Rara Avis
By Blas Falconer
Four Way Books | 2024 | 77 pages
Sometimes, when I begin reading a poem or book of poems, I am hit full force by the desire to speak out loud, Ah, this is poetry! I want poetry to deliver everything it can, everything: philosophy, story, music, experience, mind and body, thought and sensation. When it does, it can be whole, the way a living organism, with its own systems of breath and movement and beating heart, can be. If it’s not, I might move onto other distractions. If it is, I can’t stop thinking about it—like I can’t stop thinking about Blas Falconer’s new collection, Rara Avis.
While these beautiful poems are compelling, exploring topics of family and fatherhood, shame and love, and portraying summers in Puerto Rico, grandmothers, cousins, the vagaries of genetics, forgiveness, and kindness, what makes the poems unforgettable is their fine craftsmanship, breathtaking turns, and simple line breaks that are natural yet surprising.
“Pancreas” is a striking example of how such turns and breaks can build and move readers through a complex and surprising emotional landscape. It begins as most of the poems in this collection do, quietly and simply, in this case with close examination of an organ, looking at its functions, habits, and how it can malfunction.
Here is the poem in its entirety:
Pancreas
A gland, like
a sponge,
secreting fluids to
regulate
blood sugar, to
break down.
Common
ailments include
inflammation (pan-
creatitis) and
cancer (ab-
dominal pain,
weight loss,
jaundice). It’s
possible to live
without one, my
father says
on the phone, a
dryness in
his mouth, his
tongue sticking as
he tells me what
to expect if
he’s lucky. And
all day, everything
no matter how
small, makes me
think of it,
hidden deep
inside me,
weeping. The bee
crawling in
blossoms
scattered on
the glass
tabletop. The sound of
a pitcher fill-
ing slowly
with water.
The lines “It’s possible to live without one” followed immediately by “my father” represent a powerful turn, where the pancreas becomes a metaphor for the father, who the speaker, his son, cannot live without. Later in the poem, another turn—this one subtler but just as powerful—transforms the pancreas into the speaker’s own grief, “think of it, / hidden deep / inside me // weeping…” What makes this last turn so masterful is how, without any special fanfare, it harkens back to the opening description of the pancreas “secreting fluid” and “breaking down.”
Poems like this one, documenting narrative moments in lyrical terms, build on one another to create a life, a consciousness, in the landscape of the body and world, all made haunting by the poetry—two boys wrestle, touching, finding each other’s skin, a flash of intimacy, before turning away (“Qué Significa”); a man and his son take turns reading a story, where the father dies before the first sentence, the son sometimes wondering if the father is gone for good, sometimes yawning with boredom (“In the book we are reading together”); a young boy stands in line with his mother, embarrassed as she shouts at the man behind them, He can’t touch me! like that! (“Figura Serpintinata”)
These poems are quiet, but with a remarkable emotional heft conveyed through direct observation of the body. The collection opens with the poem “Rara Avis,” which offers a description of a bird embalmed and entombed with its king. The emotional content is driven by the unflinching precision of the descriptions: “Force-fed mice, sparrows, it couldn’t // expel the bones, the claws, / and died having eaten too much, // the stomach packed: feather and / fur, tail descending the throat.” This poem offers what appears to be a straight-up invitation to find a connection between Falconer and the bird, beginning with this: “A falcon, one of millions raised / for sacrifice…” Is this creature an archetype for the poet? The emotionally charged vision of a bird raised in captivity, denied access to its natural habitat, is an added layer to the narrative moments in this collection where the speaker comes to terms with what he has been force fed—loss, death, definitions of masculinity, and his own desires.
“My Son Wants to Know Who His Biological Father Is” is a poem in which the reader shares the physical and emotional experience of the speaker, a father watching his son at swim practice via lines cast in short and rhythmic strokes with phrases repeated like laps in a pool.
My Son Wants to Know Who His Biological Father Is
My son wants to know
his name. What does he look like? What does
he like? My son swims
four days a week. When my son swims
underwater, he glides
between strokes. When he glides underwater, he is
an arrow aimed
at a wall. Four days a week, his coach says
Count—1…2…— before
coming up for air.
My father had blue eyes, blond hair,
though mine are brown.
My father could not speak
Spanish and wondered, How can you love
another man? We rarely touched.
When my son
is counting, I count
with him. I say, I am
your father, too. 1…2…
As the son swims and counts, so does the speaker, and so do we. The speaker has been here before, “four days a week,” watching his son, alone with these musings. The son is aiming like an arrow, but it’s an arrow pointed at a wall. We can feel his determination to know all that he is, to be it and assert it. We can feel the walls that contain and frustrate the will to know completely who one is.
A turn, a choice word, a line break can kick the reader into new and deeper territory, as when the poem turns suddenly to the speaker’s father: “My father had blue eyes, blonde hair, / though mine are brown.” The word “though” points to something more complicated than a simple contrast, more like a concession to reality, prompting a surprising ache that takes hold even before we get to the more direct expressions of distances between the speaker and his father: “My father could not speak / Spanish and wondered. How can you love / another man? We rarely touched.” These lines are expressions of an ongoing conceit, the poet/speaker grappling with the captivity he has experienced within his own family and the reality he was force fed.
With Rara Avis’s striking first poem, I entered a world of storytelling whose deft lyricism moved me from poem to poem. We open with the body of a bird, make a connection to the human body’s vital organ, the heart, and then death, life, fatherhood, sons, and lovers. The conceit of the rare bird never disappears. It is a kind of gloss, a guide, an added layer of meaning, showing us the unique bird in every story. Indeed, in all our stories.
Paula Stacey is a writer and editor who makes her home in Northern California. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Mid-American Review, Dappled Things, december magazine, The Los Angeles Review, Dunes Review, and Pidgeonholes, among other publications. She currently serves as a managing editor at Poetry International.
Header photo by Inga Kuehn, courtesy Shutterstock.
