Sky Hammer by Julian T. Brolaski (Asterion Projects, 2023)
Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s latest work—Sky Hammer—opens with a title poem densely packed with symbolic and mystical reference. It also sets the stage for Brolaski’s overall poetics within the chapbook quite well. What is a sky hammer? Is it that thing from that video game, Curse of The Gods, that can annihilate enemies with lightning strikes? That’s unlikely but cannot be ruled out altogether. However, the sky hammer is a device with which the metaphysically-inclined speaker of these poems sculpts clouds with no concern for their westernized naming conventions. The speaker-sculptor begins:
I took my sky hammer &
pounded out a few choice
clouds, cirrus, and I don’t know, nimbus
as in a god on earth
moving in space as a great auroral mist
Even if the sky hammer is more of a made-up device for Brolaski’s speaker-sculptor to enter readers into their universe, it is (in certain gaming fashion) isometrically perspectival as the speaker-sculptor-earthly god traverses the modern groundwork, remarking at the sparrows bathing in “dusty gravel” on a Philadelphia’s Frankford Avenue and persistently inviting readers to come along, offering: “ride with me in the shadowy afterworld / beyond the spider of a doubt.” This is where it is possible for a reader to interpret that Brolaski’s sculptor has actually hammered out a cloud that is now speaking, thus, double-speaker, collectivized.
The cloud says via the poem, “don’t be plain […] find / the ornament that please you best” and to “rail in a useless manner/against the inevitable dawntime” where people of the dawn will find a way to make music and fortune will return “in this pocket world of a minor horned god.” The use of “minor horned god” introduces the deep fermenting symbolism that packs the poem with layers of meaning. For instance, a pocket world can be seen as something tied to the limits of possession but it is also a minimalist container as near the body as something can get. Add back in the “minor horned god” giving the duality of horn as musical instrument and a unique part of the body that offers a slight erotic realm. In the Wiccan tradition, the syncretic term “minor horned god” is usually depicted with a dualistic head that incorporates divinity in the domain of the animal. The poem has now become a refuge for difference, a place of fluid entities blending into a sort of mystical system that both doubts what is concurrently hegemonic (not knowing the names of the clouds it sculpts and being instructed by the created cloud to “not be plain”) and contrives an entire body safe enough for approaching a behind-the-curtain power all while training the reader to begin to see the erotic everywhere, as in the following:
[…] I thought, if there was a world beyond…
I could become one of those assholes
who gets their sugar from fruit
and regard the one who points out my faults
as a revealer of treasures
Those last two lines get repeated and slowed, becoming three lines to act as a louder echoing device, highlighting the twofold meaning of “faults” and “treasures”—as “the one” traces their fingers over a body and around the “faults” as crevices and cracks in the body. Brolaski’s multiplicity of symbolism is thick throughout this opening poem—an asshole getting its “sugar from fruit.”
The other element of this title poem that introduces readers to Brolaski’s poetics is the element of chant, even if not overt. Beyond the repetition of the last lines, there are also lines where drumming moves into a pillow drum and the term “fortune” is repeated, split by a comma, and then the line: “lackadaisic in the sky-sky-sky.” This chanting seems to yield inspiration to a meditation entitled “I Am The Sky,” written by Paramahansa Yogananda—of whom Brolaski has publicly stated they are a follower—that goes:
I am the sky, Mother, I am the sky,
I am the sky, Mother, I am the sky,
I am the vast blue ocean of sky.
I am a little drop of the sky—frozen sky.
Both Brolaski’s poem and Yogananda’s chant show grand form enraptured by granular moments that would be easy to overlook but it would be a disservice to do so, a deeper symbolism of which would be something like, the body has a surface that is visible but its connection to everything else that is both visible and not-so is its transcendental capacity. Moreover, listen first—the drumming can happen with anything and the “little drop” of sky can drum so much it piles into solidity. That is the repressively-inclined failure of the binary that Brolaski’s work tries to decimate. Ultimately, the forms we’re surrounded by present utter fluidity.
Take, for example, the items in the second poem, “flock of stars” where the poets are “...the ones / who knew what nectar / tasted like” and later the speaker states:
I am accurate to my surrounds, they sang
I can swim in a drop of dew
I can make a flower spurt
from my finger
rock in a snowball
jelly in a donut
Everything is in process, in transition and nothing is predetermined and in fact a constantly flowing indeterminacy becomes gradually persistent. This is quite a radical state, considering the alternatives. Look at the opening of “to the poets who never stopped rhyming”
in my honeyed state
love’s tercets formed
perpetually
a self-willed meadow where deer
would play
happiness, happenstance,
the alchemization of loneliness
into sweet my birds, sweet my saplings
This is a good moment to pause and reflect on two factors about (1) Brolaski’s occasionally Renaissance-bent register (“sweet my birds, sweet my saplings” and, later, in other poems, “haply did I delay” and “lo did I this very hour”) as well as (2) their creative endeavors off the page, as the lead of the musical act Juan and The Pines, who make traditional, inventive Americana music. The prolific Brolaski is wildly unafraid (as a poet) to pull in a Keatsian, Hopkins-esque, Shakespearean turn of phrase all while being completely devoted (as a songwriter and musician) to the musings of Mother Maybelle Carter, Loretta Lynn, and Hank Williams, Sr. The implications of these nearly out-of-time fusings go back to the Yogananda chant—to be the sky and the drop of water and the ice is to never be a mere body subject to birth and death but to continue deepening creativity as something beyond bodily appearance, as a framework for a very distinct duration that time as a clock perceives/performs magical delusion upon. The poetry can soothe a reader into trance and the songs can settle a listener into a dissolved time that flattens and rises as transformation.
Examples are plentiful but just to complete the comparison, look at the opening to the poem, “when it bend its knee to pray”:
when it bend its knee to pray & says
what did you think and
what did you think and
i’ve been here before and
i was standing here before and
i’ve been standing at your attention all along
Now, venture into the whistle-clad song, “Birds Winding Down” (from the Juan and The Pines album Glittering Forest) that goes:
Sound of the moon over Wichita Mountains [...]
Sound of the birds singing fountain to fountain
The song of the birds winding down
I, of course, get caught in the sonics and enjoy swimming around there (bend, did, been; mountain, fountain, down) but there are also the overly mobile transitory verb states (the auxiliary past meeting the ever-present) where time is all around and deliquescing into ceremonial and cyclical pools.
Sara Ahmed wrote in TSQ, “When we are not at home, when we are asked where we are from or who we are, or even what we are, we experience a chip, chip, chip, a hammering away at our being. To experience that hammering is to be given a hammer, a tool through which we, too, can chip away at the surfaces of what is, or who is.” This statement shares a kinship, not only in its obvious tie to Brolaski’s title, but with, for me, the central poem of the collection, “the english queen and the indian boy” in which Brolaski writes,
from what I can understand, a star crossed
w/ a mycelial structure, crossed w/ a bee
speaks to me in the form of a cloud
dripping rain, and in its patter I discern
the words, in the pattern of the drops—
but I have already seen this hand I hold
Where “crossed with” contains the obviousness of changing the surface of appearance performatively, it also contains many additional layers—those of changing forms via intersection (we crossed by each other) as well as those of being violated, offended, betrayed (you crossed me), and even those of basic encounter (to cross a path). Most importantly, here, as the hand appears able to hold the pattern of the falling rain or to be covered in it, it is that hand that proves the person living the body is the one who truly knows the body. Later, Brolaski’s speaker declares,
[...] I was clocked,
no hormones could save me, no knife
could unearth me, I sang w/ the worms
no new song, no new song under the sun
And, then
the hard rain down can rain
it was all too obvious to be believed
it was all how is had already been written
Up to this point, Sky Hammer has delivered a poetics that address the inability of appearances to be completely recognized as one strict thing. Then, the speaker is clocked, and a deserved melancholy seems to settle in, as the body-based information is sometimes all one can go on but its weakness in redemptive declaration never reveals the fullest picture. We all want to be seen but isn’t it better to feel seen and not just be seen. Now, the skepticism that shows itself in these poems is elevated. Even the song can enter a helpless space. Everything is moving downward. I think those last two lines truly act as a central antithesis to this overall work. Those lines are not the essence of the work, but they are seeing the essence of the work through the eyes of what has long been, in Brolaski’s words, “painted in the schools of art.” But as dissolving time continues on in the poem, the lack of “new song under the sun” finds its non-way to a counteract retrieval and the poet swallows disappeared words then challenges the sun to not be so closed-minded to the surging refulgence of darkness.
This darkness turns, again, in the final poem, “wave of murmuration” that begins with an epigraph from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, detailing the body’s position in avoiding, at least, by one half, the sun. In the poem the speaker is discerning bird types and asking for a fortune-telling while walking with a cane (in Spain), “on the arm of my butch friend, the boat captain, the one” and later
I feel like we’re two elephants with trunks entwined
eating sardines and berenjenas t4t
it’s not shocking what love can do—
[...]
sometimes a thing that makes a good story
is its holes.
At the beginning of Whitney Houston’s song, “So Emotional,” she says (verbally), with fingers snapping in the background, “I don’t know why I like it, I just do.” As the song goes on, Whitney not only shares her reactive, almost helpless capacity to perpetually recall the events of seeing and touching a temporary beloved, but she asks for affirmation, via the chorus’s main line “Ain’t it shocking what love can do?” Brolaski’s speaker confidently echoes Whitney’s elation but also disagrees with the sentiment. Love is confident and not for the timid and when we fulfill love’s offering, we’re calmed. It seems perfect to imagine this beautiful, shared moment between two people with Whitney’s song loudly playing overhead while the speaker of the poem silently acknowledges to their self, “No, Whitney, it actually isn’t shocking.”
We began with faults pointed out as uncovered gems, and we come to a close with holes and cracks letting in the light while returning to face the sun, the same sun that was challenged to enter, for once, the darkness. It’s not only fitting as a non-end but it’s also a carrying away into a healthier collective for this cosmic hammering that will hopefully continue.