Mantis 19 (Spring 2021)
A figure in which secret things confide"
Amelia Crowther
I wrote “Elegy for Eavan” a couple weeks after she died, and in trying to grieve and honor a poet I admired and was later taught by, I kept returning to the first poem I ever read by her. This poem is a conversation with that first poem. This poem can be read vertically down each column or horizontally across the divide, beginning from either side.
On the left is Eavan’s poem, “Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet.” The poetry on the right is my own.
Elegy for Eavan
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city—
white pepper white pudding you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it
how strong the flood must have been
that the bridge and its carvings on the handrails
under an assault of rain—had all
washed away in a single stroke
every piece had a name
I still lived on a farm covered in April mist
I remember the gifts
Paris reflected in your black lace fan when I was 16 dreaming
3 years later in a California spring. Maybe
I woke up in your classroom and had a chance to say
you brushed the edges of the words
to contain the depths of my gratitude and my rage Eavan and
words, you became them. Maybe
a grieving girl said thank you and then wrote an elegy
and it bloomed in the mouth of every poet you spoke to
AMELIA CROWTHER is a poet studying contemporary media in the Comparative Literature department at Stanford.