Stairway To Heaven by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Stairway To Heaven: Poems

Alison Hawthorne Deming

Penguin paperback $20

Release date: Sept 27, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-14-310885-6

Stairway To Heaven by Alison Hawthorne Deming is about death, and grieving, of and for Deming's friends and brother, but especially her mother. At the middle, the core, of the book is “The Luminous Mother,” the longest poem of the book, about the last days and moments of Deming's mother, starting with a prayer for both, and an invocation of Whitman—that is, an invocation of poetry/art:

I light two candles of uneven height

one for my brother and one for my mother

both dead in the same inscrutable year

After burning for two days

the candles are the same height. What

is the science of their diminishing?

I want an explanation about the matter

when I should be paying attention

to the condition of my soul.

I take Whitman's command

as my own. I do not bow to death.

I place my hand against its cheek

as the heart quiets and grows still...

The spaces between lines read as lines unsaid, or hesitations, or places we readers might fill in with our own experience. This is always true with poetry, but even more apparent here, the three-line stanzas a seemingly much-needed structure Deming holds on to writing about a difficult topic that could send anyone out of control. The stanzas also a perhaps very slight nod to, or evoking of, Dante as well. Her poem not as epic, of course, but still, Deming's confronting death. Not quite the afterlife, not for her, but a questioning of how and why, and maybe an unconscious desire to take this experience beyond, to continue the dialogue.

Other poems about death and dying, meaning about grief, lie scattered around this one, but Stairway To Heaven also includes many desert poems, which stand alone, and are the best, like “What The Desert Is Thinking”:

We know the desert has consciousness because the saguaros

stand up and speak as one about the heat.

They tell the Gila woodpeckers to come in out of the sun.

They tell a man or a woman lost without water to lie

in the column of shade they make out of their kindness.

The saguaros all hum together like Tibetan or Gregorian monks

one green chord that people hear when they drive

through Gates Pass and come to the Place where they gasp.

Beauty does that though the nihilist will make an ironic joke

about the note of surprise that has escaped

from his or her loneliness. The smile from the joke will cover

for the smile for joy. That's okay. Consciousness

is like the saguaro's decision to wait half a century to com up

with arms though arms were in its mind all along.

'Place' in the book becomes vital. We go from the American desert to the east coast ocean and forest, and back to the desert for the last series of poems. In all cases, in all poems, except those when Deming is in a hospital room with someone dying, she places herself outside, and it's in the outside, in N/nature, where she finds refuge from, and solace in, her grief, culminating, almost seemingly inevitably, in Death Valley, maybe the starkest landscape in America, and certainly one most people would find uninviting or even scary. And yet, Deming shows us the beauty there. And this is what poetry, and art, does: not only to help us come to terms with death (others', and our own) but even find a certain stark beauty in it. It's hard to conceive, but in “Resurrection,” Deming's mother wants death, at 102 has had enough of life and its pain(s). Death can even be desirable.

The weakest point of Stairway To Heaven is the title poem. I admit, as an old Led Zeppelin fan I was curious, but weaving an interview with Robert Plant heard on the radio into the grieving process for her brother just becomes a distraction from the strongest part of the poem, the ending, with Deming in dialogue with her brother on his death bed:

…..Do you ever dream

of animals, I ask him, hospice bed

looking out on a plywood squirrel

perched on cement black wall.

Frequently. A lilt of surprising joy. What kind?

Mostly the jungle animals. Then: I'm going

to do my exercises now. What exercises?

I like pacing, he said, immobilized

upon his death nest of nine pillows.

Then he closed his eyes to become the inward one

whose only work was to wear a pathway

back and forth within his enclosure.

Sections like this, when Deming just stands back and lets us 'see' the scene(s) of the process of dying, and let's the dead talk, à la Dante, are where she's at her most powerful (likewise especially with her mother). Not forcing meaning, but showing us a picture, and letting us create/imagine our own meaning.

You don't have to read Stairway To Heaven as a series of connected poems about death and grieving, and it's interesting to think about how the 'theme' of the book would have changed if, say, Deming's mother and brother hadn't died—I think somehow the collection would have ended up more of a celebration of nature, which would have been fine. And yet, that aspect of celebration is still in here, on the edges of grief, where maybe it always is. Life is sad. Life has a lot of things to celebrate. We go on. We go out into the desert. We look up at the stars. And feel small. Isn't that beautiful?