Two poets in the desert

One of Jorie Graham's early poems is entitled “San Xavier Du Bac/For Jon” and is placed in Tucson, in a parentheses preceding the poem and after the title. It is published in a little magazine, Tendril and then in New American Poets of the Eighties and never reprinted in one of her individual volumes, as far as I can determine. For some reason I am fascinated by the why of this poem?

Was this poem written to memorialize a relationship that was going to end soon? To meditate on what it felt like at a particular time and place, and to describe the emotional landscape of the poet/speaker and her soon to be ex, love?

The poem concatenates the interior of the speaker with the exterior landscape, the exterior of the inside of the church and the exteriority of the religious rites there happening, as well as the terrible outside of the two bombers, or war planes of some sort as they go through their maneuvers.

The poet is longing for the end of something, if only the pain of being in the bad situation in which she finds herself:

“The passage
from the personal
is everything. The passage into other hands.”

She makes a peremptory prayer is made and she moves to the heat of the outside, moves to the graveyard….presumably kneeling:

“how do I pull myself
up from these blistering/
hands? from their idleness, up from their

flawless dusty math?"

The last lines of the poem echo the war planes and are

“mind making choices, fingering
levers, cutting this way and that over the minutes over

the blazing runway of oblivion.”

I guess the poem was too successful in its darkness, in its search for the oblivion of the white light of the desert, which banishes everything.

Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson and her poem entitled “Sahuaro,” from her book Fortress ends this way with this three line stanza:

“The only protection
against death
was to love solitude.”

Apparently, the desert breeds solitude and its bad sister oblivion. Also good poems.