On the Surface Flashing

If I were a statue
I'd be Venus de Milo the shape of your loss in my invisible arms.
Alexis White
The above poem was written by a talented young NW poet who died in 2012 after completing her Fine Arts degree from Oregon State University. This artist, my daughter Alexis, grew up in Oregon where you can find wild rivers, rocky shores of the Northwest coast, magical mountains, and high desert country. Her writing was affected by these places of pristine beauty. Interested in ecofeminism, Alexis saw the environment and the female body as intertwined, and because of this she wanted to try to give a voice to that which she felt had been silenced: "because nature and the body are often rendered voiceless, my poetry deals with the tension between what can and cannot be said. I see this as what is spoken, and what cannot be said in words but lies all around and braided within the message." Many of Alexis's poems give voice to women who have been muted through trauma. She believed that trauma has a way of physically silencing the body, and recovery from trauma creates its own language. This is apparent in the narrative sequence from "Letters from Nantucket" and the "Newfoundland Women" where she adapts the persona of women who speak but are aware of the inadequacy of their words. Alexis imagined how it was to be in another's body and mind in another time and place, giving these women a unique voice.
Alexis had always been creative and imaginative, kind and true. As a child she was able to discuss deep feelings with empathetic awareness of how others must feel. In a passage partially used by Mark Hallman in the book "The Boy Behind the Mask," at age 11 she wrote "I remember kids, ignorant hateful kids, would make fun of him. It cut through my heart like an icy dagger, to hear their cold, gossipy giggles... Perhaps ignorance was our biggest enemy...remember that a person's true beauty is not on the outside, but within the heart." This was the very sweet and wise soul her father and I knew. This is the imperfect, perfect child we loved and still love.
If not for illness I am sure she would have continued to write and teach, and be successful at both. Her loss still leaves us with more questions than answers. Death when unexpected always moves faster than the human heart beats, and the mind accepts. She once wrote "Time is a fickle god, her temples being not on some high mountain or sacred grove, but everywhere in pillars of stone and the cells of my cheek, the places of kings and my lover's sleeping breath. How does a thing that nurtures us damn us as well?" I wish I could go back in time and rewrite the history of her life, but we can never go back, as she well knew. Her beautiful, deep loving
soul now resonates in her poetry. This is what she has left us, this and memories of an extraordinary child whom we, as her parents, love beyond all reason and time. Her father and I would like to share her work, and see her words in the world. We know that is what she wanted most of all.
Mary White; fall 2021
89
67
Dedication

Dettagli