beating, featherless arms
already clutching at the emptiness.
As babies leave the kingdom of the infinite,
and pass through the bone gates of the woman,
they diminish, and enter mortality: still touched,
if fadingly, with the greater life of the non-
human, and trailing those clouds of glory.
Finally, the ground of the poem of family
relationships muddies in the space between the
transition from one eschatological belief to
another. In Mortal Acts, Mortal Words,the
belief that an individual human existence is a
flower that blooms but once, hence its singular
sweetness, tangles with the belief suggested in
The Book of Nightmaresthat life is part of a
birth-death cycle wherein we die to be born,
and in which death returns us to our higher life
in eternity, where we are free of the circling of
generations of mere matter. There is a strong
pull in this view towards a gender-polarized
description of human nature, where the good
parts are assigned to longing for celestial tran-
scendence (male) and the wicked parts to a quiet-
ist chthonic restriction (female).
InMortal Acts, Mortal Words,except for
the passage on dread of the female, quoted
from ‘‘The Last Hiding Places of Snow,’’ Kinnell
does not wholly retreat to an overtly sexist posi-
tion. This is only brushed in lightly for flashed
seconds. Instead, for Kinnell, and for Blake on
occasion, the negative symbology of woman/
nature can be shelved in favor of a happier pos-
tulate: that sexual union of male and female is
the iridescent emblem of the ruling principle of
love made indwelling and physically manifest, as
sexual love transforms the impermanence of the
flesh through time-eating ecstasy:
... the last cry in the throat
or only dreamed into it
by its thread too wasted to cry
will he but an ardent note
of gratefulness so intense
it disappears into that music
which carries our time on earth away
on the great catafalque
of spine marrowed with god’s flesh,
thighs bruised by the blue flower,
pelvis that makes angels shiver to know
down here we mortals make love with
our bones.
In terms more casual, but no less convinced,
from ‘‘Flying Home’’:
in the airport men’s room seeing
the middle-aged men my age
as they washed their hands after touching
their penises—when it might have been
more in accord
with the lost order to wash first, then touch—
Only through mortal flesh is flesh made
immortal, as human birth, fueled by holy sexual
desire, cancels human death. If, in another
poetics, language is finally too unreliable to be
the conveyor of the eternal real, sex is not. And
from this elevation of sexuality as death’s death-
blow, it also seems an easy transit to a usually
phallocentric world, and to the elimination of
woman as muse, or energy source, in literary
terms. Not an enriching move: as Kinnell and
so many other American male writers use their
masculinity, often with crushing innocence, as
an occluded representation of the human state.
Self-consciousness about sexism has driven the
more robust misogyny underground, but the old
vision, still stubbornly retained in pieces, has not
yet been replaced with one more generous or
inclusive. For many, the choice simply becomes
retreat to a human effigy with the genitals either
conspicuously male, or blurred, or lopped.
A muse figure, except as a flickering possi-
bility, does not exist for Kinnell. As we have seen
earlier, deity as the origin of grace or song is
equally remote. While earlier poems drew from
his animals the most resonant cry longing for
immortality, longing for the artifice of eternity,
that cry originated in a male totem: a porcupine
or a bear.... It is interesting to see that Kinnel... displaces women from the birth-role in ‘‘The
Bear,’’ by claiming the male totem as his source
of creative energy. In ‘‘The Bear,’’ Kinnell’s
speaker literally climbs into the carcass, to he
re-born as poetic speech; more overtly later,
but in an analogous displacement, in ‘‘The Last
Hiding Places of Snow,’’ the generative line dis-
solves from the problematic mothering into the
speaker’s fathering. (As usual, more is hunkering
down in the American woodlot than first meets
the eye.)
InThe Book of Nightmares,the source of
transcending mortality through mortality begins
to thrust forward in Kinnell’s mythology of chil-
dren, where the births of his daughter Maud and
son Fergus provide the framework for the
sequence opening and closing the book. Speak-
ing inWalking Down the StairsaboutThe Book
of Nightmares, and after remarking that the
Blackberry Eating