Nightbloom and Cenote
Nightbloom & Cenote
by Leslie Contreras Schwartz, Saint Julian Press, $16.
“Who says you need five rivers/ to reach the underworld?” asks Leslie Contreras Schwartz in one of the title poems of her new collection Nightbloom and Cenote. In these rich, and layered, evocative poems, like “My Mother As a Child Surrounded by Night-Blooming Jasmine,” Contreras Schwartz shows us there are many routes indeed, as well as many underworlds.
This is a book that parses the dark ways we can be deceived by our own bodies as well as the sly and horrific ways girls are used and abused by the world. The poems suggest abandonment, abuse and even murder. In the poem referenced above, her mother as a girl wears “the bodysuit of nightmare.” In the collection’s opening poem, Cenote, she references a girl standing on her hands in a swimming pool. By the end of that poem, she is conflated with historical Mayan virgins, who are flung into deep sinkholes. She builds that metaphor by introducing a present day girl, who stares at “condoms, needles, mace.” “To the bottom/she goes, sea in a little jewelry/ box of hell.”
But what fresh hell is this? The reader knows immediately that by reading the poems in this collection, they are signing on to travel in a treacherous landscape indeed, a latter-day Plathian world of female power and destruction, built upon ancient Mexican legend and history.
A cenote is an underground reservoir of water, often a hot spring, that bubbles up from crumbling rainforest limestone. If you have ever been to one, or in one, you know they feel like secret pockets of beauty, but also they have a palpable darkness. For one thing, they are often extremely deep. For another, they can be hidden away in overgrown jungles. I went to one once and that was my experience, it was spooky beautiful.
A nightbloom is a flower, like jasmine, that blooms at night. Again, spooky beautiful. Combining the two together, as Leslie Contreras Schwartz does, in these 45 mythic poems, and you are reminded of the true meaning of the Greek-based word “mythopoesis” – defined by the Oxford dictionary as “the making of myths.” Except here, Contreras Schwartz is stitching together real myths from ancient people, most specifically the Mayan, with family mythologies and stories. In essence, this is a collaging poesis. And the result is a revealing of generations of deeply personal family legend and inherited pain. Passed down the generations are abnegation, forsaking, and even torture, all wrapped in beauty. The blooming jasmine. The cenote. These poems find the spot of cognitive dissonance between experiences bright and dark, enchanting and exterminating.
Case in point. The delightful opening poem “After Her Death, We Find Thousands of Dollars in my Grandmother’s Curtains,” is a poem that openly smiles at us at its beginning, as we see the bills that “floated out from the curtains, pouring out/like dusk.” But quickly that image of quirk and thrift shapeshifts into a narrative of extreme hardship. This was a woman whose “hands held/ a belt deftly” and who had “eyes that hated the fat or the bony/or the beady eyed and the whorish in every /girl/tried to smother them in a bathtub’s reflective sheen of water.” Like so many of the characters in this book, this was a woman who not only abandoned by her own but betrayed by them. The poem ends with “I wish, Mother, that for one minute/your mother had loved you.” The ouch and pique of these poems runs deep.
All women have been daughters at one time and many of us become mothers, and for every woman there is a familiar sting or two here, of love gone sour, love that never achieves its ends, or love that never even opens up its doors.
There is something here also for anyone who has ever been gravely ill or experienced extreme physical pain. In the prose poem “Weep Holes in the Body,” in the second section of the book, “Dopplegangers,” Contreras Schwartz describes pain as “that see-saw of chutes and black holes hiding in my neurons,” something she is as afraid of as “losing my own biological children.” It is a comparison one would avoid conjuring unless one were Contreras-Schwartz who, in every single poem in this collection, goes there. To that most taboo and unthinkable place. I could not help admiring this poet’s bald courage, and the way she renders language like a sword, that she drives deep into our hearts, again and again, making us bleed with a sense of familiar grief. She finds her deepest demons and brings them out into the light, where they find points to connect with our own.
That time when I went to the cenote I remember fearing that at any moment a crocodile could side out from the foliage and open its jaws my way. These poems have a way of doing just that. Dipping you in warm and beautiful images and then turning.
We read poems like this to remind ourselves of the obstacles girls must face, in particular, sometimes at the hands of their own kin, which seem insurmountable and of the ways our own bodies can turn against us. We read poems like this to remind ourselves of what it means to survive.
Elizabeth Cohen teaches creative writing at SUNY Plattsburgh and through Gotham Writer’s Workshops in New York. She is the author of The Hypothetical Girl, a collection of short stories, The Family on Beartown Road and four books of poetry, including What the Trees Said. She lives in upstate New York with her daughter, Ava, and way too many cats.