Wonder: Down to Bone and Awe

In Barbara Nickel’s essay on Margaret Avison, she speaks of Margaret’s work allowing ‘children, and even smaller beings and things ... to loom large.’ Her famous ‘optic heart’ saw, as Elise Partridge noted, with “zoom-lens precision of small details.” When those lens were fixed on children, the one aspect she noted of them that struck me was wonder. She, the poet, could see the wonder where others, often the distant and distracted parent, could not. In “From Age to Age: Found Poem,” (AN, vol 2, p. 107) the poet sees a child suddenly excited by a glimpse of the fountains at city hall from his vantage point in the back of the streetcar. The child cries out “WAH-TEE!” and “LOOKIT the Watee mommy!” The poet compares the voice to Adam naming the animals; she calls the boy “shaman-didactic” making that remarkable breathless leap of the observed into anagogic word-event.

Again in the street-car in the poem “Wonder: A Street-car Sketch” (AN, vol. 2, p. 109), the observed becomes a meditation on the difficult theological question of how God can be both just and merciful. The answer I find is not easily teased out of the poem, but the girl who “all alerted....unable to bear alone the pour of wonder” is given a glimpse of her weeping mother, and is suddenly made intimate with a parent’s distracted grief, and in that moment, mother and child are together. ‘Then the hand closes down.’ and all is veiled again, ‘but the little one’s face does not crumple/or burrow.” Instead, the child “snuggles confidently back,/absorbed with the now/limited wonder still.” Creaturely wonder has met with Divine grief and a kind of intimacy has been achieved. And perhaps that is all we can expect for answers to theological questions, a moment of intimacy interpreted by the poet in her act of observation, her act of ‘fusing’ the seen with the unseen, as the poet herself uses the word in the opening stanza: “Judgement as well as mercy:/that these could fuse/is staggering.”

Wonder. The poet Don Domanski asks for a ‘wonder unavenged’ – a wonder pure and unfettered by the only language we have for invisible things – the spiritual, from whatever tradition. Margaret’s wonder is in unabashedly Christian territory – perhaps even too much so, some might argue, but it is wonder nontheless. “I’m down to bone and awe,” the poet says in “Creative Hour” (AN, vol. 2, p. 104).

The greatest gift I received in having children was having the ‘wonder restored.’ Too often I am that parent on the streetcar whose arm or hand reaches down, unthinking and distracted, and it takes a lot to jump out of that skin and observe from another angle the view of oneself that way. Margaret’s poems do that for me. She restores the wonder.