Volume 24 229
Now anchored to the earth,
it founders in the slipstream
of a mild, inverted sea,
and labors toward it still, its little
destiny undisturbed by acts
of forgiveness or contrition.
No amount of rectitude or penance can alter
the tortoise’s fate as it struggles to survive beyond
our reckoning. For all its sedulous craftsmanship
and lyric intricacy, “Sea Turtle” calls to mind the
Nietzschean weltanschauung that obsessed Robin-
son Jeffers in his mature years. We should not be
surprised, therefore, to come across a poem titled
“Jeffers Country”:
Bay leaves season the air
along Ocean Avenue, which dips down
to the beach, that cypress-lined, granite-faced
allegory he worried into something more
inhuman than a paradise of sticks and stones.
Unlike Jeffers, Santos does not espouse a ni-
hilistic philosophy or yearn for “life purged of its
ephemeral accretions.” Only in his manner of re-
volving words and cadences, his desire to capture
the grandeur of the phenomenal universe, does San-
tos pay homage to the poet of the Monterey coast
mountains: “He imagined the strophe and antistro-
phe, / the steelhead nosing at the riverbank.”
Perhaps the most disarming and portentous
lyric in The Pilot Star Elegies,“The Dalai Lama”
focuses on a single flower, a memento mori pressed
by the young Tibetan god-king between the pages
of D’Aulaire’s Norse Gods and Giants:
the five clean-cut crenelate petals
of a flower almost alchemical
in its papery
likeness to what
it was: a sign conspired
to preserve some tremor in an adolescent’s
heart, to round out phyla in a science
notebook kept for school,
or perhaps, in fear,
to summon the wandering
Valkyries whose muraled lives
are marked for good by the cinnabar
leached off its cells.
Santos’s speaker describes the dessicated
fibers of a once-living talisman as “clean-cut” and
“crenelate,” a meticulous arrangement of sound and
imagery that evokes what is now the mere simu-
lacrum of beauty or remembrance. Scarcely the pal-
pable, full-blooded rose of the Renaissance love
lyric, the petaled husk molders to quintessence,
“cinnabar” rouging the “muraled lives” of Odin’s
daughters. But the exotic transmutation proves only
another form of transience: “a dead / metaphor car-
rying on long / past its paradigm // of human need.”
Indeed, the flower “faces into the future / freed of
our small demands on it, / like the exiled Tibetan
god-king / blessed with the common sense / to sur-
vive himself.” Santos’s closure conceals a double
meaning. In Tibetan lore, each Dalai Lama is the
reincarnation of his predecessor; thus he survives
down the ages. On the other hand, Tenzin Gyatso,
the current holder of the title, fled his homeland for
India rather than submit to arrest by the Chinese
Communists in 1959. He put aside a temporal realm
once as secure as Asgard, forsaking his stronghold
in the mountains of Tibet so that he might continue
to discharge his spiritual obligations. Possibly the
frail “crenelate petals” remind him that the Norse
gods are themselves subject to time and fate; in the
words of the Elder Edda, “the gods are doomed and
the end is death.”
“Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End” ini-
tially looks upon transience with a jaded eye, sum-
moning a fin de siècle ambience from the routine
of getting through a day: “Impatient for home, / the
after-work traffic fanning out along / the wet streets.”
However, what waits at the house unnerves the
speaker more than the rapid-fire assonance of ra-
dials on wet asphalt: “a CNN foreign correspon-
dent tells / how a single Serb mortar shell / just
leveled the crowded terrace of a / Tuzla café.”
Ignoring this contemporary drama, the protagonist
and his wife prefer to find refuge in the past, re-
calling a dispute by candlelight years earlier: “how
they quarrelled / one night in Iowa. The buried
longings / such memories stir.” Obviously, the ar-
gument arose from a sexual jealousy that seems re-
freshingly vital in retrospect:
So forget for a moment
the future of their monogamous hearts,
forget the rain,
the traffic, the boot-
soles pressed forever in our century’s mud,
for it’s all there, whatever
they’d say, the industry of pain, the
Holy Spirit of everything that’s been
taken away, it’s all there in the burnt match-
head preserved into amber
by a beeswax candle pooling beside
their dinnerware.
Although youthful emotions appear transient
within the larger context of the century’s upheaval,
the charred match-end that once blossomed into
flame, however briefly, betokens an innocence and
passion long spent.
“Elegy for My Sister,” a cycle of twenty-five
lyric vignettes that accrue meaning layer by
layer, represents Santos’s most ambitious effort to
date. Despite narrative elements, its progression isPortrait of a Couple at Century’s End