“Bring the Knife and Bring the Choir”: A Review of American Cavewall Sonnets by C.T. Salazar
American Cavewall Sonnets by C.T. Salazar. Bull City Press, 2021. 33 pp. $12.
“I have written here an index of things / too beautiful to lose,” C.T. Salazar says in his new and third chapbook, American Cavewall Sonnets, “but we lost them / anyway.” These meticulously crafted and inventive sonnets (literally, “little songs”) are “box[es] of twilight” carrying all “that disappeared when / we weren’t looking.” One by one, Salazar reaches in to pull out and show us these precious relics, telling us their stories about what has been lost: faith, family, home, identity. Though to say that Salazar shows “us” these things is a bit dishonest. These poems are addressed to a beloved, and we are eavesdropping. In many ways, reading this chapbook is like listening to half of a conversation. The speaker is continually gesturing into a world we can see only allusively. When he describes navigating a dark room in his childhood home, he shows us how “we held our hands in front of us like this.” In the opening poem, he invites his beloved to “place / your ear right here if you want to listen”—gesturing, I imagine, to his chest.
The world the speaker gestures into is a strange one, peopled with “a sleeping bear” named Ramses, “fountain[s] clogged with plague frogs,” ancestors who wear “masks for fear of angels knowing their faces.” In this world, songs are once again scrawled onto cavewalls. It’s a world that is distinctly and recognizably after, though it’s difficult to tell after what exactly—some apocalypse, personal or national. The line “Heaven / fell into the pond and killed all the fish” brings to mind the star Wormwood from the Book of Revelation, but there are hints that the loss described here is more intimate, interior. “Look,” the speaker says, motioning to his own body adorned in daisies and blackberry vines: “under this field, / the only battle my father lost.”
In many ways, this chapbook is in conversation with Traci Brimhall’s Our Lady of the Ruins, rendering the personal apocalypse of a loss of faith on a biblical scale. In Brimhall’s mid-apocalyptic world, the pilgrims tell us that “every day we wake to a new god and devour an old vision,” every day hoping to discover “a god so reckless, so lonely, it will love us all.” In Salazar’s world, believers collect strange relics: “St. Peter’s colon stuffed with honey- / suckle to mask the scent.” Their god has “disappeared” after having “sobbed angels and circus animals” and named them “fathers.” This god is so distant that the speaker’s mother must tie a prayer to a sparrow’s foot to reach him. The speaker, on the other hand, defiantly grounds himself in the physical world over against the spiritual: “I said no, because you asked / if prayer worked. A hammer works. A man / is work to a mushroom.”
Still, there is a dull grief pulsing here for the god who named the speaker, named his heart, and then left. The speaker can’t help searching for that god, or for a new god to replace him, but, as he commiserates with his beloved, “every belief grows teeth to chew you.” In the world of Salazar’s chapbook, there is no benign god, just these beliefs, treacherous and necessary as a myth. Even equipped with a faith, the speaker recognizes that “it doesn’t matter / how good your grip: the world is rudderless.” Turning to his lover midway through the chapbook, the speaker confesses, “the map to heaven I made on my palm / smeared when I held your hand.” There is something triumphant in this line, a choosing of a different kind of heaven—an embodied heaven. But there is also an ache, a disconnect, because for the queer body, this is no choice at all. A simple acknowledgment of the way the body was created blurs the path back to heaven, back to the god that was lost. That god, in Salazar’s chapbook, is Aristotle’s unmoved mover: having set things in motion, he takes no responsibility. “Little fish,” he whispers to us, “what have you become?”
Always becoming, Salazar’s identity as a non-binary poet is present from the first page: “even in the shape of a boy I can / wear the morning.” Garlanded with flowers, the speaker queers a masculinity that is too often held like a blunt object. Aware that his heart could be named either an “axe head” or “a teapot of blood,” the speaker shrugs off these binaries:
Symmetry wants you to feel just
as purposed, but I already put on
all these feathers. I already kissed all
the other lonely boys and they melted
like snow angels.
Like gender, identity is slippery for the speaker: “my name / the frozen lake my body treads across.” These sonnets are rocks thrown against that thin barrier. Below, the speaker’s true essence rests, “dark as the moon’s inside.”
The prayer his mother tied to a sparrow’s foot read, “Yes / we have sinned but we have several great / excuses.” Salazar’s speaker is preoccupied with articulating “the amount of muscle it takes to make / a mistake.” If a sin, in Christian theology, is what separates humanity from God, the speaker’s “mistake” appears to be what, in some sense, estranged him from his family. The speaker likens that mistake to “honeycomb,” calling it “pleasing,” a choice of words that evokes Eve’s plucked fruit. His sin is sweet and crawling with beestings:
A brave boy called me a
beam of moonlight when his father wasn’t
looking. I’m all babel of tongues for you:
bird of prey boy, bloom boy.
Lovely as a flower but sharp as a hawk, the speaker eyes his family from afar throughout this chapbook. He navigates his pitch-black childhood home in two separate sonnets: it is abandoned (“my mother’s rug still rolled up”) but smells of fresh paint. He laments that “the kitchen where we dried our feet and wiped / rain out of our faces is painted and has forgotten us.” Even outside of those two sonnets, that home’s dark emptiness seeps through the chapbook. His mother tells him later that “paradise…hides behind old family / photographs—the dark we hold but dare not / open.” Unlike his mother, the speaker does dare to open his “box of twilight,” no matter the cost. Now he “whistle[s] to dead birds” and waits for a miracle. He’s willing to wait as long as it takes. He confides his hope to his lover: “At the end of the world I’m told / a prayer could harden into a full / moon bright enough to guide our fathers back.”
It’s easy to imagine the speaker as a child standing before his father’s gun cabinet, an altar of sorts, the Remington exalted to the level of King James—both of which, the speaker notes, are able to “fill the body / with new knowledge.” The gun is a major character in these sonnets: one is tossed into a well, while another is offered to the speaker with a warning (“careful not to point / at yourself it’s loaded”). His beloved holds his “father’s / revolver, heavy as a handshake,” and the speaker warns that “every / bullet will be fired in due time.” Against this landscape of guns, the speaker points out the lack of imagination displayed in the way a rifle scope makes “everything…a target,” critiquing a masculinity that could value this way of seeing. Like his creator’s, this man’s imagination can only ever make in his own image. The speaker sees his “face slowly becoming his” father’s and asks, “Could you, if I begged, make me look less / like the barbed wire was sharpened in my / likeness?” Later, he wonders, “What do I look like now, without warpaint / and dirt in my teeth?” Shedding this violent masculinity like a soldier’s uniform, Salazar dreams a more ancient origin of man, predating even God: “Wer means man: war means / God picked a flower and named it Abraham.”
The volta in so many of these sonnets is a turn from violence to beauty, and from beauty back to violence. This is most apparent in an experimental sonnet in which the entire initial octave is made up of repetitions of the word “hatchet.” On the eighth line, the word is fragmented into the word “hatch,” and out pours the final sestet, made up entirely of the word “hope.” Later, when Salazar describes his body as a church bell rung by a bullet, the reader comes to realize that the volta is, it turns out, the speaker himself. His own queer body is the hinge on which violence and beauty turn. “Bring the knife and bring the choir,” he commands. When his lover calls him an overturned piano, they wait to see if the world is in more need of firewood or song. Throughout the chapbook, the speaker likens the two of them to Gorgons, made monstrous by the culture surrounding them, though he “never asked / why the men would turn to stone at the sight of us.” In its final line, the book resolves into determination: “Even if black eye—love, touch me.”
In the backdrop of all this violent beauty is the speaker’s country & his uneasy relationship to it. A Latinx poet, Salazar is aware of the violences America enacts and the stories it tells to justify them to itself. In these sonnets, he presents his own counter-narratives. He begins by retelling the myth of Romulus and Remus who, despite building a city, “couldn’t hide the animal” at the heart of empire, the “wolf milk and wilderness” of America. The speaker’s advice to the inhabitants of these falling empires is to “hold your / motherland in your mouth, all marble and doomed.” Salazar knows that this marble is only a façade: “here’s a country of statues crushed under / the weight of migrating ladybugs.” From those crushed “chips of empire,” all that can be made is a “shattered mosaic.” Capitalism and its wars are among those shards. “If / men could,” the speaker claims, “they would melt other men down to / gold.” He warns that “soon the oil will / run out we will burn.” His only optimism is that this country “burns you last if it loves you.” At the end of the day, though, “America / is just a word it means we couldn’t mine / answers we had to dig into ourselves.” In the first and last poems of the chapbook, Salazar blacks out the word American in the poems’ title. One might imagine these poems found scratched into a cavewall long after America is no longer even a word—only a collection of sounds.
Renouncing the easy answers provided by nationalism, religion, and family, the speaker searches for an enduring meaning that can be dug out from himself. Midway through his crown of sonnets, “Sonnet River,” Salazar repeats a line from Geoffrey Hill’s “September Song” twice back-to-back. Hill’s sonnet, though written against the backdrop of the Holocaust, still finds “September fatten[ing] on vines. Roses / flake from the wall. The smoke / of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.” Like Salazar’s sonnets, the volta here is from the violence of “Zyklon and leather” to a beauty that, despite everything, still has the audacity to fatten itself. Staring into this beauty and all its dissonance, Salazar and Hill sing in unison, “This is plenty. This is more than enough.” Readers might join in here on this call-and-response, looking around at their own private apocalypses and the earth that blooms indifferent around them. This is plenty, the choir sings. This is more than enough, answers the knife.
