Ann Fisher-Wirth gave a reading at
The Warehouse in Tallahassee in the fall of 2005. During that
visit, SER editors scheduled an online interview
with her. In that interview, published in Volume
24.1-2 of The Southeast Review, Ann shared a prose poem
about an experience she had recently had at the Djerassi Residents
Artists Program in California. Below you will find that poem,
"No Vow," and her description of how it came to
be.
Click
here to listen to a podcast
of Ann's reading, which includes other poems written at and
about Djerassi, one called "Sudden Music," which
Ann reads in the voice of the Djerassi's own wild-boy. Ann's
reading follows Joyelle McSweeney.
Click
here to order Volume 24.1-2.
NO
VOW
Calm yourself, here where the blue
painted saint in his wooden shrine presides over the hillside.
The mountain lion they saw by the barn is not, as you’re
convinced, looking especially for you. You talk about loving
the creatures. Yet all you can see today is your own fear,
projected on to his twitching tail. All you can think is
your version of his thoughts. Here comes the 58-year old.
In a life raft she’d be most expendable.
Calm yourself, you who could not fight a dog or outrun a
rattler. There’s nothing to be done about it. The
hay is white and golden in the wind. Flies buzz, want what
you offer. Pray all you like, carry a whistle around your
neck, march along the trail singing “Whenever I Feel
Afraid.” The world makes you no vow. The thistles
make you think of crowns of thorn, with light on every sepal.
Ann
explains:
“No
Vow” is a prose poem I wrote last summer while spending
five weeks in near silence among meadows and redwood forests
at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in California. I
would describe myself as a deep ecologist. And yet, for all
my thoughts about the interconnections between all forms of
life—and for all my deep conviction that the reason
for or value of the universe is not anthropocentric, but is
the universe itself—when one of the artists at Djerassi
said she had seen a mountain lion, I found myself absolutely
terrified. I had been hiking for hours each day, visiting
my favorite sculptures on the Djerassi grounds, wandering
to the old barn and through the forests, writing bits of poems
as I walked. But with the mountain lion scare, I saw death
around every curve. I didn’t want to walk alone any
more; I barely wanted to go outside. It’s funny: my
fear of death does not keep me out of airplanes or cars, which
are actually dangerous, and yet it threatened to spoil this
five-weeks’ gift of what I love so much. So “No
Vow” reminds me that, as Emily Dickinson wrote in a
different context, “The price—is / Even as the
Grace.”
