This crucial turn redirects these ghostlike accounts onto the grit of realism – but a realism no less eerie. The bug-form, revealed to be a girl, now is subjected to a more sinister precarity. The translucence of her attire does not explicitly indicate her social standing, but her isolation in this tenuous urban locale, coupled with the premature maternity (the pathetic mock-up of the rickety pram) suggests a grim provenance, all the same.
Why is there a girl traveling through the city’s shadows alone? Is this her child, or a close relation’s? And how does this portrayal relate to the philosophical (bordering on whimsical) flourish of the opening lines?
The dilating wing
billows from her shoulders
the wondering of windows,
mildews, as the soul does,
penury
with dream.
Ponder this
metamorphosis:
Infancy’s
kidnap into Fantasia.
Stanzas 18 and 19 are superb in their capture of a kind of trapped wistfulness. 19, in particular, is wonderfully ambivalent: is “penury” that which is mildewing “dream,” or is it the other way around? Both readings suffice, in a way, for the child is still abducted (whether or not she accepts it, and/or forges it for herself) into an unreality where her self metamorphosizes into some nigh-fanciful sprite – as much a separate entity from the urban darkness as it is an emanation from it.
Here is a stark portrait of destitution, and – perhaps – an attempt to couch it in airiness both mental and physical. Anyone who has experienced or meaningfully witnessed poverty, first-hand, should know this procedure well. Children can easily imagine their way out of impoverishment, letting inane games take precedence over the constant losses – and aren’t adults susceptible to this, as well, in their more seemingly rational justifications for why absence in their lives abounds? Is this what the speaker is doing? Cushioning the child’s abject state with heady wordplay?
Whose Fantasia seizes the child and her child? Her metamorphosizing radiance, in its sustainment of the Eternal, seems to almost sanctify her – but what does the city care? The slush and the gloom and the shadows do not vanish, really. Are these rapid changes, her flickering pale form, only a trick of the mind in the speaker, orating from a high window, partly self-mocking, and incapable of real connection?
The girl walks. The moment, quick-winged, is ephemeral – but the city persists, while the speaker watches, and the poet writes.
A/N: I first came across the name Mina Loy in the Neglected Poets section of Cosmoetica.com. Any budding poet (if those browsing this site are not already aware of Dan Schneider’s domain, and influence) would do themselves a service by going through it and the Poetry page, in general, regularly. There’s a great attraction to these types of lists, and Schneider’s remain, in my experience, easily the most consistent in terms of their high-quality recommendations.
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More from Ezekiel Yu: Still Growing: On Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project” (2017), Longing’s Transit: On Juho Kuosmanen’s “Compartment No. 6” (2021), The Girls, the Garden, the Pictures: On Carlos Saura’s “Cría Cuervos” (1976)